BEFORE WE HAD A BABY ..."

ANTONIA AND EMILIO

Antonia Rodriguez and her boyfriend Emilio, a young Puerto Rican couple, live in Philadelphia's West Kensington section, colloquially dubbed "the Badlands" because of all the drug activity and violence there. Both sides of their block are lined with small, unadorned row homes, some well over a hundred years old. A century and a half ago, this densely populated neighborhood was home to hundreds of small manufacturing concerns. Though few of these businesses exist today, the America Street Enterprise Zone, one of four such zones within Philadelphia, has revived some of the area's industrial vigor. Antonia and Emilio's immediate neighborhood is a mix of industrial strips, residential blocks, and narrow thoroughfares choked with small businesses, including an astonishing number of storefronts offering auto repair, auto parts, and auto detailing—trades that provide an economic niche for Philadelphia's Puerto Rican men.

Twenty-year-old Antonia is slight, with shoulder-length brown hair, large brown eyes, and a warm, friendly manner. She invites us in through the enclosed porch, and as we move through the living room to the kitchen, she proudly points to renovations that she and Emilio have made to the tiny row home since they bought it five years ago, when the median price of a home in the neighborhood was about $5,000. After we settle around the table in her newly remodeled kitchen, Antonia tells us she is the youngest of three children from her mother's first marriage and the black sheep of her Catholic family. Antonia's older brother and sister both graduated from high school and have stable jobs, one in the military and one at a mortgage company. Her sister also has a child, but she is married to the father. Antonia describes her sister as her "very best role model."

Unlike her siblings, Antonia became a parent very young—at fourteen—and left high school at fifteen. She's been unemployed and on welfare ever since, except for a brief stint behind the counter at McDonald's. Yet Antonia sees herself as bright and ambitious and believes she will go somewhere. She is sorry she didn't graduate from high school with her peers and "march down that aisle, have all those memories." She also regrets that the pregnancy prompted Emilio, whom she describes as very smart, to drop out just one month shy of graduation so that he could work full time and support his new family.

Antonia met Emilio when she was eleven and he was sixteen, about to enter his sophomore year at Edison High. "I always liked him," Antonia recalls. "I thought he was handsome. But he never paid no mind to me because I was young." She soon found out that his aunt, whom he often visited, lived next door to her own family, so Antonia spent much of the summer between the sixth and seventh grade camped out on her front stoop hoping to capture his attention. "I always told [his aunt], 'Tell him to just stop by to say hi. I'm not gonna bite him.'"

Two summers after she developed her crush, Emilio "walked by, he stopped, and we started talking ever since." In Philadelphia's poorest neighborhoods, "talking" is a handy euphemism for anything from casual flirting to sex. Antonia's problems at home and the frequent angry confrontations with her mother, whom she describes as verbally abusive, took her relationship with Emilio to the next level with breathtaking swiftness. When Antonia's mother evicted her at age fourteen, Emilio convinced his mother to let Antonia live with them. Soon after moving in, Antonia started "feeling kind of sick and hungry." Since they were not using any form of birth control, she immediately thought she knew the cause. "I said, 'Oh my God, I think I'm pregnant.'" After a positive home pregnancy test, Antonia and an older cousin did what many other low-income young women in her position do: they quickly made a furtive trip to Planned Parenthood to confirm the results. When the test "came out positive," Antonia was "happy, but then again I was scared because I was only—what?—fourteen years old."

Despite their youth, Antonia insists she and Emilio had already planned to have children before she got pregnant, but had agreed to wait a year or two so both could get further in school. In the half-year before the child was conceived, Antonia says she and Emilio spent hours imagining, "If in the future we have kids ... I wonder who he'll look like. Yeah that'll be great ..." Yet neither anticipated that the first pregnancy would occur less than six months into their relationship. The pair nonetheless dealt with the situation in what they deemed the only responsible way: "I didn't think I was gonna have a child at [such] an early age, but I faced it. We faced reality, and we moved on." Emilio faced it by looking for an apartment where they could set up housekeeping on their own. Shortly thereafter, he dropped out of school and began working two jobs to finance the move—a weekend job at Checkers, a local fast-food joint, and a weekday job as a mechanic in his uncle's garage.

* * *

Pregnant by fourteen, a high school dropout at fifteen, and already a mother performing all the tasks of a wife—just when other girls her age are merely hoping to get a learner's permit to drive a car—Antonia is no neighborhood success story. But in poor neighborhoods like West Kensington, where Antonia has lived all her life, the haphazard way she and Emilio embarked upon family life is hardly unusual. Across the city of Philadelphia, more than six out of ten births are now outside of marriage, many to couples whose circumstances are no better than Antonia and Emilio's. And though Antonia may have been younger than most single mothers when she had her first child, nearly half of all first nonmarital births are to teens.

What forces compel childbearing among the poor at a time in the life course when most of their affluent peers probably worry about whom to invite to the prom? To answer this question, we share parts of the hundreds of in-depth conversations held on front stoops and in the kitchens of these bleak urban neighborhoods. The stories of those we spoke with offer an intimate look into the private moments of courtship, as well as the drama of how relationships unfold during the often tumultuous experience of pregnancy and childbirth. Women's voices tell the stories; the perspectives of the men who father their children are not heard. But as you will see, these women have their own theories of why the men in their lives behave as they do.

"I WANNA HAVE A BABY BY YOU."

Like Antonia Rodriguez, young women who come of age in poor communities like West Kensington usually meet the men who father their children in their neighborhoods:...