The concept for the Georgia Campaign for Adolescent Pregnancy Prevention began in 1994 when I attended the U. N. Conference on Population and Development in Cairo, Egypt, as the Goodwill Ambassador to the United Nation's Population fund. At that time, Georgia led the nation as the state with the highest rate of adolescent pregnancy and I believed that the way to address the issue was by expanding the use of contraception.

The Cairo Conference was unique in that is was the first time that women were central to the development of a U. N. conference's Plan of Action. These women were frontline workers from around the world for whom population growth was neither a demographic issue, nor simply a health issue.

Upon my return to Georgia I traveled to different parts of the state to talk to our own frontline workers and to learn about adolescent life here. At that time, more than 29,000 teens were becoming pregnant annually in Georgia; about 7 of every 100 girls were becoming mothers. 99 out 100 teen pregnancies were unplanned, and, nearly 1/4 of teen births in Georgia were repeat births -- ranking Georgia 44th in the nation.

I remember looking into the eyes of a 14-year-old girl in a hospital in Albany, Georgia, who was in labor with her 2nd child. I was told she lived in a shack that lacked running water and electricity. I knew intuitively that unless one could change the conditions of her life there would probably be more children to come. Even assuming there was a family planning clinic accessible to her and affordable, what would motivate this child to use these services? What future could she see for herself that would be compromised by having children so soon?

Girls who grow up in poverty and without hope of bettering their situation are likely to be teen mothers. The best contraceptive, it turns out, is hope. In this country, 80% of mothers who begin their families as teenagers were living at or below the poverty line long before they became pregnant. Without early and on-going interventions, their early parenthood virtually guarantees that they ­ and their children ­ will spend their lives in poverty.

I discovered that keeping girls in school is an important to reducing early pregnancy and parenthood in the U. S. as it is in other parts of the world. School failure and dropout are associated with many risk behaviors in both boys and girls including early and unprotected sex.

So is the lack of an involved father. Boys who grow up with an involved father, whether or not the father lives in the home and is married to the mother, will have more confidence in himself, do better in school and tend to be less violent. Girls with involved fathers tend to delay onset of sexual activity and postpone childbearing.

Girls who have experienced sexual abuse or sexual coercion tend to initiate sexual activity earlier, have multiple partners and engage in unsafe sex. A United States study found that sexual and physical abuse are powerful predictors of early pregnancy. Some studies shows that 60% or more of mothers 15 years or younger have been abused! Usually the abuser is an adult man, often a parent or family member. Sexual abuse robs a girl of a sense of identity, of ownership of her body. For these girls the idea of negotiating contraceptive use with a partner would be anathema.

Cairo taught me how gender role stereotypes directly effect a girl's sexual and reproductive behavior. For instance, our culture portrays sexually active girls as "loose" or "cheap" thereby inhibiting girls from seeking information or services such as contraception for fear that this would be an acknowledgement that they want and plan on having sex. Often girls are unable or unwilling to negotiate condom use because they are taught by our culture to be docile and to please the man at all costs or they fear accusations of unfaithfulness or even violence, especially when partners are several years older, increasing the level of intimidation.

I came to see that while sexuality education, reproductive health and family planning services are critical components in any effort to prevent adolescent pregnancy they are not enough. Too many other factors influence whether a youth has sufficient motivation and adequate access to contraception or to act differently because of what she or he has learned in a classroom. In addition, family planning services that are appropriate for adult clients may too often not be adequate for young people whose needs and problems are different. Clinics often exclude single adolescents, either formally or informally, through inconvenient hours, lack of privacy or judgmental staff.

For all these reasons, I created G-CAPP to broaden the traditional adolescent pregnancy prevention agenda to address the social antecedents that lie beneath the problem behavior. These include poverty, unemployment, violence, drugs, lack of good parenting, school failure, and dropout, child abuse, alienation from mainstream society, racism and gender bias. This approach necessitates working not only with girls but also with boys, not only with their mothers but also with their fathers, with their communities and with society at large.

G-CAPP identifies best practices and strategies, locates appropriate agencies to involve in management, assists in locating funding, and ensures that programs are being properly implemented. Our community-based organizers engage the communities in determining which programs meet their needs. They work with community leaders, residents, youth and caring networks within each community to create sustainable programs and a positive environment that will reduce the rate of adolescent pregnancy and increase opportunities for young people and their parents.

Youth and their families need programs and opportunities created for them such as job development and community policing, and they need activities that are done with them such as programs that build their skills and capacities. But they also need self-initiated opportunities done by them such as advocacy and organizing, and, ultimately programs they run themselves. G-CAPP wants to ensure that the communities in which we work benefit from comprehensive multi-faceted efforts that weave together different interventions to create an integrated "for, with, and by" web.

Along side our community-based work, statewide advocacy is a central part of what we do. We are a campaign after all. You can be doing extraordinary work at the community level and then look over your shoulder one day to find that a minor's right to confidential access to clinics, or comprehensive sexuality education, or funding for after school programs have been taken away. Voter education and mobilization is critical to countering the efforts of those who think the "just say no" message is effective for all adolescents. On a proactive level, G-CAPP hopes to institutionalize through policy the models that have proven effective in the field.

The problem with the "just say no" message isn't the "no" it's the "just." This is not a simple issue and our polling shows that a majority of Georgians understand this. By activating that majority and amplifying its voice, G-CAPP can become a catalyst for change, the reduction of adolescent pregnancy can become more than a statistical blip, and a great service will be done for future generations.

Jane Fonda,
Founder and Chairperson