Elaine Bartolome, 17, stands beside her boyfriend, Mark Smith. Together the couple tells Bartolome’s mother and brother and Smith’s family she is pregnant. After missing her period, Bartolome, a usually cheery and optimistic petite Filipino girl, had gone the day before to the Daly City Youth Health Clinic to make sure she was pregnant.

Like the fog outside, disappointment rolls in and falls heavy over their heads. Smith’s father and sister both break into tears. Bartolome’s brother tells her it’s her decision if she doesn’t want to keep the baby, while Bartolome and Smith’s mother try to work through the reality of the situation.

Who will care for the baby while their own children finish school? How will they get by with a baby?

But instead of the calmness, Bartolome’s mother displayed at her boyfriend’s house, at home, it is another story.

"Mark’s family is right", her mother yells at her, insisting that she must do whatever her boyfriend’s family feels is the best plan.

“All I wanted was my mom’s hug and I wanted her to understand all of the emotions I was going through,” Bartolome says. “I really needed someone to just be there for me instead of yelling at me and telling me his [Smith’s] family was right and that we have to do what their plan for me and the baby was.”

Later that night, overwhelmed, confused and scared, the reality that Bartolome was going to have a baby at her age hadn’t quite set in. She picks up a laundry basket full of clothes and sneaks out her window. Seeking comfort and support, she turns to her sister, who is able to emotionally and financially support her until she can get a job and her own place to live.

Bartolome doesn’t talk to her mother throughout her whole pregnancy.

Now at 19, Bartolome wants to prevent other teens from going through similar situations, even though she decided to keep her little bot, A.J.

“Teen parents aren’t stable enough to take care of their own kids,” Bartolome says. “It sucks for the kids. If you have a baby when you’re older, you can see the big picture.”

Bartolome is an active member of the Teen Pregnancy Prevention Coalition (TPPC) in San Mateo County. By sharing her story with younger high school students, Bartolome may be able to prevent one less teen from becoming a parent.

The Teen Pregnancy Prevention Coalition provides comprehensive science-based education programs to youth and adults. The Coalition focuses its work in Southern San Mateo County, the area where teen pregnancy rates are the highest in the country. TPPC tries to help teens make healthy choices to reduce the rates of teen pregnancy and STD/HIV in the community.

TPPC was created by a group of teachers, health educators and nurses in 1988 as a result of an unexpected need to provide a way for a pregnant 8th-grade student to finish school. The Coalition's executive director, Valerie Brown, says the community had never dealt with such a young girl being pregnant and the group came together to address the issue.

“The direction it went in was prevention,” Brown says.

The Coalition is now a partnership of educators, community residents and health and human service providers. One of the Coalition’s programs, Teen Talk, is an eight to ten hour comprehensive curriculum taught by a health educator in 8 to 12th grade science classrooms. The health educator takes over the classroom for that time and deals with everything from the basics, like how the body works, to birth control methods and even communication and refusal skills.

The last session is where Bartolome comes in. The Coalition brings in pregnant teens and teen parents into the classroom for their most popular part of the program, the Teen Parent Panel. The panelists are trained and paid a small stipend for their presentations. Brown says they found having teens talk directly to young people about their challenges and experiences as a teen mother or parent is very effective.

“They’re hearing this from people their own age versus teachers,” Brown says.

Surveys from students who’ve seen the panel found that 88 percent of them are more likely to use birth control if they choose to have sex and 100 percent say they are more likely to wait to have sex after hearing first hand accounts about the realities of teen parenthood.

A 17- year-old male from Hillcrest High School comments, “I am glad the Teen Parent Panel came to talk to us. After Ernesto [teen dad] spoke, it made me think twice about using condoms more."

Beyond self-reports, according to the San Mateo County Health Department, in 1997 the total of teen births in San Mateo County was 441. Dropping steadily every year, the total of teen births in 2004 was 280.

Like most of the other teen speakers, Bartolome was recruited for the panel while she was finishing up at Baden High School’s school age mother’s program in South San Francisco.

“I wasn’t sure if I wanted to do it or not,” Bartolome says. “But I really enjoyed it because they [the students] were really interested. I didn’t think they’d be that interested.”

Even though Bartolome says the students ask for baby pictures, not every question is easy.

One of the students raises his hand and asks Bartolome if she regrets anything that happened. She thinks the typical answer should automatically be no, but she would like to do everything over again and enjoy her senior year of high school.

“I could have gone to prom,” Bartolome says, “but I do love my son. It was a hard question for me, but I thought about all the blessings my son brought to my life and the only thing I would regret is not being conscious about birth control. Although I don’t regret my decisions, I definitely don’t recommend it to any teenager.”