Posted on 12/22/2003 12:36:20 PM PST by 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.
Good Lord where are the parents????
How about some statutory rape prosections for the males involved? Usually the younger the girls are, the older the boys/men.
Birth control pills aren't going to do a bit of good in a society where girls don't know how babies are made until they're pregnant. One can only imagine what a shambles their famililies are. Someone should be protecting these girls, but given the absence of parents, it's hard to figure out who.
La Clinica de Familia obviously isn't aimed at American families. These young ignorant girls are giving birth to new little citizens for the American taxpayers to support.
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. I suppose this reporter would think I grew up in the Jurassic era.
The difference between then and now is liberalism. My generation was taught the difference between right and wrong. Liberals say there is no right or wrong, everything is relative, do anything you wish -- and they added sex education to teach kids how. Liberals threw out all the moral rules given us by 3,000 years of Western Civilization. Then after doing hell's handiwork for a century, they wonder why the country is going to hell.
You summed up the problem very well. Multiculturalism is just the latest euphemism of the left for the elimination of any traditional sense of morality or ethics.
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