In defense of teenaged mothers.

At the Crittenton Center for Young Women near downtown Los Angeles, seventeen-year-old LaSalla Jackson sets down her tiny infant and shows the scars on her calves where her drug-addicted mother beat her with an extension cord. Jackson left home when she had her baby to live at the Crittenton Center. After she graduates from the Center's high school, she plans to marry her child's twenty-three-year-old father, who visits twice a week. "I was watching five little brothers, sisters, cousins at home," she says. "Here it's one, and I'm not getting hit around."

Almonica, another Crittenton resident, saw her mother set on fire and murdered by her stepfather during a drunken fight. At age sixteen, she got pregnant by a twenty-one-year-old man. "It was a way out," she says.

To President Clinton, these unwed teenaged mothers represent an assault on family integrity and public coffers. "Can you believe that a child who has a child gets more money from the Government for leaving home than for staying home with a parent or grandparent? That's not just bad policy, it's wrong," the President declared in his State of the Union address. "We will say to teenagers: If you have a child out of wedlock, we'll no longer give you a check to set up a separate household." Clinton has won praise from liberals and conservatives alike for his "family values" campaign, which includes welfare sanctions to force unwed teen mothers back into their parents' homes. Some Congressional Republicans have proposed cutting off welfare to all teen mothers to achieve the same end. "We want families to stay together," Clinton says.

But the supervising social worker at the Crittenton Center, Yale Gancherov, takes a different view. "The parents of these young women were violent, were drug abusers, were sexually abusive, were absent or neglectful. While privileged people may see a detriment in a teenager becoming a mother, these girls see it as a realistic improvement in their lives."

Current rhetoric about sex, values, and teenaged parenthood in the United States ignores several crucial realities. Contrary to welfare reformers' contention, many teenaged mothers cannot return home. Washington reasearchers Debra Boyer and David Fine's detailed 1992 study of pregnant teens and teenaged mothers showed that two-thirds had been raped or sexually abused, nearly always by parents, other guardians, or relatives.

Six in ten teen mothers' childhoods also included severe physical violence: being beaten with a stick, strap, or fist, thrown against walls, deprived of food, locked in closets, or burned with cigarettes or hot water.

Most teen mothers stay with their families even under difficult conditions. More than 60 per cent of the young mothers in Boyer and Fine's study lived with their parents, foster parents, or in institutions. Nearly all the rest lived with adult relatives, husbands, or friends, often with combinations of the above. "Very few live apart from adults," says Fine. Those who did, Fine says, are often escaping intolerable situations at home. "Young mothers who live away from home are significantly more likely to have been physically or sexually abused at home than those who live with parents."

Despite all the talk of "children having children" the large majority of births--as well as sexually transmitted disease, including AIDS--among teenaged girls is caused by adults. The most recent National Center for Health Statistics data show that only one-third of births among teenaged mothers involved teenaged fathers. Most were caused by adult men over the age of twenty.

In order to mold teenaged pregnancy into a safe, expedient issue, some uncomfortable facts have been suppressed--even by groups that know better.

Child advocates such as the Children's Defense Fund might be expected to speak out against official distortions of "teen" parenthood. Not so. Despite its excellent research papers, which show the complexity of the problems teenaged mothers face, a popular poster campaign by the Children's Defense Fund promotes a two-dimensional--and misleading--picture of the issue. It's like being grounded for eighteen years, says one poster, depicting teenaged mothers as naughty airheads. Wait'll you see how fast he can run when you tell him you're pregnant, says another, showing a stereotypical picture of a callous varsity jock.

"Teen-adult sex is not being dealt with," says Angie Karwan of Michigan's Planned Parenthood. Part of the reason, Karwan theorizes, is that the Federal preoccupation with teenaged sex influences programs that receive grant funding. "That's how the money is awarded," she told a reporter from Michigan's Oakland Press.

The spin put on teen pregnancy, in turn, has some serious consequences for social policy. Present policy blames teenaged mothers for causing a multi-billion-dollar social problem. Says Health and Human Services Secretary Donna Shalala, "We will never successfully deal with welfare reform until we reduce the amount of teenaged pregnancy."

In fact, the opposite seems to hold: Poverty causes early childbearing. The rapid increase in child and youth poverty, from 14 per cent in 1973 to 21 per cent in 1991, was followed--after a ten-year lag--by today's rise in teenaged childbearing. Like Ronald Reagan's anecdotes about "welfare Cadillac" black mothers, the allegation by Clinton's welfare-reform task force and members of Congress that teens have babies to collect the "incentive" of $150 a month in AFDC benefits has been repeatedly disproven.

Recent studies show that, rather than "risking the future" (the title of a 1987 National Research Council report), most adolescent mothers may be exercising their best option in bleak circumstances when they latch onto older men who promise them a "way out" of homes characterized by poverty, violence, and rape.

"Troubled, abused girls who have babies become more centered emotionally"' says social worker Gancherov.

"They often gain the attention of professionals and social services. Such girls are more likely to stay in school with a baby than without. Their behavioral health improves."

A 1990 study of 2,000 youths found that teenaged mothers show significantly lower rates of substance abuse, stress, depression, and suicide than their peers.

"Becoming a mother is not the ideal way to accomplish these goals," Gancherov emphasizes. But impoverished girls who get pregnant may not be the heedless, self-destructive figures politicians and the media portray.

To decrease the incidence of teen pregnancy, we must improve environments for teens, Gancherov argues. Girls who see a brighter future ahead have reason to delay childbearing. Dramatically lower rates of teenaged pregnancy in the suburbs, as opposed to the inner city, bear this out.

The Clinton Administration's budget and its rhetoric offer little to millions of youth subjected to poverty and physical, emotional, and sexual violence--conditions many girls form liaisons with older men to escape. Instead, the myth Clinton and those around him continue to foster is that of reckless teenaged mothers guilty of abusing adult moral values and welfare generosity. Female "survival strategies," in the words of sociologist Meda Chesney-Lind, are what the Government seeks to punish.

In an Administration led by the most knowledgeable child advocates ever, the concerted attack on adolescents has never been angrier, more illogical, or more potentially devastating to a generation of young mothers and their babies, who cannot fight back.

Mike Males, a graduate student in the University of California-Irvine's School of Social Ecology, reports on youth issues for In These Times.