Capitol Ideas /A Girls' School in Baltimore
Bethell, Tom
The Laurence G. Paquin High School for Expectant Teenage Mothers is a bleak brick fortress in a desolate section of east Baltimore; a squiggle-painted, cinder-block, boardedup-row-house,...
...Babies were crying softly in the background and young women wearing slacks and loose outfits were walking in the hall...
...They have been told over and over about birth control and condoms, they're all pregnant anyway, and now a new item has been added to the contraceptive menu...
...This is an elective for them...
...Another 16-year-old girl he met baited her virginal 18-year-old cousin as "barren" because she had not yet had a child...
...She did take me to see the Paquin Entrepreneur Program...
...The paper, doubly troubled, failed to note what was so "troubling...
...Shortly after Norplant was approved by the FDA, in December 1990, the Philadelphia Inquirer stirred up controversy by publishing an editorial—"Poverty and Norplant: Can Contraception Reduce the Underclass...
...The sign on the cafeteria wall read: "You Are the Apple of Our Eye...
...The city is now about 60 percent black...
...Mothers on AFDC are called the "underclass" but they also constitute a privileged class—unloved but still privileged...
...Since then, however, the offensive editorial's recommendation has been quietly implemented...
...Unless I am mistaken, it is not going to make much of a dent...
...But Stith kept me away from them...
...He also complained to the New York Times about the "summonses from the thought police for violating the no-right-turn rule...
...Yet, according to the New York Times, she does believe that the welfare state fosters dependency, and that as a result young women in her school do not have to think about the consequences of pregnancy...
...The liberal assumption that government aid "helps" people in proportion to the amount given is still largely intact...
...This in turn "is stirring profound and troubling questions about personal rights and public policy...
...How about a marriage license, or an end to welfare...
...The Paquin School is ghetto-proofed, a sign outside proclaiming it to be a Drug-Free School Zone...
...In a letter to the editor, the president of the Philadelphia Association of Black Journalists attacked the editorial as a "tacit endorsement of slow genocide...
...I peered through a glass aperture into one classroom, and teenagers with infants on their laps were sitting around a conference table...
...Two or three were carrying plastic bassinets with babies...
...It is probably true that in decidingwhether to have further children, the young women do not make marginal calculations about AFDC payments...
...This merely means that incremental change in the welfare system—which is all that we are going to see in the current political climate—will make no difference...
...She took at face value what the girls tell her in school—"You don't think it's going to happen to you, then one day you find you're pregnant," and so on: "It's not deliberate," Stith reassured me...
...There are no windows at all on the ground floor, mere slits upstairs, and stadium lights suspended from the four corners of the building's roof...
...Butthis they already know...
...There's too many birth control pills out here...
...It can handle up to thirty infants and children, aged six weeks to six years...
...Inside, there were bright lights and Christmas tree decorations, wall slogans ("At the End of Broken Dreams You Need Someone, Us—the Paquin Family"), plaques, and a display case showing a satin-finished christening set for twins, made in the school's garment-making shop...
...Everything was surprisingly quiet...
...Almost all are black...
...The great problem at present is that unwed mothers on welfare, and the young men who impregnate them, are indirectly told that they do not have to be responsible for their behavior...
...Paquin has been in the news lately because Norplant will soon be dispensed free at the school's clinic...
...Girls in the inner city, and their offspring, have names like that now: ShonTae, Taniqua, Shaquira, Tamika, Tallisha, Tayesha...
...When Karen de Witt of the New York Times visited a classroom of thirty pregnant girls at the school, and Stith asked them what did give protection, they chanted in unison: "Condom, condom, condom...
...About 500,000 women now use Norplant (up from 100,000 a year ago), but 61 percent of sales are to doctors in private practice...
...Once a month there's a "workshop" for the fathers-to-be...
...This was immediately denounced as racist by both black and white members of the paper's news staff...
...According to the Washington Post, Planned Parenthood of Metropolitan Washington has found teenagers in the capital "reluctant to use Norplant because it is more complicated to reverse than other contraceptives and because it is visible under the skin...
...If this view prevails in policy debates, life in the inner city will deteriorate further...
...Norplant is "just another form of birth control, like having another car to drive," Stith told me...
...Stith, fortyish with upswept silvery hair, was happy to talk and she mentioned all the media attention of the past two weeks—AP, UPI, Newsweek, Bettina Gregory of ABC News...
...which suggested that welfare mothers should be offered incentives to use the device...
...Many were overweight, and they looked older than one might have expected...
...The assumption underlying this latest weapon in the arsenal of the therapeutic state is that conception among inner-city blacks is largely accidental...
...She wanted me to know right off that the students are well warned that the implant does not protect against venereal and viral disease...
...L ike that of Washington, D.C., the population of Baltimore (735,000) has declined 25percent from its 1950 peak...
...Down the road, on North Avenue, young men in army surplus jackets were filing out of the Eastside District Court just as their sisters were leaving the school...
...The implant is now covered by Medicaid in all fifty states...
...Their provider role is usurped by the state...
...A Norplant kit costs $365, and a private doctor may charge $500 to insert it...
...You have to have a driver's permit to drive, a voter's card to vote, but you don't have to have anything to be a parent...
...They have a whole Toddler Center, with cots and cribs and baby rattles and multicolored wall alphabets—Paquin University, it is called, with "an infant stimulation/learning program designed to promote an adaptive cognitive style...
...There is also a considerable irony here...
...A s I waited to talk to the principal, Dr...
...These can be for their own children or for a toddler line called Young Sensations (available at four area malls, Stith said...
...One 16-year-old, Tauscha Vaughn, said to him: "Mr...
...Foundations are also making them available to women not covered by Medicaid...
...There's a staff of forty—the school is a honey pot for social-service providers...
...Teenagers can become eligible for Aid to Families with Dependent Children when they have children themselves...
...Even when they twelve, they know what it is...
...The principal, Dr...
...According to the Baltimore Sun, the annual cost per pupil is over $9,000 per year, about double the cost of regular public schools in the city...
...The thinking has changed," the author of the Inquirer editorial told me, referring to the new acceptability of Norplant incentives...
...One in ten Baltimore girls aged 15 to 17 gave birth in 1990, and teenagers account for 23 percent of the city's births in 1991...
...Embittered, many take to a life of crime on the streets...
...E arly indications are that the inner cities are not about to be depopulated soon...
...With the implant, a teenager doesn't have to worry about forgetting to take the pill...
...I've heard it can give you cancer," Paquin student Quadrine Kelly, six months pregnant, told Karen de Witt...
...Bush wrote, "and they will love Tom Bethell is The American Spectator's Washington correspondent...
...Paquin's student body is composed entirely of expectant mothers or teenagers who already have given birth, some of them twice...
...a squiggle-painted, cinder-block, boardedup-row-house, upside-down-sofas-onthe-sidewalk kind of a neighborhood, with drug lookouts wearing woolsox headgear posted at nearby corners...
...No doubt it was that inner city women on Medicaid—black women, overwhelmingly—now really do have an incentive to use Norplant, whereas the working poor do not...
...The young men are "deprived" at a more fundamental level, however...
...The potential for controversy "depends on who says it, and who does it...
...A note of mockery here...
...So Hang On . . . Don't Drop Out...
...I watched about a hundred of them filing out of the front door, many of them boarding a Baltimore mass transit bus outside...
...Dash, will you please stop asking me about birth control...
...ShonTae Farrare has done a wonderful job personalizing them...
...Rosetta Stith, I copied down a cheerless message framed on the office wall: "Our school must be dedicated to being a change agent through activities that offer young school-age mothers a measure of stability, hope, and a sense of reality to deal with a world that is constantly torn between uncertainty, unrest, and violence...
...This is a new form of contraception, consisting of six capsules that are inserted under the skin on the underside, of the upper arm...
...it seemed to be an almost wholly female environment...
...CI...
...In what some see as a troubling paradox," a writer noted in a recent unbylined New York Times news story, "truly poor women can get Norplant more easily than those who have modest incomes...
...There were framed letters from George and Barbara Bush and other dignitaries...
...Washington Post reporter Leon Dash questioned this in his 1989 book, When Children Want Children, based on months of research in the Washington ghetto...
...s tith would have none of this wanted-child argument...
...The play outfits for the grands [grandchildren] are just perfect," Mrs...
...Entre-pre-neur: a person who organizes, manages and assumes responsibility for a business or other enterprise," said the sign on the wall...
...The overall effect of the welfare state is less devastating to them than to the fathers...
...The great majority also receive Food Stamps, and of course Medicaid...
...A second, apologetic editorial followed, and the editorial page editor, David Boldt, said he "deeply regretted" the way the earlier editorial had linked race, poverty, and birth control...
...The young mothers—two of whom were in the room, stitching away silently—learn how to use sewing machines and to make baby clothes...
...This is a lot more than the zero cost encountered by those on Medicaid...
...All of them know about it...
...Later in the book Dash claimed that the four pregnant teenagers in one family he interviewed "wanted children for a variety of reasons—to achieve something tangible, to prove something to their peers, to be considered an adult, to get their mother's attention, and to keep up with an older brother or sister...
...The Paquin students go home at 3:00 p.m...
...Sad to say, for most of the young women the bloom was already off the rose...
...They were just finishing lunch, which the students and their babies have together in the cafeteria...
...True there are not enough weddings and too many funerals, and the mothers live in chaotic extended families, but there are babies and in-laws, showers and christening parties, and the material essentials are provided for them...
...ere and there, liberals are showing signs of recognizing that all is not well in the cities, and Norplant is apparently their latest riposte...
...She does not accept that teenagers make cost/welfare-benefit analyses of childbearing, because the babies keep coming while the "public assistance grants have been decreasing...
...She showed me around parts of the school...
...A phone outside the front and only entrance allows visitors to identify themselves and to be buzzed in if considered friendly...
...She did express some exasperation, though...
...They release a hormone called progestin which blocks ovulation for up to five years...
...About 112,000 mothers in Baltimore received AFDC in September 1992-86 percent of them black...
...About 300 girls attend the school each semester, but I gather that few stayfor more than a year...
...Girls out here know all about birth control...
...Girls out here get pregnant because they want to have babies...
...them...
Vol. 26 • February 1993 • No. 2
