Choosing teenage pregnancy
Interesting research from the JRF today about young women with few prospects choosing to become teenage parents. You can understand it, really. Many young women growing up in deprived areas see getting pregnant as the option that demonstrates that they are adults in a world where the usual trappings of adulthood such as getting a car, moving out of home and earning a decent wage are unavailable to them; a baby provides unconditional love to young women who may never have had that before; and being a mother is a real impetus to make a go of your life, to get an education or a job, and to get your own place.
But there is a flaw in the research, one that Beverley Hughes picks up:
But Beverley Hughes, minister for children, families and young people said: “This is an unfortunate study which, on the basis of a very small and carefully selected sample, suggests that teenage pregnancy can be a positive option for some young people. We reject that view completely.
“There is overwhelming evidence that, overall, teenage parenthood leads to poorer outcomes both for teenage mothers and their children.
“Our Teenage Pregnancy Strategy focuses on preventing teenage pregnancies and since its introduction conception rates for under-18s have fallen to their lowest level in 20 years.”
The way that you access teenage parents to do research like this is through the agencies that support them (e.g. LEA specialist teenage mums’ schools, Sure Start Plus, voluntary organisations like YWCA and Barnardo’s). If these agencies are doing their jobs, then the young women have more confidence and better self-esteem as a result of that intervention, and by getting pregnant have accessed a far greater level of support than they would have when they were just any old young women growing up in a deprived area. With this greater level of support and increased motivation now they have someone to care about besides themselves, is it any wonder they feel positive about being a teenage mum? And as Beverley Hughes correctly identifies, the priority is to reduce teenage pregnancy as the long-term results are profound and expensive, whatever the immediate positive effects for individual young women and men.
I also have a problem with the discourse of planned/unplanned pregnancy in this context. Planned/unplanned assumes young women have agency, that they can choose what happens to them, that pregnancies are either accidents or overtly desired. In fact, for these young women, pregnancy will be one more in a string of things that just happens to them, over which they have little control.
[...] A Missionary Writes Of The Savages “I also have a problem with the discourse of planned/unplanned pregnancy in this context. Planned/unplanned assumes young women have agency, that they can choose what happens to them, that pregnancies are either accidents or overtly desired. In fact, for these young women, pregnancy will be one more in a string of things that just happens to them, over which they have little control.” [...]
What kind of research rejects specific cases on the grounds of some mystical “overall”?
“Our Teenage Pregnancy Strategy focuses on preventing teenage pregnancies and since its introduction conception rates for under-18s have fallen to their lowest level in 20 years.”
So you think there’s correlation. What proof of causation is there?
I agree with you Antonia that teenage pregnancies are neither planned nor unplanned, I wonder if I’m a missionary too, not that I care, I was a teenage mum though and I most certainly experienced the feelings of wanting the baby inside me that I had neither planned nor not planned, because exactly as you said, he would and did provide unconditional love. I think it was that which made me such a good mother to him.
I also think that it is our attitudes that need to change. Yes, I entirely can see that the perception, rightly or wrongly of the ‘Vicky Pollard’ stereotype portrays teenage mums as a burden on the State, but the State itself now acknowledges, as do all of our other European partners, that birthrates are too low to sustain our economies.
It appears that there are moves afoot to take steps such as making IVF more widely and freely available. If it were possible to encourage younger parents, both mums and dads to have children without it becoming just another way of depriving the country of the skills of women and of women of their careers, then this could be beneficial to the population as a whole.
The problem with teenage pregnancies is not that teenagers become pregnant and have babies, it is that they are encouraged by society as a whole, to think of themselves as rubbish.
The problem with teenage pregnancies is not teenagers becoming pregnant and having babies - it’s people having babies before thay are able to support themselves, let alone a baby.
If the country was full of 18-19 year olds finishing school, deciding that they wouldn’t benefit from university, committing to a stable, long-term relationship and having a baby, with one partner staying home to look after the baby whilst the other works to support the family, we wouldn’t be discussing a “teenage pregnancy” problem.
Babies are hard work. Simply being pregnant can be a lot of work - whoever named “morning” sickness was terribly optimistic - and once you’ve done that for 9 months, you’ve got a newborn baby who feeds almost continuously. It’s enormously more difficult for a pregnant teenager or new mother to finish her schooling than it is for her coaevals. It’s enormously more difficult to care for a baby as a single mother than as half of a couple.
Yes, babies are also incredibly rewarding, but they’ll be even more rewarding if you wait a few years so that you have a bit more security and stability.
I have been catching up on my reading recently because since finishing uni I have not done enough. The Armstrong quote reminded me of something I read the day before you posted it which made me laugh.
In discussing how policy research is received by politicians - focusing on how they can ignore research - Roy Sainsbury argues that how research is ignored can be highlighted using the Yes, Minister episode where Hacker is given research which shows that government policy is failing. Whilst Hacker starts to panic his Permanent Secretary, Sir Humphrey, informs him that a range of responses are available:
1- it’s out of date,
2- the sample on which it was based was too small,
3- the policy has changed since the research was carried out, and
4- the issues raised have already been dealt with.
Whatever response is used the result is the same: ignoring the research and taking no action.
hi,
can i put some light on what a pregnant teen feels i am 16 and am 3 and a half months pregnant im in school and have gotten many offers for college which i will enter in a year you say teen pregnacys a nither planned nor unplannned i beg to differ my husband and i have been married for a year and decided to have a child unfortunately i have had very little support from my family through this but we are doing fine my husband and i have a house jobs and are both in school we are both entering college next year because of ours gades i meaan yes its hard because when someone finds out im pregnant they assume that im some stupid teen when in fact im acctually very smart and it bothers me that so many people think that young people can’t raise a child that we dont know what we are doing but a lot of us do the problem is that many older adults will not listen to us and when tnhey do they just brush it off and dont pay attention to it but if you would like to know more ask questions on this blog and i will be happy to answer them for you