Troubling Boom in Babies

But now she tends to her 1-year-old son, Guillermo, in the brightly painted day care center, which opened about six months ago for student mothers like her. Thirteen other teen moms also use the facility in a small housing tract surrounded by fields of onions, grapes, tomatoes, cotton, peaches and citrus trees.

"It's such a small community, and there's nothing actually to do," Rodriguez said, musing on why she and so many other young girls in the Central Valley town of 12,000 become sexually active and pregnant. "Everyone knows everyone, and I guess you can say they get comfortable with each other."

The small farming towns such as Parlier, Earlimart, Porterville and Visalia that dot California's San Joaquin Valley are among the world's most productive agricultural communities.

But in these towns and more populous cities like Fresno and Madera, teenage mothers are bearing fruit of a different sort at an alarming rate.

The birthrates among teenagers in California's great rural swath are nearly double the state and national averages, and in some instances they surpass those of poor countries such as Namibia, Haiti and Cambodia, according to recent studies.

The phenomenon is emerging as a key issue in this economically fragile region, rivaling air quality and transportation as major concerns, costing taxpayers millions of dollars each year and leaving generations of families in poverty.

The region's mix of economic, demographic, cultural and geographic factors could not be better designed to result in teenage pregnancy, say experts.

Immigrant families work long hours for low wages in fields and packing houses. Young people have few recreational or work opportunities compared with their urban counterparts. An absence of rural public transportation further isolates them. Public and private social services, including birth-control programs, are underdeveloped.

The San Joaquin Valley also has the highest levels of poverty in the state, the lowest high school graduation rates and the highest rates of sexually transmitted diseases, all of which, researchers say, are linked to higher birthrates.