Want A Baby?

By Richard Lacayo

By the age of 12, Katherine Mims was what you might call a welfare mother in training. That was in 1985, when home was a two-bedroom Harlem apartment that she shared with her mother, four brothers, one cousin and a pregnant aunt who was 14. All of them were supported by welfare checks, a background that might have put Mims in line for early pregnancy, an education cut off in the ninth grade or so and a long stretch on public support. Instead, she is married today and looking forward to starting a family -- after she finishes her degree program at Manhattan's Hunter College. Even she sounds surprised by it all. "I didn't think I'd make it out of high school."

And what might it take to accomplish such a small miracle? This much: private tutoring to help her finish school, weekly lessons in sports like swimming and tennis, career counseling, a summer job -- and a guaranteed college education. All of that became available to Mims the year she turned 12 and heard about the Family Life and Sex Education Program of the Children's Aid Society, a social-service agency in New York City that aims to help inner- city teenage boys and girls to get a life before they go about conceiving one. The goal is to reduce teenage pregnancy in a sneaky way, not so much by preaching against sex as by bringing enough structure and accomplishment to the lives of the kids involved that they keep themselves in line. As the ultimate incentive, every graduate is promised admission to Hunter, with full tuition. "We knew we needed a carrot-and-stick approach -- and Hunter was the carrot," says Donna Shalala, Bill Clinton's Secretary of Health and Human Services, who initiated the program in 1985 when she was the school's president.

Program Director Michael Carrera claims that of the 250 teen graduates there have been only eight out-of-wedlock pregnancies among the girls. Only two of the boys are known to have fathered children. Forty-one percent of those who finish the program go on to college. "The most potent contraceptive you can provide is to help them believe that they are valuable," he says. "Young people who feel that way are rarely irresponsible sexually." Because it works with small numbers of kids who are at least sufficiently motivated to sign up, it's not possible to tell if the same program would be as successful with a full cross section of inner-city kids, or whether its potentially costly combination of close supervision and college-tuition guarantees could be duplicated on a wider scale. Even so, 10 cities around the U.S. have developed programs modeled after Carrera's.

Though the program includes classes in sex education and family planning, the focus is on gaining skills that lead to a life of stability and regular employment. "In some sessions they would ask, 'How much do you plan on making?' Then they showed you how much it would cost to raise a kid," says Donell Harvin, who completed one of 10 New York programs that have sprung up in emulation of Carrera's. "They were never really pushy about sex." Experts in teen sexuality say that's one of the most effective ways to discourage early pregnancies. "Most middle-class youths take a strong interest in their future and know what a pregnancy can do to derail it," says Elijah Anderson, a sociology professor at the University of Pennsylvania who has studied sexual norms among the urban poor. "In contrast, many inner-city youths see no future to derail." That leaves open the question of what Americans are willing to pay to put them on the right track.

With reporting by Ann Blackman/New York