She has a 4.0 average at Heritage Academy, the small private Christian school she attends; played on the soccer team; and served as president of the student council. But when her fellow seniors don blue caps and gowns at graduation early next month, Ms. Runkles, 18, will not be among them.
The reason? She is pregnant.
The decision by school officials to bar Ms. Runkles from “walking” at graduation — and to remove her from her student council position — would have remained private, but for her family’s decision to seek help from Students for Life. The anti-abortion group, which took her to a recent rally in Washington, argues that she should be lauded, not punished, for her decision to keep her baby.
David Hobbs, the administrator at Heritage Academy, a nondenominational independent school in Hagerstown, Md., where students take daily Bible classes, declined to discuss Ms. Runkles. In a written statement issued on behalf of the school’s board of directors, he said she would earn a diploma, and called her pregnancy “an internal issue about which much prayer and discussion has taken place.”
In 2009, the National Association of Evangelicals, drawing on figures from the National Campaign to Prevent Teen and Unplanned Pregnancy, reported that 80 percent of young evangelicals engaged in premarital sex. A spokeswoman for the evangelical group said its own research, however, suggested that the figure was much lower.
Ms. Runkles, who considers herself “a practicing born-again Christian,” expects to raise her baby, a boy, with the help of her parents, and keeps a framed ultrasound picture on her night stand at her family’s home here in rural Boonsboro, a small town of about 3,500 people not far from Antietam, the Civil War battlefield.
She calls the child “a blessing,” but declined to discuss the baby’s father, except to say that they do not plan to marry, and that he does not attend Heritage Academy.
