At age 16, Xaviera Sanchez was pregnant with her first child. “There were a lot of girls pregnant at the time when I was a teen mother,” the now 36-year-old South Tucson resident said.
Sanchez never received information about contraception or health education when she was in her teens. “They never mentioned this kind of stuff in school, and then next thing I knew I was having a baby,” she said.
When talking to her daughters, age 20 and 13, about sex Sanchez said she isn’t too worried because she has a very open relationship with them. But, she recognized that when she was a teen herself she never talked to her parents about the topic. “It’s important for girls to get this education in school too. It’s important for them to know,” she said.
From 2000 to 2010 the fertility rate among Hispanic women in Arizona dropped from 3.0 births per woman to 2.4, according to the Arizona State Demographer’s Office.
“The rate dropping makes sense to me,” Sanchez said. “It was more difficult back then to get birth control. Today girls are more open about it and there are so many clinics available for them to go to,” Sanchez said.
When she was younger she recalls needing parental permission to get on the pill, which made pregnancy prevention more difficult. “Now girls can go get birth control without parental consent,” Sanchez said.
Several schools throughout Tucson are also trying to decrease unplanned pregnancy by increasing knowledge among teens, both Hispanic and non-Hispanic, about sexual health and contraception.
When Student Services Coordinator Tom Rogers started at Edge High School at Himmel Park there was no formal sexual education, he said. “Now for the last five years we have been working with Teen Outreach Pregnancy Services (TOPS) who comes in to teach a nine week course with classes twice a week. The classes are packed. Their standing room only,” Rogers said.
Last semester health educators like Melissa Brady, from TOPS were doing one-on-one sit downs with the students. Brady said they found a majority to be sexually active. “I would personally make an estimate that it was about 90 percent of the kids that were sexually active,” Brady said. “The kids are enthusiastic about learning and want to do the right thing,” she added. “It’s not giving kids permission to go out and have sex. It’s about being educated,” Brady said.
There is lots of misconception about contraception and safe sex, Rogers explained. It’s either passed from misinformed generation to generation or coming from peers, he said. “We start the sex-ed course with a 10 question quiz about sexual myths.”
Rodgers also pointed out that the counselors keep baskets of condoms in their offices. “The kids are really good about coming in and taking some,” he said. The condoms are provided to the school for free from the Southern Arizona AIDS Foundation, which gets involved with the sex education course by doing presentations.
“I like that when we have questions about certain things, like HIV, they will bring in guest speakers to talk to us,” said Edge student Cheyanne Cuthbertson, 19, about groups like SAAF who recently came in to discuss safe sex and how students can avoid contracting HIV and other sexually transmitted diseases.
“We discuss birth control, like the shot and pill methods, and about condoms and abstinence,” Cuthbertson said. “Even though its sex-ed it has a lot to do with life skills,” she added.
Cuthbertson said she believes it helps teens learn the risks. “I think it opens a lot of doors that haven’t been opened, and if more schools had sex-ed a lot of students would take it.”
Celina Cruz, 22, recalls having sex education when she was attending Cholla High School. “They taught us everything about safe sex and different types of birth controls, it wasn’t just about abstinence,” Cruz recalled.
“I’m personally not ready for a child,” Cruz said. “I’m currently in college at the University of Phoenix and I want to take care of my education first. I do want kids,” she added, “just not right now.”
Brady sees this same attitude about education as a priority in a lot of young Hispanic women she works with. “I have had girls who admit to me that their unplanned pregnancy is a disappointment. They will say to me that they wanted to be a doctor. But there are also a lot of other girls pregnant, or who have a child, who end up going to Pima Community College or finishing school,” she said.
Beyond more education in schools, the balancing act of parenting and other responsibilities may be leading to these women having fewer children, suggested Lexann Downey-Lewis, the program director for pregnancy and adoption with Catholic Social Services.
“These girls after parenting one child realize that it’s not like having a live baby doll,” she said. “It’s more like having a pie,” Downey-Lewis explained, “and you start with three or four slices and as you add more children you realize the less pie you have. After having a child these women know what they can give their kids now. They know that if they add another child into the family that everyone gets a smaller slice.”
Sanchez expressed how difficult of a struggle it was for her to be pregnant and then have a child while still working on finishing her education. She was able to graduate high school, and later attend Pima Community College, but it was a tedious road, she said. “I know a lot of girls who are choosing to get their education first before having kids,” Sanchez said.
“It’s not just about finances when you have kids,” Downey-Lewis added, “It’s about time and energy as well.”
