Pregnancies Concern Gadsden School Officials

Santa Fe New Mexican ^ | 12/22/03 | A.P.

[Holly_P]

ANTHONY, N.M. - The Gadsden Independent School District says 66 students are pregnant - most of them younger than age 15 and two of them still in elementary school.

Young girls getting pregnant is nothing new, but the problem appears to be increasing, said Sue Gowing, a nurse with La Clinica de Familia who splits her time between the district's two high school clinics.

Forty of the pregnant girls this year are freshmen, seven are in middle school and two are in elementary school. Sixth-grade is elementary school in the Gadsden district.

Last year 74 pregnancies were reported at Gadsden High School; 20 were reported at Santa Teresa High School.

New Mexico has the fifth highest teenage birth rate in the country, with nearly 5,000 babies born to teenagers each year. About one-third of all families in New Mexico begin with a birth to a teenage mother. Dona Ana County had the fifth-highest teenage pregnancy rate in New Mexico last year.

Last year La Clinica and Gadsden's school-based health clinics proposed making contraceptives available in school clinics. The idea probably will come before the school board early next year.

Gowing said the availability of condoms or birth control pills in school clinics would be a Band-Aid to the problem. However, she said it would help teens who want contraception but have difficulty getting it because of a lack of transportation.

Santa Fe Public Schools began dispensing contraception to students at school-based health clinics years ago after health staff discovered some students, mostly younger ones, were not picking up free birth control pills from county health offices, said Robert Benon, a family nurse practitioner at the Teen Health Centers in Santa Fe high schools.

Santa Fe health workers approached the district about providing birth control pills at high school clinics. Pills are now available, but only after discussions of abstinence and sexually transmitted disease, Benon said.

The rate of pregnancy at Santa Fe high schools dropped about 36 percent between 1997 and 2001, according to a recent report. Benon said the national teen pregnancy rate dropped about 9 percent over the period.

Noemi Loera, 18, who began pregnant at 15, is not sure easier access to birth control would have made a difference to hear.

"I'm not sure if anything would have helped," she said during a Gadsden High School class offered to teen parents.

Loera said she thought becoming pregnant would help keep her boyfriend, but he disappeared soon afterward.

She also said no one ever talked to her about sex until after she was pregnant.

School health officials hear that complaint when discussing abstinence, protection against unwanted pregnancies and sexually transmitted diseases, including HIV.

"They do not know basic stuff about their bodies," said Colleen Runyan, head nurse at Gadsden High School's clinic.

"Lack of knowledge coupled with a majority of students having their first sexual encounter at 12 is a dangerous mix. The typical teenager, they don't think it can happen to them," she said.

[FITZ]

That's why birth control isn't even close to being the answer in this school ---- the girls know where babies come from, and they are intentionally getting pregnant. It's a different culture and there is no stigma in being an unwed mother.

[PLMerite]

"I am not all that old, but I remember when my girlfriend told me that she and her boyfriend were sleeping together at his house after school, I honestly thought that she meant that they were taking naps."

That reminds me of a comedy skit I heard years ago. This old guy was telling a younger guy that he didn't think people sleeping together was a big deal. Then the punch line:

"But you young people...you don't sleep!"

[Wright is right!]

Comedian Redd Foxx was once asked if he'd slept with his wife before they were married.

He replied, "Not a wink."

Michael

[Xenalyte]

Loera said she thought becoming pregnant would help keep her boyfriend, but he disappeared soon afterward.

Note to stupid teen girls: that NEVER works. He'll leave you one way or another . . . and getting knocked up is a sure way to accelerate the process.

[Xenalyte]

When I was in school, a pregnancy was shocking and almost unheard of. For a class of about 400, there were zero pregnancies in grade school, zero in junior high, and one in high school.

Ditto that. My high school, from which I graduated in 1986, had one pregnancy .

[Xenalyte]

Of course, even asking that question must mean I'm some sort of bigot.

You suck and are obviously drinking the Haterade. Off to the reeducation camp with you!

[cupcakes]

Many girls do menstruate at that age you know which means many are ovulating and capable of becoming pregnant at that age.

[cupcakes]

No kidding. My bil worked with some of the "men" you are talking about. Immigrants, I'm sure some illegal and some legit with wives home in various Latino countries, and they would readily go after a girl of any ethnicity who was younger. We are talking 30 and 40 year old men seeking out teenagers. I think the idea is these women would not seek them out if they became pregnant and they were easy to get in their pants because they were so naive.

[Tax-chick]

I don't know why, but it's just accepted in Mexico, and in Mexican communities in the U.S. Men will have a legal wife, and as many other women as they can get, all having babies. I feel sorry for the girls; they are too young to go through what they do, but adults do nothing for them.

[cupcakes]

Sounds like the culture we witnessed living in AZ and via my bils personal experiences. Just as you say, a legit wife at home and having babies with as many "women" as will have them in the states while they work.

I agree with you about the girls. Someone, their fathers(I wonder how many have them or how many of them are like the guys getting them pregnant) should be looking out for them and guiding them so they wouldn't feel so desperate to hold onto a boyfriend's "love". I had a dad at home, but I might as well not have had one(long story). I could have easily been these girls and I just want to shake them and tell them they don't understand it yet, but this is NOT what they want. By the grace of God only, I made it to my 20's unscathed physically at least and God provided me a husband beyond my wildest expectations. I really feel for these girls. The scars of fatherlessness or uncaring fathers and let's throw in self-centered and unattentive mothers cuts very deep and I still deal with baggage that comes up in my marriage and I think I've probably expressed in these forums before. May God help guide the girls who have not got pregnant to make choices different than what they are seeing around them and may God guide the girls that are pregnant to a new life that doesn't involved any more pregnancies, for now anyway.

[FITZ]

We are talking 30 and 40 year old men seeking out teenagers. I think the idea is these women would not seek them out if they became pregnant and they were easy to get in their pants because they were so naive.

Another thing you see common in this culture is that that 30-40 year old man doesn't need to seek out the teenager --- he's the live in lover of the mother of the girl --- and he's doing them both --- plus any younger or older sisters. In this culture, women are taught never to say no to a man or boy or they won't have any.

[Polybius]

In this culture, women are taught never to say no to a man or boy or they won't have any.

From my experience, there seems to be a huge difference in sexual cultures within Mexico itself.

I spent my early and mid 20's in the 1970's and early 1980's with a girlfrind that was Cuban American like myself. While my "Anglo" friends were were living the 1970's Sexual Revolution, I was living in 1870's Victorian America.

Although my Cuban American girlfriend and her Cuban American girlfriends were in their early and mid-20's and either in law school or medical school or working for major corporations, they were expected to live at home until they married. A large percentage of mothers forbade them to date without chaperones and my girlfriend was not allowed to set foot in my apartment. Mother Theresa would have had a better chance of getting pregnant than any one of them.

As the oldest son with sisters not old enough to date, this came as quite a cultural shock to me. I expected it in high school but it came as a total surprise that this was still going on in college and even into grad school.

With the stresses of my medical school and The Rules drastically cutting into the time we could see each other, things did not work out in the end and I had to leave for my military obligations after med school with my 24 year-old girlfriend still living at home.

I'm still bitter about it.

Last summer, I spent a two days at Old Town San Juan, Puerto Rico and I met two young Mexican professional married couples vacationing in San Juan. We chatted on the roof-top patio of the hotel late into the night and the subject of different cultures came up. I related my 1970's-80's experiences to them expecting to surprise them with how things used to be during the Age of the Dinosaurs in 1970's Cuban American Miami.

I was surprised when these two 25 year-old Mexican women told me that was exactly how things were for them until they got married only two years ago. There was no surprise or resentment. It was simply The Natural Order of Things.

They both lived at home until they married. Moving out of the house before marriage was totally out of the question. If Mother did not insist on a chaperone, you were considered pretty liberated. If one of them had to meet a male business client after work to discuss a business contract, that required a call to Mother to ask for permission and a long discussion about the client's character.

It seems to be a social class thing.

[FITZ]

You're right about that --- but what social class of Mexico is moving en masse over to the USA? The illegitimacy rate of so-called hispanics is over 40% but that's because of the particular class of people that is moving over --- and welfare programs have much to do with it. If you've never stepped foot in a school, have no job skills at all, then American welfare life looks very appealing. A unwed girl from that country only needs to come over to visit an aunt or to go shopping, give birth to a US citizen and she's got life made. The Mexican papers were reporting an unwed teenage pregnancy rate of something like 25% for the state of Chihuahua --- but it's obviously not so high in the successful more professional types.

[FITZ]

Lack of knowledge coupled with a majority of students having their first sexual encounter at 12 is a dangerous mix. The typical teenager, they don't think it can happen to them," she said.

I also know some of the old-time hispanic families of the SW and this certainly wasn't their cultural ways --- but you can go across the border into Juarez and see the same problem --- very early sexual promiscuous is one reason for the dire poverty they have in that country. You can go to Juarez and see the young girls and their babies begging for money on the street corners but here it's a lifelong welfare check so they don't need to beg.