Hispanics grappling with teen pregnancy

Tuesday, May 22, 2001 | 10:59 a.m.

A 17-year-old Las Vegas girl didn't want to believe what she knew to be true.

"I thought it was all a bad dream, and couldn't be happening to me," she said, recalling the day in January she learned she was pregnant.

A second generation Mexican-American, who preferred to remain anonymous, the girl illustrates one of the state's growing health problems -- teen pregnancy in the Hispanic community.

According to John Etcheto, teen pregnancy prevention coordinator for the State Health Division, of an estimated 4,800 Nevada teens who became pregnant in 2000, 1,800 were Hispanic -- or 36 percent of the total.

Hispanics, the largest minority group in the state, make up only 19.7 of the total population, according to the 2000 Census. Among teenage girls, Hispanics make up only 18 percent of the total, Etcheto said.

A conference -- put together by Solidarios Entre Amigos, or Solidarity Among Friends, a local community service organization -- was held Saturday at the Community College of Southern Nevada to address the problem.

"This is an issue that affects all of us in the Hispanic community, whether it is because we have a pregnant teen in our families, or as taxpayers who contribute to the federal and state funds that most of these young mothers have to depend on," meeting organizer Marlene Monteolivo said.

In Nevada, Hispanics are the only major racial or ethnic group with a growing teen pregnancy rate in recent years, according to the most recent figures available from the Bureau of Health Planning and Statistics.

While blacks, whites, and American Indians have all dropped in number of pregnancies per 1,000 girls 15 to 17 years old since 1997, Hispanics have risen from 121.47 per 1,000 to 127.15 in 1999. Pregnancies among Asians rose in 1998 and then dropped again in 1999.

The drop in other populations is linked at least in part to a statewide teen pregnancy prevention initiative launched in 1996, Etcheto said. In fact, falling pregnancy rates in the overall teen population since then have knocked Nevada from first in the nation to fourth in 2000.

The program includes talks by the 12-member Governor's Youth Advisory Council to peers around the state. A nonprofit organization, the Nevada Public Health Foundation, was also created, and with the State Health Division it has developed a workshop for parents called "Positive Choices, Positive Futures," which focuses on the prevention of teen pregnancies.

Finally, state funds have been made available to produce posters and television and radio commercials on the problem.

Hispanic workers are being added to the "Positive Choices" program, and commercials are being produced in Spanish.

But the message is still not getting across to the Hispanic community.

The 17-year-old girl, who is due to have her baby in August, said she and her boyfriend had used birth control, "but then we were just careless."

In junior high school, she said, the subject of pregnancy was broached by encouraging abstinence, but no information was given about other forms of birth control.

Her high school "hadn't even brought up the subject," she said.

Several Hispanic teenagers who attended Saturday's meeting offered similar insight.

Yoshabel Cortez, 13, a student at Fremont Middle School, said her school had given a one-week course on sexuality as part of a nine-week health course.

"But it mostly talked about what diseases you can get, especially AIDS. And they showed all these boring old videos from the 1980s. The idea we got on getting pregnant is that it will be our responsibility."

Cortez said she had three friends her age who were pregnant. " They don't know what they are going to do," she said.

Meanwhile, the 17-year-old Sunset High student, who only seven months ago felt "everything was going my way" -- with a new job at Macy's, a new apartment with a cousin, and straight A's in school -- has changed her plans.

She is living with her parents, couldn't take her job, and is "focusing on school and my baby."

"I'd like to be doing teenage stuff, like going out at night, but I feel like a real grownup now, and have to deal with this."