Maturity for Unwed Mothers

Most U.S. school systems until recently had a blunt but simple way to deal with the girl who became pregnant: she was kicked out, sometimes with a cryptic note on her record that "cyesis" or "glandular imbalance" was the cause. As the rate of illegitimate births among teen-agers continues to rise despite the easy availability of contraceptives, school officials are coming to realize that dismissal from class is neither a humane nor a sensible solution to the problems of pregnant girls. More and more urban school systems are setting up educational centers where the girls can keep up their regular classwork while they are preparing for motherhood.

What these girls need and want most, contends Mrs. Julia Stern, director of such a four-year-old program in Boston, is to go to school--"but no one seemed to realize that before." New York City's superintendent of schools, Bernard Donovan, is seeking $300,000 to open two centers for pregnant schoolgirls next year. Detroit created two such centers last year, hopes to start a third soon. Kansas City is planning a pregnancy center, while Los Angeles already has six.

Serious Problem. A three-year pilot program in Chicago developed into a permanent "Family Living Center" last year, is expanding two more locations this year and, as one official puts it, "Even our waiting list has a waiting list." Most of the centers serve areas with a high Negro school population, although teen-age pregnancy is certainly not confined to Negro neighborhoods, and is a serious problem in white society as well.

The centers offer relatively small classes--Chicago, for example, has an average of twelve. Most cities provide counseling services by social workers and psychologists, prenatal and postnatal health advice. Washington's three-year-old Webster School goes so far as to provide special courses on "Values of Family Life," "Biological Aspects of Birth" and "Marriage and Its Economic Advantages."

The teachers try to ease the girls' anxieties and correct their misunderstandings about pregnancy. One Detroit girl, for example, had been told by her mother that someone must die for everyone who is born--and believed it when her father died just before she gave birth to her baby. The center specialists also shun moralizing. "We do not condone the pregnancy," says Chicago Teacher Sarah Jackson, "but we try to give the girls a feeling of human dignity."

The centers try to convince the girls that motherhood does not mean the end of their earlier ambitions, and many respond surprisingly well to academic courses that they had ignored before. In Los Angeles, for example, students at the centers generally do better in their classwork than they did in high school.

Somebody to Love. While most white girls place their babies for adoption, Negroes usually keep theirs, not only because of adoption difficulties but because, as one Los Angeles girl put it, "now I'll have somebody to love." Both white and Negro girls who have been aided by the centers are far more inclined to return to school than those who have not. At a four-year-old center in Oakland, Calif., for example, 94% of the students have continued their studies after childbirth.

The girls aided by the centers tend to develop a cooler and more mature attitude toward boys. Says one girl in Washington's Webster School: "I'll ask my boy friend what his plans are for the baby and me, and if he doesn't have any, it's goodbye, Roger." Whether or not a girl does marry the child's father--and relatively few do--she seems to emerge with a sounder sense of values, a conviction that the shame of unwed pregnancy is not the end of life. As one girl told center officials in Detroit: "My mistake is in the past, and that is where I will leave it."

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