Aid Gives Teen Moms A Future

Since the House of Representatives determined that one cure for the epidemic of teenage pregnancy is to cut off teenage mothers from Aid to Families with Dependent Children, I have been reassessing my position. While I am in an elite class of American families, the 5 percent with annual incomes in excess of $150,000, I once was a 15-year-old without a dime who found out she was pregnant. In my heart, I am not one of us, I am one of them.

I was a book-smart ugly duckling. When an older guy with a glamorous-sounding job expressed an interest in me, I was grateful. From my current vantage point of maturity and higher self-esteem, this seems so little to commend a suitor. While I never collected a cash grant, I could not have gotten from his abandonment and disavowal of his child to my current life without food stamps and Medicaid, without reduced-cost school lunches for my daughter.

The minds that conceived a provision denying AFDC to teen mothers have forgotten exactly how young 16 is.

Sixteen is young enough to have a limited idea about how pregnancy occurs.

Sixteen is beyond the reach of parents to reassure you of your value; parents are a suspect class, at 16.

Sixteen is insecure enough to believe a boy or man who professes to have the thorny area of contraceptives under control, who says that he will stand by you if anything happens.

Sixteen is young enough and scared enough to believe in magic: If you don’t tell anybody, then no one will notice, and the growing problem might go away without becoming a life for which you are responsible.

Sixteen can be optimistic enough to convert fear and loneliness into the belief that the unconditional love of a totally dependent human being will become redemption.

Suppose it is possible that half of all teenage girls imagine erroneously that AFDC will meet their economic needs, and therefore go ahead with an unanticipated pregnancy.

But the proposal to deny benefits does not take into account the rest of us. The furthest things from our minds, when we got pregnant, was the probability of collecting AFDC. Among teenagers, fewer are elated with the prospect of impending parenthood than are ashamed. Some make no peace with the situation, and we have the statistics on abandoned and battered children to prove it.

In my nightmares of the future without AFDC benefits to teenage mothers, I see more abandoned and battered children, I see more baby corpses washing up on beaches, I see more coat-hanger abortions.

I don’t see fewer teen pregnancies, however. It is not as though the first unmarried teenage pregnancy occurred in direct correlation to the advent of AFDC.

The welfare system unquestionably needs reform. But mounting that reform on the backs of those least able to bear up under the load seems ludicrous.

There is nothing wrong with holding a young woman accountable for her actions, for impressing upon her that she is responsible for a life she makes. This is what I learned from my parents after my daughter was born.

But there was a difference between their approach and that of our elected representatives. My parents were willing to provide backup in case I fell.

There is something inhumane about the assumption that the best way to help a teenage mother is to withdraw all possibility of support. She didn’t make that life by herself. Yet all responsibility is hers; none attaches to the young man without whom this discussion would not be necessary.

There are other prospective law professors hidden behind piles of diapers, future doctors juggling high school and midnight feedings and hours at McDonald’s. There are works in progress, 19-year-old mothers of two who have figured out that they have dreams to remember.

The success stories are a regular feature of the current debate. But if you laid us all end to end, from Los Angeles to Washington, I still doubt that we could dislodge from the small minds that gave us welfare reform their preferred image of a thirdor fourth-generation “welfare queen” who simply does not want to work.

Those who would deny public assistance to the most needy of all families with dependent children are not envisioning individual young women who might need a bridge between the error of loving badly and the possibilities before them.

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