The Pregnant Schoolgirl

New York high school girls who get pregnant--as about 1,000 girls under 17 in the city do each year--get taken out of school "for the good of the school." This threat tends to scare young, unwed mothers-to-be so much that they often try to hide their condition, and fully half of them manage, with skillful dissembling, to get away with it and stay in school. In consequence, they mostly do without prenatal care, and many of the resulting babies are stillborn. To break this chain of unhappy events, the New York State department of social welfare last week urged the city to let pregnant girls finish the school term and to teach the need of prenatal care in the schools' "family life" courses. The board of education agreed to consider the idea--but openly wondered whether it would not invite an even higher schoolgirl pregnancy rate.

This file is automatically generated by a robot program, so reader's discretion is required.