Teen Pregnancy

Introduction

Teenage pregnancy was, in fact, more common in the United States before 1950 than it is today. Though teen pregnancy in the United States has decreased since 1950, with a sharp decline since the 1990s, it has been increasingly defined as a social problem, with lawmakers and citizens convinced that something needs to be done to reduce the number of children born to teenagers and unmarried women. In many societies around the world, marriage is a primary measure of whether a woman is “ready” to have a child (Luker, 83).

In societies in which the average age of marriage is younger, teenage pregnancy is not seen as a social problem, since most pregnant teenagers are married. In the United States, people now delay marriage well beyond the teenage years. Thus, what is considered an acceptable age for pregnancy has continued to rise. Also fueling the concern is the association between teenage pregnancy and poor women of color. African Americans and Latinas have higher rates of teenage pregnancy; they are also more likely than white women to contend with racism, poverty, and the stigma attached to teenage pregnancy. Despite these social inequalities, individual explanations and remedies for this problem predominate political discourse. Structural understandings and solutions to these racial and class disparities receive much less attention (Stoiber, 45).

Social Policy and Teenage Pregnancy

Welfare Policy

According to 1996 welfare reform, teenage parents must live with their parents or legal guardian in order to receive cash welfare payments. Prior to welfare reform, teenage parents could live independently with their children and receive benefits. This policy forces parents of teenage mothers to assume responsibility for the perceived amorality of their daughters and to establish and maintain close supervision over them. The reforms also require the teenager to go to school, attend a training program, or obtain a general educational development credential (GED) to receive benefits (Coley, 52). The absences that this participation necessitates further burden members of the teenage mother's family by pressuring them to care for her child for free. These policies make it difficult for teenage mothers to receive welfare despite being significantly impoverished.

Sex Education

In addition to making the requirements stricter for teenage mothers to receive welfare, politicians attached a provision to the welfare reform bill that stated that federal money allocated for sex education programs could be used only for abstinence-only-until-marriage programs. These programs must meet strict requirements, which include not teaching about contraception, safer-sex methods, or sexually transmitted diseases, and emphasizing that marriage and self-sufficiency are prerequisites to sexual activity. The ideology behind this is that comprehensive sex education, which teaches about contraception and safer-sex practices, encourages teenagers to become sexually active (Luker, 84). Thus, teaching abstinence-only will discourage teenage sexual activity.

Some criticize this approach and argue that teenagers will likely still engage in sexual activity and should be equipped with the knowledge to make better choices. Critics argue that this may increase the teenage pregnancy rate (and sexually transmitted diseases, or STD, rates) because teenagers will not know how to prevent ...