TEENAGE PREGNANCY

Teenage Pregnancy

Abstract

This critical review aims to study the health policies regarding Teenage Pregnancy in the United Kingdom. The underlying theories have been derived from sociological, psychological, feminist and midwifery concepts, and aims to challenge the notion that men and women are determined by their sex. Instead, it proposes that gender roles are socially constructed according to the dominant culture and learnt through socialization. It questions the assumed normality of the nuclear family and the sexual division of labour within it, which separates women into the domestic domain and men into the public sphere of capitalist society. This paper focuses on pregnant teenagers as a group stigmatized as deviant to the 'norm' and the role healthcare policy plays in reinforcing their marginalization in society. A critical analysis of the semantics and discourse of New Labour's Teenage Pregnancy Strategy (SEU 1999) aims to show that its definition of the route to social inclusion via education, training and employment is partial and problematic, as it ignores the structural and contextual barriers to the inclusion of pregnant teenagers in society and thinly disguises a welfare dependency discourse with moral undertones, further compounding the oppression of women in society. It is my aim that this paper encourages the reader to question the origin of many widely held assumptions about normal family life and the roles and relationships between men and women within it. As midwives, there is a need to question whether our values and opinions are shaped by these assumptions and, in turn, question whether these ideas unintentionally reduce our objectivity and capacity for truly individualized care.

TEENAGE PREGNANCY

Introduction

Teenage pregnancy has become a pressing issue in the western countries especially in U.K. and U.S. Biological determinists explain the differences between men and women according to the differences in their reproductive systems. According to the male-dominated world of science, the organs and functions of motherhood biologically handicap women. This handicap is said to go back to the animal world and makes females helpless and dependent upon the superior m le sex to provide for them and their young (Reed 1971: 7). While Reed (1971) recognizes the obvious biological differences between men and women, she finds no justification for the oppression of women in nature or in the study of primitive, classless societies. Engels (1884) also states that, in nature, females suffer no disability compared to males, but that it was with the rise of patriarchal class-based society and the development of the family as a social and economic institution, that the biological make-up of women became the ideological pretext for keeping them in servile status. Women's absence from the workforce or in education less then reinforced the notion that women were intellectually inferior due to their 'reproductive specialization'. Those women who challenged the narrow role prescribed to them were pathologies by medical men as hysterical. Thus, women who rebelled could be defined as sick and subjected to a range of treatments including cliterodectomy, as Victorian doctors attributed distress to biological factors rather than addressing ...