[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.