Teenage Pregnancy
Dec. 15th, 2008 03:14 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
lavendersparkleThis morning I was listening to Woman's Hour and there was a piece on, well it's a bit difficult to sum up what it was on, I think the best way to summarise it would be to use the term 'the unworthy poor'. The things being discussed were benefit reform, teenage pregnancy, benefit bundles and people being bone idle whilst good middle class people's tax paid for their ciggies. Whilst listening to it I was struck by a question which I often ponder: what is wrong with teenage pregnancy?
Everyone seems to just assume that teenage pregnancy is a Bad Thing in and of itself and doesn't bother to explain why. The government has a target to reduce it. Ian Hislop shakes his head at the UK topping the European chart at it. I've even hard people refer to it as a Bad Thing because the daughters of teenage mothers are likely to become teenage mothers themselves. So here is my attempt to untangle the issue.
The first candidate for a reason for teenage pregnancy to be a Bad Thing would be physiological. Even if a girl is fertile, it doesn't mean that she has finished growing and pregnancy may be better delayed until puberty is completed. A problem with this argument in regards to Western societies is that we have a peculiarly extended childhood and very early menarche. I've been trying to look up information on when the optimal age to support a pregnancy is and I've found 20-25, 20-30 and 20-35, depending upon the study. There also seem to be compounding factors in the data because pregnant teenagers tend to be poorer, worse nourished, less likely to receive pre-natal care and having a first baby, all of which increase the probability of complications. I very much doubt that a well fed healthy supported 17 year old, who will have been menstruating for 6 years, is at much more risk than a woman who delays first pregnancy to her thirties. There may be a physiological reason to be concerned about 13, 14 and 15 year-olds getting pregnant but there doesn't seem to be much of a good reason to see all pregnancies under 20 as a problem.
Another possible answer to why teenage pregnancy is a Bad Thing is that it 'ruins' women's lives. To this I like to paraphrase the president of Feminists for Life. Babies don't ruin women's lives. Universities with no facilities for student parents ruin lives. Schools which exclude pregnant students ruin women's lives. Employers who discriminate against mothers ruin women's lives. The society we live in in the UK generally pushes women to delay first pregnancy until their 30s or 40s. This is not the only way to set things up. In some communities it is quite usual for a woman to have children in her teens and early twenties, before she has completed her education, and for her to return to education and build her career a few years later, with the help of childcare from her extended family. Why shouldn't a woman have her children before she begins her career? The main arguments seem to be hat she will not be able to afford them at that age, which is a product of our economic and tax and benefit system, or that she will need as much human capital as possible to overcome the discrimination she'll face when she returns to paid employment, which is product of law breaking fuckwit employers. It seems the problem is less that teenage pregnancy is of itself a problem, but that it is made problematic by the institutions of society.
People sometimes back up the claim that teenage pregnancy 'ruins' women's lives with correlations between teenage pregnancy and unemployment, low levels of education and poverty. A problem with this is the direction of the causation. I remember once meeting a parliamentary researcher who had had a baby whilst studying at Durham. She was employed and appeared to be reasonably well off as I think her son was attending a prep school. She definitely fit the image of doom we're often sold. Could it not be that perhaps women with few prospects are more likely to have a baby whilst a teenager? Who could blame them? Face with a choice between forty years working at Tesco for minimum wage or becoming a stay at home mother I know which one I'd choose. I can see how this could pose a problem for the government but perhaps it would be more honestly rephrased as "We need a pool of people to be willing to do menial unfulfilling jobs for low wages. They will not do this if there is a better option so we need to push them close to destitution if they don't take a low paid job. Unfortunately, we feel a bit guilty about doing this if they have children who will also be made destitute. It is also inconvenient if the proletariat sometimes take time off to give birth or care for children. So we have to find a way to force the lower classes to delay birth, which doesn't make us feel guilty about indirectly harming children." I would suggest the alternative of improving the lives of lower class people, whether or not they are parents. Of course, middle England will cry, they'll just waste money on sky TV and clubbing rather than good middle class uses of money, such as wine and skying holidays.
A third possible problem is that teenagers may not be mature enough to be good parents. I don't think that it's accurate to refer to this problem as teenage pregnancy. There are mature teenagers who manage perfectly well with their babies. There are deeply immature 30 year olds who become terrible parents. It also assumes a nuclear family structure. I have often thought that the way to avoid the economic penalty placed upon fecundity without having to give birth after it is physiologically optimal, would be for people to raise their grandchildren. That way women could give birth in her 20s, immediately return to work/education and have a career until her 40s when her own daughters start having babies, whom she raises.
I can see that it is a bad thing for women to have babies when they don't want to have babies. This is true at all ages. I am deeply suspicious that the real problem with teenage pregnancy is that it inconveniences the powers that be and upsets middle England's social norms rather than that it is a bd thing in itself.
Everyone seems to just assume that teenage pregnancy is a Bad Thing in and of itself and doesn't bother to explain why. The government has a target to reduce it. Ian Hislop shakes his head at the UK topping the European chart at it. I've even hard people refer to it as a Bad Thing because the daughters of teenage mothers are likely to become teenage mothers themselves. So here is my attempt to untangle the issue.
The first candidate for a reason for teenage pregnancy to be a Bad Thing would be physiological. Even if a girl is fertile, it doesn't mean that she has finished growing and pregnancy may be better delayed until puberty is completed. A problem with this argument in regards to Western societies is that we have a peculiarly extended childhood and very early menarche. I've been trying to look up information on when the optimal age to support a pregnancy is and I've found 20-25, 20-30 and 20-35, depending upon the study. There also seem to be compounding factors in the data because pregnant teenagers tend to be poorer, worse nourished, less likely to receive pre-natal care and having a first baby, all of which increase the probability of complications. I very much doubt that a well fed healthy supported 17 year old, who will have been menstruating for 6 years, is at much more risk than a woman who delays first pregnancy to her thirties. There may be a physiological reason to be concerned about 13, 14 and 15 year-olds getting pregnant but there doesn't seem to be much of a good reason to see all pregnancies under 20 as a problem.
Another possible answer to why teenage pregnancy is a Bad Thing is that it 'ruins' women's lives. To this I like to paraphrase the president of Feminists for Life. Babies don't ruin women's lives. Universities with no facilities for student parents ruin lives. Schools which exclude pregnant students ruin women's lives. Employers who discriminate against mothers ruin women's lives. The society we live in in the UK generally pushes women to delay first pregnancy until their 30s or 40s. This is not the only way to set things up. In some communities it is quite usual for a woman to have children in her teens and early twenties, before she has completed her education, and for her to return to education and build her career a few years later, with the help of childcare from her extended family. Why shouldn't a woman have her children before she begins her career? The main arguments seem to be hat she will not be able to afford them at that age, which is a product of our economic and tax and benefit system, or that she will need as much human capital as possible to overcome the discrimination she'll face when she returns to paid employment, which is product of law breaking fuckwit employers. It seems the problem is less that teenage pregnancy is of itself a problem, but that it is made problematic by the institutions of society.
People sometimes back up the claim that teenage pregnancy 'ruins' women's lives with correlations between teenage pregnancy and unemployment, low levels of education and poverty. A problem with this is the direction of the causation. I remember once meeting a parliamentary researcher who had had a baby whilst studying at Durham. She was employed and appeared to be reasonably well off as I think her son was attending a prep school. She definitely fit the image of doom we're often sold. Could it not be that perhaps women with few prospects are more likely to have a baby whilst a teenager? Who could blame them? Face with a choice between forty years working at Tesco for minimum wage or becoming a stay at home mother I know which one I'd choose. I can see how this could pose a problem for the government but perhaps it would be more honestly rephrased as "We need a pool of people to be willing to do menial unfulfilling jobs for low wages. They will not do this if there is a better option so we need to push them close to destitution if they don't take a low paid job. Unfortunately, we feel a bit guilty about doing this if they have children who will also be made destitute. It is also inconvenient if the proletariat sometimes take time off to give birth or care for children. So we have to find a way to force the lower classes to delay birth, which doesn't make us feel guilty about indirectly harming children." I would suggest the alternative of improving the lives of lower class people, whether or not they are parents. Of course, middle England will cry, they'll just waste money on sky TV and clubbing rather than good middle class uses of money, such as wine and skying holidays.
A third possible problem is that teenagers may not be mature enough to be good parents. I don't think that it's accurate to refer to this problem as teenage pregnancy. There are mature teenagers who manage perfectly well with their babies. There are deeply immature 30 year olds who become terrible parents. It also assumes a nuclear family structure. I have often thought that the way to avoid the economic penalty placed upon fecundity without having to give birth after it is physiologically optimal, would be for people to raise their grandchildren. That way women could give birth in her 20s, immediately return to work/education and have a career until her 40s when her own daughters start having babies, whom she raises.
I can see that it is a bad thing for women to have babies when they don't want to have babies. This is true at all ages. I am deeply suspicious that the real problem with teenage pregnancy is that it inconveniences the powers that be and upsets middle England's social norms rather than that it is a bd thing in itself.
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(no subject)
Date: 2008-12-15 04:31 pm (UTC)- Married at 17, had babies at 17, 20, 22 and 23 and the world hasn't ended!
(no subject)
Date: 2008-12-15 05:14 pm (UTC)I don't think that adds up to the fact that it's merely disrupting social norms which makes it a bad thing for teenagers to be pregnant. Firstly we have an age of consent for a reason, and it's not only prudishness. Yes, some 15-year-olds are very mature, but most aren't, and therefore aren't equipped to handle adult relationships, sexual negotiation, proper use of contraception and so on. It's not true in all possible situations, but it's a reasonable generalization that teenagers are more vulnerable than adults. I can't remember the exact statistics but there's a horrible correlation that the younger the woman becomes sexually active, the more likely there is to be a large age difference between her and her partner.
I'm all in favour of improving people's lives, giving everybody access to education and enough of a financial safety net to make reasonable life choices. That doesn't make it a good thing to have kids before completing education and establishing a career. It's better for both the parents and the kids if the parents are in a relatively strong economic position, rather than relying on welfare. I'm not against welfare, I just think it's better to earn your own money if that's possible! "Lower class" 25-year-olds have more financial security than "lower class" 15-year-olds.
I don't like the idea of shifting the burden of childcare from parents onto grandparents. That's the best outcome if a teenager does have a child, but that doesn't make it a good way to run society. Why should women give up the prime years of their careers to raise their grandchildren? I don't see why it's any fairer to disadvantage women in their 40s than women in their 20s!
There's no realistic choice between working a minimum wage job for 40 years and being a stay-at-home mum. A stay-at-home mum implies a husband providing financial support. Most teenagers are not ready to form life-long relationships, so when they have kids, they're actually choosing to work the minimum wage job and raise the children, which is possibly worse than just the menial job, and not obviously better.
I don't have any problem with a mature 19-year-old getting married and starting a family straightaway, especially if she has a good support network. But that's not the typical case. It's much more likely that a vulnerable 15-year-old is pressured more or less directly into sex with her 30-year-old "boyfriend" who then leaves her holding the baby, and her mother and stepfather don't have the ability or the willingness to be supportive, and she won't know how to fight for her right to continue education and not be discriminated against in employment. I agree that teenage pregnancy is often a symptom, not a cause, but it's a symptom of a bad situation that as a society we should try to prevent.
(no subject)
Date: 2008-12-15 05:21 pm (UTC)Financial security and age. Yes. A middle class person has more financial security at 25 than 18; for a lower class person this isn't necessarily true once you get old enough to have full minimum wage. You still can't afford to buy the place you live in and never will; food is the same, clothes are the same, the probability of you getting promoted in any job is pretty low unless you kiss sufficient ass and even then it might not work; you may as well have children earlier while you've got the energy to take them to school and then go to work every day.
This assumes you don't hit it big and decide to get a career that would pay more and be more stable, though.
(no subject)
Date: 2008-12-16 09:58 am (UTC)I absolutely don't think you need to be rich enough to own your own home in order to be a suitable parent; that would be an unforgivably classist attitude. But 15-year-olds generally have no income at all, or none beyond pocket money, and are wholly dependent on their parents. If the parents are themselves poor, they can't afford to properly support both a teenager and her baby as well as themselves. So I think it's financially worthwhile to wait a few years, to complete education and enter the workforce, before having a baby. Maybe 25 is too old, but 20 still seems better than 15.
(no subject)
Date: 2008-12-16 12:56 pm (UTC)It annoys me a lot too when people say that you ought to be able to own a house before you have children, especially when they are the same people who heavily subsidised their adult children's ridiculous mortgages or rented out houses in terrible conditions, and allowed the housing situation to get as unreasonable as it has.
(no subject)
Date: 2008-12-16 01:16 pm (UTC)I do think it is plausible that "lower class" youngsters get into more "bad relationships" but I think that it is also plausible that this is *caused by* (at least in part) the treatment of such youngsters as "children" rather than as "adults". If the parents of a 17 year old woman were capable of realising that she is grown, and capable of making mature relationship decisions (including, possible, having children) then perhaps she wouldn't have to go behind her parents' backs to have a relationship and thus might manage to become less economically dependent on her partner (because she might be less likely to feel the need to run away from her parents to be with him).
(no subject)
Date: 2008-12-15 05:15 pm (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2008-12-15 05:15 pm (UTC)Our society considers teens to be incapable of giving informed consent to a whole raft of other concepts; and even after the official age limits have been reached many young people are considered too immature to make "big" decisions (I am still considered "too immature" to give informed consent to permanently destroying my fertility by many people for instance).
However perhaps this "immaturity" is more a product of society than it is a product of biology (psychiatrists claim otherwise, I'm not sure I believe them; historically the age of "maturity" has been much younger and society did not fall into ruins). Perhaps if we treated teens as adults then they would act like adults instead of constantly fighting to be recognised as "grown up".
I do like your idea about grandparenting :-)
I generally agree that there is nothing wrong with teen-parents; but there is a whole lot wrong with the way society reacts to teen parents.
Also crud about the "undeserving poor" would have made me throw heavy objects at the radio, clearly you have restraint.
(no subject)
Date: 2008-12-15 05:39 pm (UTC)Not so sure about the grandparent bit, but that's the sort of thing that would take a few generations to become acceptable, so that's probably just me rather than something that's inherently problematic.
(no subject)
Date: 2008-12-15 07:20 pm (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2008-12-15 07:27 pm (UTC)