Teenage Pregnancy and Parenthood

Global Perspectives, Issues and Interventions

Helen Holgate, Roy Evans, Francis K.O. Yuen

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2006
• Topic: Social Sciences
• eBook ISBN:
  9781134280452
• Subtopic: Health Care Delivery
• Index: Social Sciences

The debate of teenage pregnancy and parenthood continues to be a topical media and political issue, and a contested policy area. Covering the controversial issues, this book contributes to the debate, filling the gap in the current market. The strong chapter selection looks at areas such as:

• education
• social policy and welfare reforms in the UK and US
• issues for young fathers
• child sex abuse
• girls with emotional and behavioural difficulties.

This is invaluable reading for those working on government strategies to reduce teen pregnancies and those working in sex education and youth care.

Chapter 1

Sexuality and young motherhood

Discourses and definitions

Helen Holgate and Roy Evans

The purpose of this chapter is to provide an overview of the ‘meaningful’ contexts within which teenage parents operate, and the power of social discourse in defining them as problematic. The following chapters take a more specific focus upon the varied and complex issues emanating from the issue of teenage pregnancy and motherhood. Initially, however, we need to note that teen pregnancy, and subsequently teenage motherhood, is often placed in the public consciousness alongside other facets of adolescent life experience such as drug and alcohol abuse, gang violence and delinquency. These are all aspects of deviant behaviour within the confusion of adolescent development that are best prevented, since they constitute a threat to the very fabric of society if allowed to flourish unchecked, as well as to the health and well-being of the young people themselves. They represent a cost to society—an actual financial cost through restitution and rehabilitation, an opportunity cost through the loss to society of economic activity and a moral cost. Our young people appear to have rejected many of the moral precepts that shaped destinies and formed the principled basis of interpersonal relationships in past generations.

Research into each of these different aspects of adolescent deviance often implicates disadvantageous socio-economic, class-based and familial structural factors in the early experience of many young people at risk, suggesting that deviance is a reaction to exclusion, actual or felt, an attempt to deny social invisibility and to leave a footprint that others can see. Programmes of preventative education are often less effective than hoped, particularly when delivered in schools, as their ability to change some aspect of the psychosocial environment of the young person on an enduring basis is essentially limited. By early adolescence most young people will have acquired, or have begun to acquire, a set of attitudes and dispositions to their environment based on their actual life experiences. For many growing up in urban environments, their behaviours are normalised within the harshness of life as they experience it. Poverty has to be seen within the overall dynamic of lack of opportunity, inappropriate role models and lack of a sense of future. Exclusion is less a positive act than an endemic socialised experience. Exclusion relates to lack of personal power and lack of choice, real or felt, an inability to shape one’s future within the status quo. Many pregnant teenagers who go on to become teen mothers emerge from such disadvantaged backgrounds. Their reasons for becoming pregnant are sometimes complex, but despite this they are frequently demonised by the media as deliberate queue jumpers seeking social housing. For government the issues are not so easily accounted for or dismissed. How should a modern social democracy respond to the causes and effects of teenage pregnancy? To treat it is as a subject to be solved by education is clearly indefensible; the fact that the level of teenage pregnancy in the UK is the highest in Europe is clearly a matter for policy development and professional action. Political objectives are ultimately serviced through professional agencies whose particular ideologies and practices influence the outcomes in human terms for better or worse. The current government has set out its policy objectives for life politics, amongst which a reduction in the number of young mothers is a key element. This is unsurprising since successive political parties in the UK have defined it as a social problem (Griffin 1993) since the 1980s.

The Third Way is constituted as the value base for the New Labour, and as such the discourse features in its policies, documents and speeches (Fairclough 2000). It is defined as a new politic that:

stands for a modernised social democracy, passionate in its commitment to social justice and the goals of the centre-left, but flexible, innovative and forward looking in the means to achieve them. It is founded on the values which have guided progressive politics for more than a century— democracy, liberty, justice, mutual obligation and internationalism.

(Blair 1998)

The Third Way pays particular attention to family life, crime and the breakdown of the family and is concerned to engage with ‘life politics’, which are about:

how we should respond to a world in which tradition and custom are losing their hold over our lives, and where science and technology have altered so much of what used to be ‘nature’.

(Giddens 2000:40)

Within the ideological rationale of the Third Way is a new discourse, specific to New Labour, that of social exclusion, which has been described as becoming increasingly detached from the concepts of poverty and inequality (Gillies 2005). The reduction of social exclusion is one of the key priorities in New Labour policy, constituting a target for the Social Exclusion Unit (SEU) and embodied within policies, including the New Deal welfare-to-work policy (Department for Work and Pensions 2005) and Bridging the Gap (Social Exclusion Unit 1999a), which aims to get young people not in education, employment or training into work. The SEU was established in 1997 as a unit within the Cabinet Office. Its role is summarised thus:

The work of the SEU includes specific projects to tackle specific issues and wide ranging projects to assess past politic and ideas for future trends.

(Social Exclusion Unit 2004)

The remit of the SEU includes unemployment, discrimination, poor skills, low income, ill health, family breakdown and teenage pregnancy. In including young pregnancy the government has for the first time developed a specific strategy for ‘tackling’ the issue. This inclusion is centralised in the ‘cross-government’ (Teenage Pregnancy Unit 2005) Teenage Pregnancy Unit (located within the Department of Education and Skills), whose role is the implementation of the Teenage Pregnancy Strategy. The strategy centres on two aims (Social Exclusion Unit 1999b:6):

• reducing the rate of teenage conceptions, with the specific aim of halving the rate of conceptions among under-18s by 2010;
• getting more teenage parents into education, training or employment, to reduce their risk of long-term social exclusion.

Underpinning these goals lies a set of contested assumptions: first, that young pregnancy represents a problem; second, that the problem has reached such an extent that rates should be reduced (Phoenix 1991a; Birch 1996; Luker 1996; Davies et al. 2001); and, third, that the solution to the problem of young parents being at risk of social exclusion lies in education, training and, ultimately, employment (Kidger 2004). At this stage it is useful to briefly consider the statistical evidence informing the above policy aims.

The Social Exclusion Unit (1999b: 12) cites the following statistical data as the basis for evidence of a problem:

In England, there are nearly 90,000 conceptions a year to teenagers; around 7,700 to girls under 16 and 2,200 to girls aged 14 or under. Roughly three-fifths of conceptions—56,000—result in live births…within Western Europe, the UK now stands out as having the highest rate of teenage births.

Despite the picture presented in this statement it is valuable to recognise that ‘teenagers today are far less likely to have a baby than was the case 20 years ago’ (Corlyon and McGuire 1997:1). In the 1970s the figure fluctuated around 50 births per 1,000 teenagers in England and Wales. During the 1980s there was a rise in the proportion of teenage women becoming pregnant, but by the late 1990s the figure had decreased to less than 30 births per 1,000 (Singh and Darroch 2000). These statistics demonstrate a chronological mismatch between the highest rates of teenage pregnancy and parenthood and the creation of the Teenage Pregnancy Unit (Arai 2003a). Equally, the aim of reducing rates of young pregnancy and parenthood coincides with a time of concern that the ratio of young to elderly people is in decline (the number of children aged under 16 in the UK fell by 18 per cent between 1971 and 2002 whilst in the same period there was a 27 per cent increase in the number of people age over 65; Summerfield and Babb 2004).

The latest progress reports from the Teenage Pregnancy Unit (2004) state that all 30 points of the Teenage Pregnancy Strategy Action Plan are being implemented. According to the report’s key points, data for 2002 show that in England conception rates among the under-18s have fallen by 8.6 per cent since 1998, with an additional decrease of 11.2 per cent in conception rates for the under-16s in the period 1998–2001. Data for 1997–99 show that 29.7 per cent of young parents were in education, training or work in 2002–04, compared with 23.1 per cent in 1997–99.

Is young teenage pregnancy and motherhood a problem?

The issue of young pregnancy and parenthood is constructed as problematic to the extent that 15 of the 28 countries that form the membership of the Organization for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) are trying to reduce their rates (United Nations Children’s Fund 2001). Policy-makers in the UK have cited evidence which suggests that the UK has the highest rate of teenage births in Western Europe, with ‘rates twice as high as in Germany, three times as high as in France and six times as high as in the Netherlands’ (Social Exclusion Unit 1999b). According to current data compiled by Eurostat, the Statistical Office of the European Union, during the period 2002–03, live births in women under the age of 19 years in Germany totalled 26,522, compared with 3,324 in the Netherlands and a provisional figure in the UK of 49,633 (Eurostat 2005). No data were available for France. The countries with the lowest rates of young pregnancy and parenthood are Korea, Japan, Switzerland, the Netherlands and Sweden, each of which experiences teen birth rates of less than 7 per 1,000 women (United Nations Children’s Fund 2001).

The UK in the twentieth century witnessed an overall downward trend in fertility rates, from 115 live births per 1,000 women aged 15–44 years at the beginning of the century to 57 per 1,000 women in the same age group by the end of the century. In the interim period there were peaks in the birth rate following the world wars and in the 1960s. In 2004 there was an upturn in birth rates; young women in the under-20 age group accounted for 45,094 out of a total 639,721 births in England and Wales, or 7.04 per cent.

Despite the focus given to rates of young pregnancy and parenthood, a close reading of the statistics reveals a decline in the teenage birth rates in most areas of the industrialised world, including the UK, in the last 25 years. Even against a background of reducing birth rates generally, the decline is often much greater among the younger age groups. However, this picture has not deterred New Labour from comparing UK rates unfavourably with those of other European countries as justification for its goal of reducing rates of young pregnancy and parenthood. Arai (2003b) has criticised this approach as inappropriate because inter-country comparisons ignore variations in conception and abortion rates. The point that the rate of teenage abortion in the UK also needs to be taken into account is made by Lee et al. (2004), whose methodological approach uses high-level statistical analyses of complex datasets, in conjunction with qualitative analyses of individual accounts of experiences, to examine the rationale employed by some young women to continue with a pregnancy, and by others to abort, and the factors that influence their decisions. They concluded that decision-making appears to be affected by a number of factors, including the views of family and community and the availability of services, with the key factor being social deprivation, which is reflected by data demonstrating that among under-18-year-olds the highest rates of conceptions and lowest rates of terminations are in the more deprived areas in the UK. A further point demonstrated by Arai (2003b) is that in comparing rates of young pregnancy and parenting between countries it is assumed that the experience of other countries can be compared with that of Britain, which is unrealistic on the grounds that the UK is demographically and socio-economically distinct, rendering comparison impossible. Similarly, religious and cultural attitudes within countries are varied; thus Korea’s low rate of young pregnancy and parenthood has been partly attributed to its strong social disapproval of premarital sex, which places young pregnant women in considerable financial and social difficulty (United Nations Children’s Fund 2001).

This section has provided some statistical context to the issue of young pregnancy and parenthood and a discussion of some of the tensions arising from the use of statistics to justify the problematisation of the issue. It is now worth considering related tensions in the defining of ‘young’ as well as in the discourses surrounding ‘mothering’ specifically.

What is a young mother?

There are a number of inconsistencies in the terminology used to describe a young mother (Dennison and Coleman 1998). Among the terms used are ‘young mother’ (Phoenix 1991a; Levine et al. 2001), ‘adolescent mother’ (Jorgensen 1993; Samuels et al. 1994; Birch 1997), ‘children who have children’ (Family Planning Association 1994), ‘schoolgirl mother’ (Horwitz et al. 1991; Dawson 1997) as well as ‘teenage mother’ (Sharpe 1987; Hudson and Ineichen 1991; SmithBattle 1995; Allen and Bourke-Dowling 1998). The abundance of terms contributes to the lack of clarity and general confusion surrounding the issue. Language is important—it reflects social processes and structures (Wodak 1996)—thus the choice of labelling terminology is significant to the way in which the described issue, person or people comes to be interpreted. ‘Adolescent’, ‘teenage’ and ‘schoolgirl’ mother more clearly suggest an age-related and developmentally related interpretation, whilst ‘young’ mother is more open to interpretation, allowing for an appreciation of the differentiation in all aspects of maturity.

Studies employing the listed definitions have incorporated research with young mothers between the ages of 13 and 24. The upper parameter is clearly outside the definition of teenager or schoolgirl. It is open to debate whether it also equates with the concept of a young or adolescent mother, or even post-adolescent mother, as some theorists would have it.

Societal definitions of age

The differences discussed above reflect a generalised lack of consistency regarding agerelated terminology and definitions. There is no consistent or universal definition of a young person in the UK infrastructural institutions such as the education, legal, health and welfare systems, so it remains unclear by which criteria an age construct is measured in a given situation. Fundamental to the issue of teenage pregnancy is the assumption that there is such a phenomenon as ‘teenage’ (Macleod 2003).

In 1970, the age of majority (the age at which a person is eligible to vote in an election) was reduced from 21 to 18. At this age a person can also legally buy alcohol, gamble in a licensed betting shop, be tried in an adult court, and marry and leave home without parental consent.

At 16 a person can (amongst others) legally leave full-time education, enter full-time employment, have sexual intercourse, smoke tobacco, pay tax and National Insurance and with parental consent marry and leave home (Electoral Commission 2003).

An area of particular relevance to this theme is the age of consent. The Criminal Law Amendment Act 1855 increased the age of consent (defined as the age at which a person can give consent to sexual intercourse) for heterosexuals from 13 to 16, where it remains. In 2001 the age of consent for homosexuals was brought into line with this, being reduced from 21 (Stonewall 2004). It is a contradiction that, although people under 16 are not legally able to have sex, the age of consent does not preclude them obtaining contraception. This can be accessed confidentially as, within medical guidelines, a young person can consent to medical treatment if he or she is deemed sufficiently mature to fully understand the implications of a proposed treatment (Brook Advisory Service 2005).

This brief synopsis of the UK age parameters demonstrates the inconsistencies within which young people, and professionals working with them, must operate. These inconsistencies are reflected within the literature on young pregnancy and motherhood that is described in the preceding section as being unclear and unclearly defined.

Discourses of adolescence

Adolescent sexuality lies within the overarching framework of theories of adolescence. This section considers the construction of adolescence as a distinct age-related period.

The definitive terms described, i.e. teenage mother, adolescent mother and schoolgirl mother, locate a young mother as a woman who becomes a mother during the period between childhood and adulthood. This time has come to be known as ‘adolescence’. The construction of a period of time called adolescence is of recent development (Furstenberg 2000). The way in which it is defined is culturally and historically specific. For example, adolescence in Western nations relates to a progression through the e...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Contributors
• Acknowledgements
• Introduction
• Chapter 1: Sexuality and Young Motherhood
• Chapter 2: Explaining Early Marriage in the Hmong American Community
• Chapter 3: Hacia un Futuro Más Seguro
• Chapter 4: In a Class of their Own?
• Chapter 5: Teenage Pregnancy and Social Exclusion
• Chapter 6: Sexual Health and Unwanted Pregnancy among Adolescents
• Chapter 7: Sisters Doing It for Themselves
• Chapter 8: Controversial Issues Surrounding Teen Pregnancy
• Chapter 9: Being There
• Chapter 10: Deconstructing Patriarchy and Masculinity with Teen Fathers
• Chapter 11: Teen Pregnancy and Girl Students with Emotional and Behavioral Difficulties