Overcoming odds

It was a simple Christmas portrait from a Wal-Mart photo studio. Amanda Altenburg, 18, smiled with her 2-month-old son, Trey, who was wearing too-big "Baby's First Christmas" pajamas and a hat that made his ears stick out. It was Amanda's favorite, and it was the one she thought would appear in the Summerville High School yearbook.

"I think that he should know what I did," Altenburg said of her son. "I went back to school, and I graduated."

She said she received assurances that the photo would run in one of the yearbook's special interest sections — serving as a sort of stand-in for her senior picture, which she skipped taking during a complicated pregnancy — so she ordered a copy. But when the yearbook finally arrived, the photo was nowhere to be found, left on the cutting room floor due to what Principal Roger Edwards said were space constraints. Now, Altenburg is a name without a face in that final record of adolescence. It's only one of the many challenges she faced in a harrowing year.

In at least one respect, she is a face behind the numbers. Teen pregnancy rates, which dropped consistently from 1991 to 2005 in the state, have begun to creep back upward in recent years, according to the S.C. Department of Health and Environmental Control records.

Altenburg, now 19, graduated June 7 after becoming pregnant in early 2008. She could have become another data point in South Carolina's statistics. Hers could have been counted among the 21 percent of teen pregnancies in the state that DHEC said end with abortion. She could have been one of the 60 percent of teenage mothers who the National Campaign to Prevent Teen Pregnancy says never finish high school.

But she chose not to fall into either of those categories, and the story of her senior year at Summerville High perhaps is a testament to the burdens and triumphs of girls facing similar predicaments every year.

'The scared phase'

When Altenburg thinks about the other pregnant girls from her school, she is alarmed by their naivete.

"They don't go through the scared phase," Altenburg said.

"They go through the 'I'm so excited I'm having a child,' and then they have the child and they're absolutely miserable. ... It's a large responsibility."

Altenburg had responsibility thrust upon her in February 2008, when a pregnancy test turned up positive. Emergency room doctors had run the test as a precaution before using an X-ray machine to see if she had sustained injuries in a car accident. They read the results without asking if she wanted her mother, Tami Altenburg, to leave the room. Weeping, Amanda apologized and asked if her mother was angry.

"I guess it shocked me, but I wasn't appalled about it," said Tami, 46, who was herself a teen mother. She gave birth to Amanda's older brother, Hunter, on her 18th birthday and said the shared experience helped her to lend practical help to Amanda.

The pregnancy came as a surprise, as Amanda and then-fiance Drew Telfer had been using contraceptives. It was to be the first in a long series of surprises.

Amanda felt a bout of morning sickness coming on soon after the diagnosis, and she said it did not stop for three months. She received frequent IV drips for dehydration and ultimately lost 15 pounds. Worst of all, the doctors said she was in danger of a terminated pregnancy.

"After accepting the fact that you were going to have a child, for someone to say you're highly likely to lose it, it's very hard," Amanda said.

Then she had to face her father. Jim Altenburg, 43, married Tami Altenburg after the marriage to Hunter's father ended. Amanda's mother and father now are divorced, and he lives in Wisconsin. Amanda knew his firm religious stance against premarital sex, and she said she was terrified of his response.

"The point is what's done is done," Jim remembers telling her over the phone. "Listen, I still love you. I'll be there — wish it had been different, but I'm gonna love my grandchild that's coming."

Amanda did not yet know that her son, Trey, would be born with asthma or have to fight pneumonia and a double ear infection. She did not know that maternity leave would end with her scrambling to catch up on missed school assignments. She did not anticipate splitting ways with her fiance shortly after Trey's birth. All these trials would come, but for the time, she was faced with more pressing questions.

Making choices

Amanda's friends suggested an abortion, but she quickly ruled it out.

"An abortion wasn't an option," Amanda said. "I just don't feel comfortable taking the life of an unborn child."

What about giving up the baby for adoption? Another of her friends had taken that route. But Amanda decided her emotional attachment was already too great to let the child go.

So it was settled: She would carry the pregnancy to term, and she would keep her baby.

But then there was the question of school. Amanda had done well in her classes until the pregnancy, but when she left school last September to have her child, homebound education, in which the school sent a teacher to her house with a pile of assignments every week, did not go well.

Aside from the lack of structure, there were major distractions. Amanda was a passenger in yet another car accident in which an infant car seat may have saved young Trey's life. Amanda's mother entered the ICU for a major blood clot the day after Trey was born.

Also, a faulty washing machine hookup left the Altenburgs' house flooded, kept the family computer out of service and forced Amanda to get a ride to the library every time she needed to type an assignment. Add in an emotionally taxing split with Trey's father and the expensive pediatric bills that Amanda's part-time filing job scarcely covered, and she said school seemed like a faraway concern.

"At one point, I was thinking, 'Well, school has to give,' " Amanda said. But her mother, who faced similar odds and went on to attend community college, would have none of it.

"As a child, you don't always listen to your parents when they tell you they've been through it before," Tami said.

In this case, though, Amanda apparently listened. Facing a mountain of missed assignments, she steeled her resolve to finish.

"I have to do everything in my life to make sure that my son has the best life I can give him," Amanda said. "And dropping out of school wouldn't have done that."

Life after graduation

On June 7, Amanda crossed the stage at the North Charleston Coliseum in a green cap and gown, sporting the purple and gold cords of the Latin Honor Society. She had finished, and the people who had helped her do it sat in the crowded stands.

"I was really proud of her," said Drew Telfer, Trey's father, who graduated from Summerville High School in 2007. "I mean, the whole entire time she was pregnant, we talked about her finishing."

Despite his and Amanda's relationship troubles, Telfer said he had stayed close for baby Trey's sake, offering financial help and child care when he could.

"Both of us don't believe that we should be with each other if it's just for Trey," Telfer said. His family, he added, always had stressed that becoming a father means taking responsibility, whether the relationship with the child's mother continues or not.

Amanda's mother was there, too. Amanda said she was grateful for her practical advice, drawing on personal experience with doctors' visits and school policies.

Even Amanda's father, who wrestled with personal convictions and ultimately decided to support his daughter, had made it down from Wisconsin to see her graduate.

There has been other help, too: Amanda gets food staples from the federal Women, Infants, and Children program, and Trey is on Medicaid, although Amanda said her goal is to become independent of both programs.

"I take what help I can get," Amanda said. "I want to be able to say that I can provide for my child and not ask the government for help, but for now, I need to make sure that my son can eat."

Tami Altenburg said her daughter had a stable support base both at home and at school, with teachers who encouraged her to finish.

When it comes to the big picture, trends in teen pregnancy on the state level, the experts are finding the same thing the Altenburgs know: Family input matters.

Forrest Alton, executive director of the S.C. Campaign to Prevent Teen Pregnancy, said that whether it's an honest discussion about abortion, sex and values or a support net when their children have children, parents have much more to offer than they think they do.

"Too often parents say, 'Oh, my child doesn't listen to me,' or, 'Oh, the media have such an influence,' or, 'Oh, their friends have such an influence,' and it's just not true," Alton said. "Young people tell us unequivocally they want to hear these messages from their parents."

At the Altenburg household in Summerville, the water damage from the washing machine is nearly repaired. Trey, now 8 months, returns new visitors' attention with a fixed and serious stare. His mother talks of plans: finding day care for Trey, going back to work full time, signing up for classes at Trident Technical College.

"When I found out I was pregnant, it was just like ... everything that we had planned, the whole plan got obliterated, and we had to make a new plan."