Teenage sisters sought freedom in pregnancy, but one found confinement

[Blue_Tires]

When the Marquez sisters set out to get pregnant, Edelmira was 14 and Angela was 15.
Edelmira was the first to succeed, giving birth to a baby girl in the eighth grade. She regretted it almost immediately, and warned her sister not to get pregnant.

Angela, whose round, brown eyes and shy smile are so similar to Edelmira's they could almost be twins, stayed quiet.

"I didn't want her to know I was still trying," Angela recalls, sheepishly. "When I used to see my sister play with her baby, I was like, 'She's so cute; I want my own.' "

Shortly before her 17th birthday, Angela got her wish: a baby girl, just like Edelmira's.

Even as the teen pregnancy rate for other racial and ethnic groups has fallen substantially in the past 15 years, it remains stubbornly high among Hispanics. As many as one in four Hispanics born in the United States to immigrant parents gives birth to a child before her 20th birthday, according to a statistical analysis by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention and Child Trends, a nonpartisan research center. Only Hispanics who come to the United States as immigrants have a higher teen birth rate.

Teen parenthood often adds an extra hurdle for the offspring of Hispanic immigrants. Many are already struggling to get enough education to overcome their mostly Mexican and Central American parents' high level of poverty, limited schooling and lack of legal status.

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2009/12/10/AR2009121002346.html?hpid=newswell

[TwilightGardener]

1. Screwed-up family.