'Adolescence', Pregnancy and Abortion

Constructing a Threat of Degeneration

Catriona I. Macleod

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2010
• Print ISBN: 9780415553391
• eBook ISBN: 9781136923432
• Topic: Psychology
• Subtopic: Developmental Psychology
• Index: Psychology

Winner of the Rhodes University Vice-Chancellor's Book Award 2012!

Winner of the 2011 Distinguished Publication Award of the Association for Women in Psychology!

Why, despite evidence to the contrary, does the narrative of the negative consequences of teenage pregnancy, abortion and childbearing persist? This book argues that the negativity surrounding early reproduction is underpinned by a particular understanding of adolescence. It traces the invention of "adolescence" and the imaginary wall that the notion constructs between young people and adults. Macleod examines the entrenched status of "adolescence" within a colonialist discourse that equates development of the individual with the development of civilisation, and the consequent threat of degeneration that "adolescence" implies.

Many important issues are explored, such as the invention of teenage pregnancy and abortion as a social problem; issues of race, culture and tradition in relation to teenage pregnancy; and health service provider practices, specifically in relation to managing risk. In the final chapter, an argument is made for a shift from the signifier "teenage pregnancy" to "unwanted pregnancy".

Using data gathered from studies worldwide, this book highlights central issues in the global debate concerning teenage pregnancy. It is ideal for academics, and students of health psychology, women's studies, nursing and sociology, as well as practitioners in the fields of youth and social work, medicine and counselling.

1
SETTING THE SCENE

On 14 November 2006, Special Assignment, a weekly programme aired on the South African Broadcasting Corporation’s television Channel 3 (SABC3), was entitled Silent Cries. The programme is about teen-aged women who conceive and decide to terminate their pregnancy (which, under legislation introduced in 1996, is legal up to twelve weeks on request and thereafter under specific conditions). The following description of the programme appeared on the Special Assignment website (Special Assignment 2006):

Girls as young as 12 years are having multiple abortions—without their parents’ consent. This week a Special Assignment investigation reveals that many teenagers regard termination of pregnancy as another form of contraception and disregard the consequent dangers of HIV infection. We follow four girls as they enter clinics and prepare for their procedures. They tell us why they have opted for abortions and how they feel going through with them. While two of the girls are still in high school, the other two are university students. Out of the four girls, two are repeat cases. Since the Choice on Termination of Pregnancy Act was passed in 1996, the demand for abortions has increased. Last year about half a million pregnancies were terminated in South Africa. According to the Act, a pregnant woman who asks for an abortion cannot be turned down. 72 000 teenagers missed school last year because they were pregnant. From our investigation it would seem that many underage girls are successfully exploiting two loopholes in the Act. Firstly, they don’t need permission from their parents to get abortions, and secondly, the Act doesn’t stipulate how many abortions a woman can have in her lifetime.

(Special Assignment 2006)

The actual programme starts with the following question:

Do you know where your teenage girl is? She could be in a clinic waiting to get through her most difficult test yet, terminating her pregnancy alone and without your consent. Girls as young as 12 years are having abortions. We ask, ‘Are teenage girls confusing abortion with contraception?’

(Special Assignment and SABC)

The tone and content of the programme clearly had an effect on some viewers as evidenced in the blogs that appeared shortly after it aired. This is an example of one.

I have just finished watching Special Assignment…. I have never really formed an opinion on abortion. The main reason behind that is that as soon as I do form an opinion on it, it is my moral duty to act on it, and well, I’m lazy. What did strike me as the nurse carried out the biological waste to the dumping area, is what a waste of potential that was. And I’m not talking about the child that almost was, but more about the people that would have surrounded it.

(Time 2006)

The issues raised in this Special Assignment programme and the blog are what this book is about—young women conceiving, young women being pregnant, some young women giving birth and some young women requesting a termination of pregnancy. The manner in which these issues are spoken about, and the implications of these representations, are the central focus of the book. Readers will notice, as they proceed through the material that follows, that I have not used young women who are sexually active, or who are pregnant, or who are undergoing a termination of pregnancy as the object of study. Instead of focusing attention on the pregnant teenager herself, the concern here revolves around public representations of ‘teenage pregnancy’ and abortion and around what enables us to make the kinds of statements that are evidenced above.

For example, in the extracts above, young women are represented as ‘girls’, people who sneak away from adult supervision in order to terminate a pregnancy, who confuse contraception with abortion, who are irresponsible regarding the possibility of HIV infection, and who irresponsibly ‘exploit’ current legislation. Throughout the Special Assignment programme these young women are referred to as ‘schoolgirls’, ‘girls’, ‘youngsters’, ‘underage girls’ and ‘underage kids’. They are represented as ignorant, immature, neglectful and risk-taking. Whatever else they may be, in the eyes of the presenters of this programme, they are not adults, not capable of independent decision and not mature enough to be involved in sexual activity, to carry a pregnancy or to decide independently on a termination of pregnancy.

In addition to positioning young women in this way, the programme intimates that ‘teenage pregnancy’ and abortion are causes for social concern. The demand for abortion is increasing, it is stated, with the implication of a strain being placed on the public health system. Many young women are missing school as a result of pregnancy, which implicitly defines them as becoming educationally and possibly economically challenged. Thus, not only are these ‘girls’ responsible for their individual suffering through their immature acts, but also they are contributing to social problems. Many of these themes will emerge in the discussions that follow.

In addition to examining how young sexual and reproductive women are represented, this book is about the research and social practices that allow for particular discursive constructions. For example, in the Special Assignment programme there is the social practice of addressing an audience. The implicit audience of the programme is exactly the person who wrote the blog featured above—an adult who will form an opinion on the matter. It is addressed to adults who are concerned about the well-being of their own children and of children in general, people who would want to have a say in what teen-aged women do. The people that the programme is about— young women who are pregnant and considering an abortion—are not addressed. They are not, for one moment, considered as a possible or reasonable audience.

The approach taken in this book

The usual types of questions asked by social science researchers in the field of early reproduction are: What causes ‘teenage pregnancy’? What are the consequences of early motherhood? What are the consequences when a teenager has a termination of pregnancy? Are young women able to make decisions on their own when it comes to a termination of pregnancy? What are the best interventions to prevent pregnancy and to ameliorate the consequences of early reproduction or termination of pregnancy? All these questions focus attention on the individual teenager—examining her individual emotional, cognitive and social characteristics to explain why she gets pregnant, why she mothers in a certain way, how she makes a decision about her pregnancy, how she responds to abortion, and how best to help her.

This will not be the focus of attention in this book. Instead, I analyse how we, as academics writing in journals and books, as health professionals talking about young women who are pregnant, as journalists and TV programme directors producing written and visual text, and as lay-people writing to newspapers or on blogs, represent young women with regard to reproductive issues. In other words, this book examines public representations—the public discursive context—of early reproduction. The main questions that direct the discussions that follow are: What kinds of understandings concerning young women and reproduction do these representations promote? What kinds of practices enable particular representations? And what are the implications of these kinds of representation?

The reason for this shift (from the standard approach of focusing on young women themselves to focusing on representations about them) has to do with an understanding of the implications of these representations. In analysing the manner in which these young women are defined, measured, categorized, described and spoken about, we start to understand two things. First, we obtain insight into the context (at least the public discursive context) within which these young women experience their lives. In other words, we can begin to explore some of the social constraints and possibilities that may shape their decisions, their interactions and their reactions to a pregnancy. Second, in exploring representations of young women, sexuality, pregnancy and termination of pregnancy, we can begin to understand the ideologies that influence interventions with young people. No intervention is neutral—all are based on particular premises regarding the basic good and the basic nature of the individual. It is these kinds of issues that will be discussed in this book.

In making my argument, I draw on a number of sources of data, including journal articles, newspapers, websites and television programmes. Although these media of communication have different functions, and appeal to different (albeit overlapping) audiences, they have a number of things in common. The first is that they represent the ideas and arguments of people with a certain level of material and educational resource base, with access to, and the ability to use, current information and communication technologies. As such, they potentially produce and reproduce particular representations of reality. The second is that, as public documents, they have ‘reach’. Potentially, they may be read by a wide range of people. Third, although supposedly different in function and audience, they espouse remarkable similarity ideologies, albeit in different narrative structures.

In analysing the public discursive context of ‘teenage pregnancy’ and abortion, I am not claiming to represent, in totality, the social environment within which young people will experience their lives. The public discursive contexts represented in journal articles, websites, television and newspapers (some of which will be accessible globally and some of which will be accessible at national or local level) will interweave in complex ways with local knowledge and practices, at times being re-enforced, at times being appropriated, at times being dismissed or ignored, and at times being actively resisted by practices and interactions at the micro-social level. This kind of context is more suitably studied using ethnographic methods (for an in-depth ethnographic study in South Africa, see, for example, Mkhwanazi 2004).

The basic argument

The basic argument advanced in this book is this. Public discussions of ‘teenage pregnancy’ and abortion, for the most part, construct a threat of degeneration, in which young women are positioned as contributing, through their sexual and reproductive status, to social decline.

Underlying this assessment of young women who conceive and either bear a child or terminate the pregnancy is a discourse of ‘adolescence’ as a transitional stage, an understanding of ‘adolescence’ as a shift from childhood to adulthood. Within this discourse, vestiges of childhood remain while the characteristics of adulthood are being developed. It is this assumption of ‘adolescence’ as transition that allows for the reporters in the Special Assignment programme to call young women who have conceived ‘girls’ or ‘children’. Although these women have displayed the biological characteristics of adulthood through being able to conceive, they are assumed to be emotionally and socially immature, and therefore children.

That this discourse is not necessary (i.e. that young people need not be understood in this way) is borne out by historical and cultural variability in the ways in which young people have been constructed. ‘Adolescence’ as a category of development was invented in the West in the early part of the twentieth century, and has filtered into African understandings of young people through such means as education.

Not only is the discourse of ‘adolescence as transition’ a historical and cultural construction, but also it contains within it the seeds of its own destruction. ‘Adolescence’ is inhabited from the inside by paradoxes (child/ not child; adult/not adult) that require constant work in order to arrive at merely temporary resolution.

There are various ideologies attached to the discourse of ‘adolescence as transition’, ideologies that have important effects in terms of research and interventions with young women who are pregnant. The first ideology concerns the linkage, made by early proponents of the notion of ‘adolescence’, between the transition of the person from childhood to adulthood and the transition of humankind from primitiveness to civilization. Although these early conceptions of ‘adolescence’ are no longer taken seriously, the threat of degeneration that primitive people posed to civilization continues to haunt our understandings of ‘adolescence’. The less developed, in the form of young people, are depicted as posing a threat of degeneration to the more developed, in the form of adults, through their careless and risk-taking behaviour—through engaging in sex, through not taking contraceptive precautions, through requiring additional health and psychological care during pregnancy or during and after a termination of pregnancy, through engaging in inadequate mothering practices and producing the next generation of problematic youth, and through relying on welfare and not being economically active.

In the same way as colonialists created a firm distinction between primitive people and civilized people, current theorists understand adolescence as clearly distinct from adulthood. The second ideology attached to the ‘adolescence as transition’ discourse, thus, is the construction of an ‘imaginary wall’ between teen-aged people and adults. This imaginary wall means that young people are treated as a category separate from adults. The similarities in trends among adults and among teen-aged people in a particular social milieu are de-emphasized, and ‘teenagers’ are investigated and treated as a separable class of people.

The third ideology revolves around the meaning of the transition to adulthood. This transition is no longer one that is socially defined through a range of rituals or rites of passage, but rather an individually based achievement as the ‘teenager’ progresses through developing the requisite cognitive, emotional and behavioural characteristics of adulthood. There are two implications to this ideology. This first is that the transition, rather than being of short duration as would be the case in social rituals marking the transition to adulthood, is depicted as a drawn out one of anything up to eight years. The second is that, because the transition is an individual achievement, the chances of the process being derailed, for problems to emerge, are high.

The ‘adolescence as transition’ discourse and the associated ideologies underpin our ways of talking about, our social practices regarding, and interventions with young people who are sexually active and/or pregnant. They form the bedrock of investigative practices with regard to the consequences of ‘teenage pregnancy’ and of abortion among young women. They are the mainstay of interventions with young people regarding sex and reproduction. And they feed into an othering process that marks black and minority group ‘teenagers’ as particularly problematic in the social problem of ‘teenage pregnancy’ and abortion.

Theoretical foundations

The kind of approach I take in this book is broadly referred to as social constructionism. Social constructionism is quite a diverse and debated field. However, there are some commonalities that I shall briefly summarize here (a useful introduction to the field for those wishing to read further is provided by Burr 2003). In the first place, social constructionism is about questioning the inevitability or necessity of understanding things in particular ways. It points out that human characteristics and interactions are historically and socially variable, that ways of being differ considerably according to time and place. In other words, our knowledge of the world, the way we behave and the manner in which we talk about things are socially and historically constructed. In this book I shall discuss how, first, ‘adolescence’, and second, ‘teenage pregnancy’ were ‘invented’ at particular historical times. I shall also discuss the social variability of the understanding of ‘teen-age’.

Second, from this perspective, knowledge is constructed in social interactions between people. In other words, social action and knowledge are intricately interwoven. Social interaction and action is, of course, not restricted to face-to-face interaction. It may take a variety of forms, including communication through journal articles, textbooks, television, the internet and newspapers, these being the main sources of data included in this book.

Third, social constructionism is critical of what is referred to as ‘taken-for-granted’ knowledge. It does not accept common wisdom as truth, but questions the assumptions that are made in statements of truth. In particular, it asks how these assumptions may serve the interests of specific dominant groups. In other words, it is interested in the power relations that exist between peopl...

Table of contents

• WOMEN AND PSYCHOLOGY
• CONTENTS
• ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
• ABBREVIATIONS
• 1 SETTING THE SCENE
• 2 ADOLESCENCE AS TRANSITION?
• 3 CONUNDRUMS
• 4 CONSTRUCTING A THREAT OF DEGENERATION
• 5 YOUNG WOMEN AND LEGALIZED ABORTION
• 6 OTHERING
• 7 MANAGING THE THREAT OF DEGENERATION
• 8 FROM ‘TEENAGE PREGNANCY’ TO UNWANTED PREGNANCY
• REFERENCES
• INDEX