Teen Parents Illustrate the Need for Better Sex Ed

By Laura Tillman, The Brownsville Herald. Posted March 28, 2008.

Julia keeps the remnants of her brief adolescence in a shoebox under her bed.

In it, a jumbled pile of photographs of a trusting young woman, with painted lips, trendy clothes and neatly blow-dried hair lie haphazardly among faces of the characters that inhabit the parables of her high school years.

Now an 18-year-old mother of a 2-year-old girl, Julia rarely revisits the photos.

One picture shows her sitting on the precipice of a carnival ride, waiting with bated breath for the cart to plummet toward the Sunrise Mall parking lot below.

Today, Julia, who asked that her name be changed for this article, wears a massive black sweatshirt and plain jeans that drown her heavy frame. She has reached the bottom of a brief, jarring ride and lacks the momentum to pick herself back up.

She tells of growing up under her mother’s unflagging gaze. The photos from the carnival capture a momentary respite, where she could be with friends, laugh and act her age.

Despite the hours and years of time she spent with her mother, being ushered between school and home, Julia says they barely communicated. They never spoke about growing up, about education or career, about love and especially not about sex.

Her sheltered childhood left her feeling defenseless. And at the moment when she most needed courage, it betrayed her, she says.

At 14, Julia was visiting family in Matamoros, where she was to attend a soccer game. She walked to the stadium with a relative in his 20s, who she knew most of her life. She had always felt uncomfortable with the way he looked at her and touched her, but she walked with him anyway. On the way, her untested instinct proved true.

“He told me he used to watch me through the window of my house. Then he pulled me into an abandoned house and raped me,” she said.

A couple of weeks later a store-bought pregnancy test read positive.

Her friends laid out her options on a table at school. In front of her were capsules and liquids from Mexican pharmacies, rumored to terminate pregnancy. Julia was scared and confused.

“I said I would take the drugs but I decided not to,” she said.

“Another girl, she took them, and then she had to go to the hospital,” Julia said. “When the police investigated what had happened, they said the pills she took were not for humans, they were for an animal.”

Julia does not know what drugs her friends offered her. It’s likely they included misoprostol, a prescription medication used to treat ulcers that’s available over the counter in Mexico.

Taken in certain quantities, the drug is known to induce contractions in a woman’s uterus, signaling a miscarriage. Too much of the drug later in pregnancy can be fatal; too little earlier in pregnancy may fail to induce miscarriage and risk birth defects.

Along the border, the pills are accessible for women who might not know that safer, legal abortions are available, and for teenagers who won’t or can’t tell their parents about an unwanted pregnancy.

Her friend survived the ordeal. And it turned out Julie wasn’t pregnant after all.

Julia eventually filed charges against the man that raped her and he was sent to prison for a few months, she said. The incident tore her family apart.

“We couldn’t go to my grandmother’s funeral in Mexico,” she said. “We can’t see that part of the family anymore.”

Soon after, she started dating a boy from high school. Within a year, she was pregnant -- this time for real.

She hid her pregnancy for eight months, afraid of further dividing the family. In her ninth month, she told her mother about the baby. Until the day her water broke, Julia says her father was in the dark.

She married the baby’s father and the young family lives with her parents.

Now a wife and mother, what Julia knows about sex, rape, and even abortion, she learned from television and her few disastrous firsthand experiences. Without television, she might not have known that this kind of thing happens to other girls.

But unaccompanied by practical conversations about safe sex and violence with her parents or a guidance counselor, television’s flair for the dramatic can be psychologically toxic.

“She sees these shows on television and it makes her so afraid,” said Letty Coronado, Brownsville’s Planned Parenthood teen advocate. Coronado had been visiting Julia’s home for four months, teaching her about how to care for her child, before the two were alone together and Julia finally told her about the rape and her persistent fear.

See more stories tagged with: gender, reproductive justice, teen pregnancy

Liked this story? Get top stories in your inbox each week from Reproductive Justice and Gender! Sign up now »