    [Public Papers of the Presidents of the United States: William J. Clinton (1996, Book I)]
    [June 13, 1996]
    [Pages 913-917]
    [From the U.S. Government Publishing Office www.gpo.gov]

    Remarks on Receiving a Report on Teen Pregnancy
    June 13, 1996

        This is one of those moments when I have the feeling if I would stop
    now I'd be way ahead [Laughter] Thank you, Blessing Tate, for that
    wonderful statement. And thank you, Blessing and Salvador, both of you,
    for the powerful example of your lives.
        Thank you, Michael Carrera, for the work you've done and for
    sticking with it over so many years. I want to thank Rebecca Maynard for
    this remarkable study, which I believe will have a significant impact on
    our United States. I thank my friend Paul Tudor Jones and Robin Hood
    Foundation for funding it, and also for being a personal evangelist for
    the cause of reducing the problem of teen pregnancy in America. The
    first time I ever met him, it was about the second sentence out of his
    mouth: ``We've

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    got to do something about this. What are you doing about it?''
    [Laughter]
        I thank Isabel Sawhill and my longtime friend Governor Tom Kean for
    being willing to organize and lead this national campaign against teen
    pregnancy. I thank you especially, Governor Kean, for being concerned
    about this over so many years. Ten years ago, we were on a Carnegie
    commission on middle schools, and Tom Kean was asking questions about
    this problem then, worrying about our young people. And I thank you for
    that.
        Thank you, Senator Kassebaum, for your leadership and your
    willingness to serve. We'll miss you in the Senate, but I'm glad you're
    going to do this. I thank you. And thank you, Congresswoman Lowey, for
    always being there. Congressman Barrett was here a moment ago and had to
    leave. But I thank you all very, very much.
        There is one other person I would like to thank who is not here
    today, Dr. Henry Foster, who is in Hartford meeting with local officials
    about their teen pregnancy programs but who has been willing to work
    very hard on this endeavor for so many years.
        I have a few remarks I want to make about this whole endeavor, but
    before I do, if you will forgive me since this is my last opportunity to
    make a public statement of the day, I want to also make a few comments
    about what happened last night in Enid, Oklahoma, where another
    predominantly African-American church was burned.
        Federal agents are now on the scene. We're doing what we can to find
    out what happened. But it is clear that we now have a rash of church
    burnings over the last year and a half. All of us who have any
    responsibility in this area have to work overtime to get to the bottom
    of the crimes and to help the churches and the communities rebuild.
        Today our top Federal law enforcement officials are meeting with our
    United States Attorneys from all over America who are here and the heads
    of the FBI and the ATF offices from the affected States to work together
    and plot a strategy about where to go from here. The State attorneys
    general from the affected States will be meeting to coordinate their
    efforts in the next 2 weeks. In advance of that meeting, I am inviting
    the Governors from all the affected States to come to the White House
    next week to work together with us to prevent future incidents, to unite
    our communities, to rebuild the churches that have been burned.
        I do want to say one more time, this must be an affair of the heart
    and the mind for America. This country was founded on the premise of
    religious liberty. That's how we got started. It's in the first
    amendment to the Constitution. And we have worked hard for more than 200
    years to purge ourselves of racism. It is the cruelest of all ironies
    that an expression of bigotry in America that would sweep this country
    is one that involves trashing religious liberty. We have had over 30
    churches burned. We have also had one mosque burned. This is wrong, and
    we must stop it.
        We are here today because of what you've already heard. We know that
    strong families are the building block of our society. We know that
    millions of children that are born to mothers who aren't ready to be
    parents are robbed of their full potential.
        When you see these two young people up here and you imagine what
    their lives are now going to be like, what their children will be like,
    what their contributions will be 10, 20, 30, 40 years from now, they say
    more than I ever could about what is truly at stake in dealing with this
    problem of teen pregnancy. I appreciate the fact that Governor Kean said
    that this is a uniquely American dilemma. It is really true. There is no
    advanced country in the world that has anything like the teen pregnancy
    problem that we do, the out-of-wedlock pregnancy problem that we do, and
    we have got to do something about it. We have to give these young people
    opportunity. We have to insist that they take more responsibility. But
    we must also come together as a community to help them to make the most
    of their own lives and to make good choices.
        You heard Dr. Maynard talk about the costs of teen pregnancy.
    There's no point in my reiterating them now. But if you just think about
    all the bad things that can happen to kids, they're more likely for teen
    mothers. And if you think about the good things that can happen to kids,
    they're less likely for teen mothers. And sure, some of them make it,
    and we have to do the best we can to make sure more of them do very
    well. But the most important thing we can do is to dramatically,
    dramatically reduce the incidence of premature pregnancy and childbirth
    in this country. Let me thank again the

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    Robin Hood Foundation for what they have done and Paul Tudor Jones,
    especially.
        But let me ask you again to think about this. If a million teenagers
    become pregnant each year, we face the prospect of dramatic social
    decay. If next year we will begin a period of several years when the
    classes of schoolchildren starting in grade school are going to be
    bigger than the classes of the baby boom generation for the first time
    since I became the oldest of the baby boomers and people about 18 years
    younger than me were the youngest, we are now going to have
    schoolchildren in numbers bigger than the baby boom generation. If we
    have not done something about this critical matter by the time they are
    biologically capable of bearing children even though they should not do
    so, we will pay an even greater price than Dr. Maynard's study
    calculates that we are paying today. And it will involve far more than
    money.
        So I say to you, I believe there is a community responsibility. As
    Hillary said in her book, this is one of those problems that it really
    does take a village to deal with. No one has a right to say we're not
    responsible for these children. And all of us will be better off if
    there are more children like Blessing and Sal. We all have a
    responsibility to do that.
        I do want to compliment Secretary Shalala for her work on these
    subjects not just as the Secretary of HHS but, as you heard, going back
    for years and years and years before she ever came to this post. I want
    to thank her and the Governors who have worked together on the cause of
    welfare reform. We have put in place about 62 welfare reform experiments
    now with 39 States, many of them designed to help young people come to
    grips with this issue.
        Ohio's LEAP program, for example, is having a significant impact on
    helping teen mothers stay in school and get jobs and get off welfare.
    And I was so impressed with the consequences of it that we issued an
    Executive order ruling that that should be the policy in every State in
    the country. Stay in school; stay at home or in an appropriate
    supervised setting; follow a personal responsibility contract; turn your
    life around: That is what we expect from people who receive these
    benefits.
        The other thing we have to do is to take seriously the role in this
    problem of older men. It's a sad fact that half of all the underage
    mothers in this country were made pregnant by a man who was in his
    twenties or even older, someone who has no business taking advantage of
    an underage girl. Statutory rape is still a crime in this country. The
    young women are victims. Yet these laws are almost never enforced, even
    in the most egregious of circumstances. It is time for them to be
    enforced so that older men who prey on underage women and bring children
    into the world they have no intention of taking responsibility for are
    held accountable.
        There are other things we have to do, too. We've come a long way in
    the area of child support enforcement. Child support enforcement
    collections have increased by 40 percent in the last 3 years from
    roughly $8 billion to just a little over $11 billion. The Federal
    Government working with the States have played a role in that. But we
    can do more.
        One of the things that there is, as far as I know, absolutely
    totally unanimous agreement on in the Congress among all Republicans and
    all Democrats are the provisions that are now in every welfare reform
    bill to strengthen child support enforcement. If for some reason we
    cannot reach agreement on welfare reform this year--and I still hope we
    can--I believe we ought to pass these provisions that 100 percent of us
    agree on so that we can do more to hold people accountable for the
    children they bring in the world and help these kids get the money they
    need and help their parents get the money they need to do a good job in
    raising the children.
        These are things that the Government can do. But we all know that
    the Government cannot solve this problem. The more I dealt with these
    issues as a Governor, the more I became convinced that the only way to
    deal with them was in a comprehensive way, the way that the New York
    Children's Aid Society has dealt with them, the way that the national
    campaign is attempting with them. That's why I asked leaders from our
    society, from every walk of life, to pull together and form a national
    campaign to prevent teen pregnancy.
        Now, Tom Kean said they have an audacious goal to reduce teen
    pregnancy by a third in the next 10 years, but I believe that's an
    achievable goal. I believe if every child in America had access to the
    kind of guidance and support that these two children did, we would
    achieve that goal and perhaps better it.

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        The work of the national campaign to prevent teen pregnancy is just
    beginning. I think we should all make a personal commitment to support
    them, each of us in our own communities. They're going to be doing what
    all of us should be doing. They'll learn what works, spread the word,
    and work to replicate it through the country.
        Today the Department of Health and Human Services is taking a step
    in that direction by releasing a guidebook called ``Promoting Promising
    Strategies.'' It describes successful programs and outlines five
    important principles that are embodied in every single successful teen
    pregnancy program that we have evaluated, including, obviously, the one
    supported by the Children's Aid Society that produced these two fine
    young people here today.
        First and foremost, community programs must stress abstinence and
    personal responsibility. A program cannot be successful unless it gives
    our children the moral leadership they need to say no to the wrong
    choices and yes to the right ones.
        Second, programs must help teenagers establish clear strategies
    about how they are going to move their lives forward. Both these young
    people have strategies for what they're going to do with their
    tomorrows. They have dreams. They have a reason to work and look for the
    long run.
        Third--and let me just say one other thing--that's saying that it's
    necessary to have strategies. Let me just follow this through. That
    means that we have an obligation to help all these kids go to college,
    among other things. Now, one of the most important proposals that I have
    made, from my point of view, is giving families a tax deduction for up
    to $10,000 for the cost of college tuition and guaranteeing a credit of
    up to $1,500 for 2 years of education after high school. But that may
    not be enough for some of these kids that are in trouble and don't have
    enough money to get from one week to the next.
        So it's one thing to say that they should have a strategy for their
    future; the rest of us have obligations to help them live up to their
    dreams. If they're doing the right things, if they're being responsible,
    if they're making the right choices, we've got to see to it that these
    children can go to college or go to training school or otherwise pursue
    their dreams. And all of us have responsibilities to make sure that
    their decisions have a chance of being carried out.
        The third thing we have to do is to make sure that parents and other
    adult mentors are constantly involved in children's lives.
        And fourth, the program has to bring together many parts of the
    community, schools, businesses, religious organizations. The chances of
    success dramatically increase when not just one group is left to carry
    the whole load.
        Finally, the programs have to maintain a commitment to the young
    people over an extended period of time. You heard what Blessing said
    about 4 years. We can't expect young people to hear a sermon a time or
    two and turn their lives around. They need action and support and
    consistency over a long period of time.
        Now, these five principles we know work: abstinence, adult and
    community involvement, a clear strategy to a good education and a good
    job, a long-term commitment. Government should support these things
    because they work, and we should not be supporting strategies that do
    not work. That's why I want to announce today that the $30 million that
    I included in next year's budget to fund local teen pregnancy prevention
    programs will go only to programs that inculcate these five principles.
        I want programs like that in every community in the country. That's
    what the Government can do to help the national commission meet their
    goal of reducing teen pregnancy by a third over the next decade. We know
    that we can do it.
        Again, let me say that this is really about Blessing Tate, Salvador
    Ayala. It's about all the kids like them all across America. It's about
    people in the New York Children's Aid Society and people like them all
    across America, who were out here working on this when they never could
    get a headline and nobody ever notice them and they did it just because
    they thought it was right, the humane, the decent thing to do.
        We know that we have to create a new culture, a new mind-set in our
    country, in which young people take greater responsibility for
    themselves but they understand that in so doing they have more
    opportunities for themselves, and in which the rest of us take
    responsibility for the welfare of all of our children, doing that
    together.
        No one is too young to be told that the decision to bring a child
    into the world is the gravest choice they will ever make. No one is too
    young

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    to be told that there are consequences to decisions and that one way or
    the other, people always wind up being held accountable.
        The basic bargain of our country should be, however, that if you are
    responsible, there will be opportunity for you. You will be party of a
    community of people who care about you, who believe that we must go
    forward together.
        Pearl Buck once said, ``If our American way of life fails the child,
    it fails us all.'' For too many children every year, the American way of
    life fails the child, and one of the ways we see it most gravely is in
    the epidemic of teen pregnancy. We now have people all over America that
    are working to turn it around. We have a national campaign committed to
    it. And we will do everything we can to support all of you good people
    who are trying to make this country a better place for these two young
    people on this stage and all the young people in America they represent.
        Thank you, and God bless you.

    Note: The President spoke at 3:10 p.m. in Room 450 of the Old Executive
    Office Building. In his remarks, he referred to Blessing Tate and
    Salvador Ayala, teen pregnancy prevention program participants, and
    Michael A. Carrera, national training center director, Children's Aid
    Society; Rebecca Maynard, editor of the report, entitled ``Kids Having
    Kids''; Paul Tudor Jones II, chair, Robin Hood Foundation; Isabel
    Sawhill, president, National Campaign To Reduce Teen Pregnancy; former
    Gov. Tom Kean of New Jersey; and Henry W. Foster, Jr., Senior Adviser to
    the President on Teen Pregnancy and Youth Issues.