Teen Pregnancy On The Rise In Baltimore BALTIMORE, MD (wypr) - Eighteen-year-old Jeanie Graham is a short, dark-skinned woman who lives with her mother in West Baltimore. After high school, she said she missed her birth control shot. Now she's eight months pregnant.

It was kind of unexpected, but the reason why I kept her is because, I don't believe in abortions and I know it's going to be hard but, I got to go through something one day, I'm going to have to go through struggles one day, so why not do it now while I'm young, that way when I get older, I'll know what to do.

She said she's still with the unborn infants 21-year-old father, who helps support her. Graham plans to get a job and go to college after she has the baby.

In July, the Maryland Department of Health and Mental Hygiene's Vital Statistics Administration reported that the birthrate among to 15- to 17-year-olds increased by 14-percent since last year. That's about 100 more births than the 649 recorded the year before.

Meanwhile, in another part of West Baltimore, Jabari Jefferson, 18, played the West African Djembe drums in the basement of The Church of St. Mary the Virgin. He's a member of New World Art Ensemble, a local youth theatre company. Last year, when he attended Frederick Douglas High School, Jefferson said his friends tried to pressure him to have sex in school bathrooms, stairwells and teacher's lounges.

It's pressure for everything you do, to have sex, unprotected sex, get a girl pregnant, get a girl to give you oral sex.

Statistically, Jefferson's experience is an exception to the norm. In 2007, The Youth Risk Behavior Survey, by the Center for Disease Control and Prevention, reported that about 70-percent of teens in Baltimore are sexually active and about 20-percent of them aren't using condoms.

Benjamin Roberts, a 16-year-old Baltimore high schooler, said most of his friends don't use condoms.

From my friends it's like, You got a girl pregnant for real?' Yeah I got her pregnant.' What you going to do?' What you think I'm going to do? I ain't talking to her no more.' That's how it is. I don't know any of my friends that I know, personally, who got a girl pregnant and stuck it out with them, no. Most of the either dipped off or tried to come up with some abortion money.

Alma Roberts is the President and CEO of Baltimore City Healthy Start, an organization that works to improve birth outcomes in Baltimore. She said the impact of teen pregnancy goes far beyond the young parents of their families.

If there's a teenage child whose parents are employed by a company who's offering benefits and that child, teenager has a poor birth outcome where the child is in the neonatal intensive care and all kinds of extra services are necessary, that gets factored into the claim base for that employer and can elevate and will elevate their insurance rates, so it all comes back. For everybody, for all the employees, not just that particular parent of that particular teenager.

Most teens, she added, end up in Medicaid or are uninsured. According to a cost-benefit analysis for Healthy Start, in 2006, neo-natal intensive care and first year re-hospitalization, costs Medicaid an average of one-hundred thousand dollars per-case.

Kevin Frick is an Associate Professor at the Department of Health Policy and Management at the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health. He said everyone pays for teen pregnancy.

It's always somebody's program and a program that really is important to somebody that would have to be cut in order to make more room for medical assistance As we encourage teens to try to avoid pregnancy, or if they do become pregnant, to make sure that the pregnancy and the child are as healthy as possible. A lot of it comes back to choices that we, as a society, have to make where we want to use resources and whether we make the resources available for the teenager to have a healthy pregnancy, once she becomes pregnant, so that we can hopefully avoid other costs later on down the line.





According to the National Campaign to Prevent Teen Pregnancy, an organization that works to decrease the problem, teen births annually cost U.S. taxpayers more than nine billion dollars. That's about four thousand dollars per-teen, per-birth. Younger teens having children cost the most. In Maryland, the Campaign reports, the average cost for teen mothers, who are 17-years-old and younger, is about five thousand dollars per-child, per-year.

As teens become parents at younger ages, Hopkins researcher Freya Sonenstein warned it's a strong possibility, teen mothers may have three or more children before they turn 19.

I'm Farrah Childs, reporting in Baltimore, for 88-1, WYPR.
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