Pregnant at 15, she received a master’s at 29

In a country that claims to value the sanctity of life, it’s amazing how much scorn is still heaped upon pregnant teens who decide to keep their babies.

Neila Johnson found that out the hard way in 1994. That was the year that Detroit’s Cooley High School refused to let her run for the homecoming court because, as she said at the time, she had a 2-year-old daughter: A teen mom wouldn’t present the right image.

It was one of many humiliations she suffered while trying to raise her daughter and stay in school.

“That’s when the fight began for me,” said Johnson, now 29.

Last Saturday, Johnson defied the naysayers and graduated from the University of Michigan with a master’s degree in social work. Next month, she begins a job working with the American Civil Liberties Union of Michigan.

But her successes are still bittersweet.

“People say I should be proud because of what I’ve accomplished as a teenaged mom,” Johnson said last week. “It’s so hard to live with everyone else’s low expectations.”

Life’s lumps produce a Diamond

Teen moms face daunting odds. According to the National Campaign to Prevent Teen Pregnancy, less than one-third of pregnant teens ever finish high school, and their children face higher than average odds of low birth weight, living in poverty and faring poorly in school.

Johnson never thought she’d be part of those statistics.

“I was on the track team; I was on the homecoming court as a freshman,” she said. “It was always my dream to go away to college.”

Then, at age 15, she got pregnant, succumbing to peer pressure to have sex. She considered an abortion, but when she learned her pregnancy was further along than she’d guessed, her mother balked at signing the medical release. Her family encouraged her to keep the baby.

It was a hard labor. The umbilical cord wrapped around the baby’s neck. Johnson’s blood pressure dropped and she suffered a seizure. The baby, while born healthy, remained nameless for 12 days while Johnson fought for her life.

When she was finally strong enough to see the baby, “she was like a jewel to me,” said Johnson. “So I named her Diamond.”

Defying expectations

Johnson struggled to take control of her life again. First, she says, she suffered abuse at the hands of the hospital staff, which she claims wanted to teach her a lesson. And it didn’t end there, at her church, she was denied a scholarship — again, she said, because she was a teen mom.

Johnson said that relatives shunned her as if “I was contagious.” She said she received looks of disgust from strangers when she walked her baby at the mall.

“I remember when Diamond was about 5 months old, I had a collapse,” she said. “I wanted it to be all over.”

She credits her family with keeping her from becoming another statistic. By her senior year, she was on the honor roll and wanted to run for homecoming court again. But she was rejected.

Johnson says principal Posey Williams refused to let her run because he didn’t “believe in girls having babies out of wedlock,” she told the Free Press in 1994. Williams, who is no longer at Cooley, denied that there was a prohibition against teen mothers. But Johnson said criteria suddenly were imposed that made it difficult for a teen mom to qualify, including participation in extracurricular activities.

The denial was a life-altering event for Johnson.

“He ignited a fire in me,” she said. “My high school graduation was the most thrilling day of my life. When I went up on stage, I heard Diamond say, ‘That’s my mama!’ I looked for her, and directly in front of my family was the principal. I felt so proud.”

College a challenge

That fall, Johnson left Diamond with her sister and went to New York University with an eye toward law school. The transition was overwhelming. Not only did she feel out of place as a minority student, she was a freshman with a toddler at home.

“I almost never had anyone come to my room because it was like a shrine to Diamond,” she said. “Once, I let my friend Amy come over and she started crying. She told me that she had assumed that I was privileged like the rest of the kids at NYU. She’d only read about people like me.”

Diamond also had a hard time. “At first I missed my mom, so I just started reading a lot of books,” she said. “But I knew that she needed to go away to school to make both of our lives better.”

Johnson began volunteering to work with teen moms in Harlem, none of whom could believe that she was a teen mother, too. It was then that she began to rethink her law career and to consider social work.

In her junior year, she brought Diamond to New York to live with her. And Johnson still graduated, with honors, taking a degree in sociology.

After graduation, she started work on a master’s in social work at Columbia University. After the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks, she decided to transfer to U-M.

“In this world, too many people are ready to judge you when they don’t know your story and don’t care,” said Johnson. “If I visited Cooley, it wouldn’t be for revenge. It would be to inspire other young people — whether they’re pregnant teens or not.”

A better life

Johnson isn’t the only one who has defied odds — so has her daughter.

Diamond, whose father remains in her life, is an honor student at Royal Oak’s Jane Addams Middle School who loves math and is curious about sculpture.

“People thought because she had me, that my mother wouldn’t do more with her life,” Diamond said on the eve of her mother’s graduation. “But she’s made it.”

Maybe Johnson’s graduate degree will bring her closer to her dream of opening a safe house for teen moms. It’s time that someone realized how hard society makes it for unwed girls to choose life for their babies, and life for themselves, too.

Contact DESIREE COOPER at 313-222-6625 or dcooper@freepress.com.

Copyright © 2005 Detroit Free Press Inc.

Reprinted with permission of the Detroit Free Press Inc.