The drawstrings of Kourtlan’s saffron fleece hoodie were sopping wet and tattered. She had been craving the smell and taste of laundry detergent for months, and the only way to satisfy her peculiar taste palate was to pour an excessive amount of powdered detergent on all her clothes and then cut the wash cycle in half. It “made for a nice mid-morning snack.”
Kourtlan popped a drawstring in her mouth as she waddled slowly down the corridor. The familiar taste of soap and lavender made her feel calm as she approached her third period class.
She reached inside the kangaroo pocket of her hoodie and gingerly felt for the folded slip of paper from the attendance office: Please excuse Kourtlan Feather from her tardiness, it read. She had a doctors appointment and will make up any uncompleted assignments.
Kourtlan firmly grasped the doorknob to her classroom and paused. She could see her classmates through the picture window of the door, staring through their teacher as he gestured animatedly at the periodic table of elements on the ancient projector screen. She slowly turned the doorknob and cringed as the door made a creaking noise, snapping all of the students out of their pre-lunch coma. Like a rehearsed horror movie, the entire class turned to stare at Kourtlan.
Then at her belly.
Kourtlan hastily handed her excuse to the teacher, who whispered an encouraging “Don’t worry. We’re just reviewing today.” She shuffled to her desk and slid down in her seat: an obscurely tight squeeze.
“Please clear your desks and find something to write with,” the teacher announced to the class.
Kourtlan reached into her messenger bag and fished around for a pencil. She pulled out a fistful of dryer sheets instead.
***
When Kourtlan Feather, a 16-year-old junior at Altoona Area High School, missed her period in June 2009, she panicked. “Those First-Response commercials say it best: ‘Your body knows before you do,'” said Kourtlan, referring to the brand name pregnancy test. Scrounging nickels and dimes from couch cushions, Feather gathered enough money to purchase a pregnancy test at the Family Dollar store near her house.
After following the instructions printed on the box, Feather glanced back and forth between the tiny indicator screen on the pregnancy test and her cell phone. Her boyfriend hadn’t yet answered her “I need 2 talk 2 u” plea, and she was growing increasingly tense.
Kourtlan’s curly brown hair was twisted into a messy topknot on her head, her olive skin was clammy and blotchy and her normally piercing green eyes were rimmed with tears. She sunk down onto the closed toilet seat with a shaky sigh and waited “for what seemed like eternity.”
According to Guttmacher Institute, a nonprofit organization that focuses on reproductive health and rights, almost 750,000 U.S. girls age 15 to 19 become pregnant each year.
Kourtlan squeezed her eyes shut as a pale pink plus sign materialized on the girth of the pregnancy test. “I knew before I took the test,” Kourtlan said. “I took two more [tests] after that, but I knew.”
Kourtlan consulted a physician two weeks later.
***
“Please fill out these forms,” were the clipped words of the receptionist as she clapped a packet of forms on the counter. Kourtlan tenderly collected the paperwork and ambled back to her seat in the waiting room of Allegheny Reproductive Health Center, an abortion clinic in Pittsburgh, Pa.
An unplanned pregnancy brings several options to the table, and Kourtlan knew she needed to consider hers. “Did I want to keep the baby and raise him?” Kourtlan recalled asking herself. “What if I can’t financially support him? Should I put him up for adoption?”
Abortion, a surgical or medical procedure performed by a licensed physician that terminates the pregnancy, is another option.
Kourtlan began saving up money in order to get the procedure done. “I went to the beach one weekend with my friend, but I wouldn’t spend any money,” she said. At the abortion clinic where Kourtlan had her blood work taken, abortions can cost anywhere between $400 and $2,000; it all depends on how far along the pregnancy is: from five to 19 weeks. After this 14-week time window, the surgery is deemed too risky to perform.
Kourtlan asked her grandma, who she refers to as “Nan,” to accompany her for the appointment. This initial appointment, in which paperwork is filled out and blood tests are done, is mandatory to patients in Pennsylvania.
“We give each patient up to 24 hours to consider their decision to abort the baby,” said the patient services manager of the clinic.
Those 24 hours ended up being a saving grace; Kourtlan decided she couldn’t go through with the procedure. “My nan is very religious,” she said, calling her grandma her best friend. “I knew she would never be able to look at me the same way again. I just couldn’t do it.”
***
Kourtlan was three months into her pregnancy and two weeks into her junior year of high school. With a protruding belly that was barely concealed beneath her peasant top, Kourtlan sat perched on the stairs outside her high school waiting for the warning bell to ring.
In an impulsive decision brought on by a bout of guilt, Kourtlan pulled out her cell phone and began furiously tapping her thumbs against the keyboard, explaining everything to her dad in less than the 160-character limit. She hit “send” and simultaneously breathed a sigh of relief as she reread the text:
I’m pregnant. I’m due March 17. Please don’t tell mom. I want to tell her myself.
Then she turned her phone off and walked into school.
Kourtlan was pulled out of class later that morning by the principal; her mom was waiting for her in the main office. “My mom’s eyes,” Kourtlan paused, trying to find the words to explain her mother’s hollowed expression. “It looked like she had just walked out of the Holocaust.”
***
Kourtlan came clean to her mom about everything: from the trip to the clinic to the absent boyfriend to the morning sickness and her doubts about graduating. Her mom listened intently and insisted that home-schooling was the only option, but Kourtlan promptly refused. “I remember saying, ‘No, I’m going back. I have to go back.’ It was strange because I hated school, and I never wanted to go. Everything changed when I found out I was having a baby. I didn’t want to miss out on anything, and that included going to school.”
That evening, Kourtlan and her mom had a surprise visitor, a recruiter from the ELECT program at the high school. ELECT, which stands for Education Leading to Employment and Career Training, is a grant program funded by the Department of Education and the Department of Welfare and provides support to help pregnant teenagers graduate from high school and either seek further education or employment. Similar programs are held in school districts across the country. Directors of the program help students work on applications, schedule college visits, set up financial aid and establish childcare arrangements.
“[The recruiter] told me, ‘You don’t need to drop out,’ and she talked my mom out of having me home-schooled,” Kourtlan said.
***
It wasn’t long before students began glancing curiously at Kourtlan ‘s baby bump as she walked from class to class, something she describes as “the worst experience ever.”
“I remember how everyone found out. I was in gym class, and we were running the mile for the Presidential Fitness Test. I was told that if you run when you’re pregnant, you can get the umbilical cord wrapped around the baby’s neck,” said Kourtlan, who power-walked her laps instead. “My gym teacher kept yelling at me to run, and I finally had to say, ‘Listen, I’m three months pregnant. I can’t do this.’”
Students who worked shifts in the administration office during school hours overheard the gym teacher telling faculty about the incident. “[The students] told everyone,” Kourtlan said. “I didn’t go to school the next day.”
Lisa Dickman, co-director of ELECT for Altoona Area High School, said teenage pregnancy can be “very isolating and another challenge in and of itself.” “Teen parents become a little community and support each other. I think we all know what the perception of teen parents can be, but it’s more like a misconception,” Dickman said. “The students do deal with a lot of ‘talk’ as they’re walking from class to class.”
Kourtlan said walking to each class during the five-minute period change was a very alienating experience for her. She heard people whispering the word “slut” at her, and one jealous ex-girlfriend shoulder-checked Kourtlan with such force that her textbooks went spiraling in all directions across the hallway. “I knew I needed to be strong. I needed to be brave,” Kourtlan said. “Not just for me but for my baby.”
Dickman said it’s important that pregnant teenagers have support in the school. “Sometimes, somebody just saying, ‘You’ll get through this. We’ll make sure you graduate,’ that’s sometimes all they need,” she said.
ELECT also hosts a counterpart program called EFI for teenage fathers. EFI, which stands for Elect Fatherhood Initiative, is a program that serves to help teen fathers cope with any struggles that they might experience during and after the pregnancy.
“Obviously that program is a little smaller, because we don’t have as many teen fathers who are involved with their children,” Dickman said.
***
When Kourtlan was six months pregnant, entering the third trimester of her pregnancy, she said her boyfriend refused to talk to her. “He didn’t go to a single doctor’s appointment. He wouldn’t answer me. I went to the hospital a few times because I had false labor pains, but he didn’t go. He never even asked if [the baby] was all right,” said Kourtlan, who added that he actually showed up while she was in labor. “That was the first time I saw him in nine months.”
March 12, 2010 was a frigid day, but Kourtlan was craving frozen yogurt and sought out the local ice cream parlor for a double scoop of raspberry sherbet.
She was just finishing up her frozen treat when a jolting pain struck her lower abdomen.
“The pain was indescribable,” said Kourtlan. “It felt like a lightning bolt had hit me in the stomach.”
The cramping turned out to be false labor pains, the third instance of its kind for her, but because Kourtlan was so close to her due date, the doctor decided to keep her overnight and put her into medically-induced labor in the morning. When she woke up at 10 a.m. the next day, “everyone who mattered” in Kourtlan ‘s life was standing around her bed, each raising a one-liter bottle of soda in a fizzy toast salute.
“When I was pregnant, I was only allowed to drink water,” Kourtlan explained. “I used to be a soda pop fanatic before that.”
Because it was a school day, most of Kourtlan ‘s friends were in class when they found out she was about to go into labor. “All of them got out of school early. Some of them went to the school nurse complaining they were ‘sick’ and needed to go home. When the nurse caught on to that, a lot of them just walked out of school,” Kourtlan said.
Kourtlan said it seemed like she was only in labor for 15 minutes but credits her foggy memory to the strong epidurals she was under during that time. “Before I knew it, they were resting my baby girl in my arms. She was,” Kourtlan said, struggling to find the right words. “She was everything. She was just perfect.”
***
Kourtlan finished jotting down her customers’ orders and collected their menus. “I’ll be back in just a minute with your drinks,” she smiled before striding to the kitchen, her gleaming curls bouncing against her shoulders.
Feather adjusted the neckline of her white tanktop, which had “HOOTERS” emblazoned across the chest with a pair of owl eyes emphasizing the “O’s.” The waistband of her bright orange shorts rested flat against her hips.
“Hey, Kourtlan,” a regular customer smiled as she walked past her table. “Where’s that adorable baby girl tonight?”
“She’s with her great-nan,” Kourtlan said, returning the smile.
Rilynne looks forward to seeing her grandmother while Kourtlan works her regular weekday shifts of 4 p.m. to 1 a.m. The now two-year-old has a head full of brunette curls, which spiral outward in an explosion of toddler tresses. Her bright green eyes are always wide and alert, which Kourtlan said seems to express her curiosity for the world.
“I don’t want to work at Hooter’s my entire life, but since getting a job, every single dollar I get goes directly to Rilynne,” said Kourtlan, her voice swelling with pride when she says her daughter’s name. “Financially, I don’t have a whole lot, but I couldn’t be happier.”
According to familyfirstaid.com, a support service for parents of troubled teens, only one-third of teen mothers end up graduating from high school. Kourtlan said she’s already beaten this statistic by obtaining her high school diploma back in 2010. She hopes to also overcome the statistic that only 1.5% of teen mothers have a college degree by age 30. “I don’t have a life motto, because life comes at you so fast. I don’t have a life motto, but I have goals. I want to do something with my life,” said Kourtlan, adding that she hopes to enroll in community college in the upcoming year, where, she said, she wants to study to become a dental hygienist.
Kourtlan is no longer dating Rilynne’s father, who she said hasn’t learned to embrace the responsibilities of fatherhood like she had hoped. “I don’t have a father for my daughter,” Kourtlan said, expressing her concern for Rilynne’s well-being. “I would rather have no money at all than a daughter without a dad.”
When she was pregnant, Kourtlan received financial benefits from WIC, a federal assistance program that provides low-income pregnant women with supplemental food, health care referrals and nutrition education. She currently receives monthly EBT food stamps, which go toward grocery trips and food purchases at certain convenience stores.
“I was so spoiled all my life, and Rilynne has made me see that my money can’t go straight to Buckle,” Kourtlan said, naming her favorite brand of clothing. “She’s made me grow up so fast. Everything I do is because of her. She’s so funny, all the things she says. It amazes me that I made her. I raise her the best I can. I’m trying to give her everything the best I can.”