DALLAS — J.R. Chester got pregnant the summer before her senior year of high school. A bright student with good grades, she gave birth, graduated, and was pregnant again when she arrived at college that fall.
She was a teen mom — like her mother, her grandmother, and her great-grandmother. Her school did not teach sexual health education, and preventing pregnancy was a foreign concept. Her sons are now teenagers.
“If you don’t know your options, you don’t have any,” said Chester, now a program director for Healthy Futures of Texas, a nonprofit sexual health advocacy and education organization. “Everyone was pregnant. And it just felt like: When it happens, it happens.”
