In the late 90s, I was a young, single, pregnant high school dropout- long before MTV aired the controversial reality shows that Kelli Goff believes make young women want to get pregnant, back when the teen pregnancy rates spiked inexplicably before dropping to where they are now- the lowest rates ever. (That epidemic you keep hearing about? Nonexistent.) Many people, like Mayor Bloomberg, think they can tell you how my story would end- I would live in poverty, sad and alone, while my friends had limitless freedom and age-appropriate marriages and white picket fences. “He” would leave me, nobody with a lick of self-respect or a dime to his name would ever want me, and my baby would be crying on a billboard somewhere as a cautionary tale for other wanton young hussies who didn’t make chastity pledges. Eventually my child would grow up only to fail from a lifetime of neglect at the hands of an incapable child parent, and I would tear my hair out and curse the day I ruined my life by becoming an Unwed Teenage Mother.
They would be wrong.
I heard all these dire predictions, and to a large extent, internalized them, before finally rejecting them. “It ruins your life,” I was told. “It is a life sentence. You will be exhausted, resentful, and miserable.” And by the way (paraphrasing now)- you will never, ever sleep again, ever, and because you are so young, you will not have the profound wisdom with which older parents universally are bestowed and from which all great parenting flows. Older moms, all married to their financially and emotionally supportive male counterpart, wake up bright-eyed and bushy-tailed, no matter how many times their colicky baby screams during the night, because they are over 25 and therefore can Handle This.
Is every young parent a good parent? Absolutely not. But is every older parent either? (I will say from experience that newborn sleep deprivation takes on a whole new meaning at age 30 than it does at 18, and it’s not pretty) Are they even more likely to be, by virtue of age alone? And what makes a good parent? It seems like most people agree it has at least a little something to do with money, because the main attack against teenage parents is that they don’t have any. Maybe we believe good parents don’t need a lot of money, but they need at least enough to provide the basics. So then we have to agree that a middle-aged married couple, both partners working for minimum wage, is not going to have an easier time of parenting than a young single woman from a wealthier background simply because they are older than her. And a young woman is not going to be poor simply because she is a mother, if her parents, family (including the young father’s family), and greater community provide her with the resources she needs- and many of those resources are emotional and psychological.
The Chicago Tribune mocked Planned Parenthood’s vice president of education and training for saying, “"It's not teen pregnancies that cause poverty, but poverty that causes teen pregnancy", but she’s absolutely right, and this was already discussed about a year ago in Slate.
But perhaps we’re approaching the problem from the wrong direction, according to Melissa Kearney and Phillip Levine in a new paper “Why is the Teen Birth Rate in the United States So High and Why Does It Matter?” published in the spring issue of the Journal of Economic Perspectives.
They conclude that “being on a low economic trajectory in life leads many teenage girls to have children while they are young and unmarried and that poor outcomes seen later in life (relative to teens who do not have children) are simply the continuation of the original low economic trajectory.” In other words, it is a mistake to the leap from the observation that women who gave birth as teenagers are poor to the view that they’re poor because they gave birth. Lexus owners are much richer than the average American, but that doesn’t mean the average person can get ahead by buying a Lexus. Women with better economic opportunities tend to do a good job of avoiding childbirth.
Which is the huge glaring point that people seem to be missing. Teen parents are concentrated in poor communities. So no, Chicago Tribune, it’s not just about sex. If you think that teenagers from higher-income households aren’t having sex, you’re daft. What they are doing is taking stricter measures to avoid having babies, including having abortions that their parents can afford to pay for.
In the past, as Ann Fessler’s book The Girls Who Went Away discusses at length, middle-class girls were expected to give their children up for adoption to cover their sins- or, they just got married (see:Riding in Cars with Boys), which did little in the long run since most would end up divorced, but saved face in the short term, and teenage marriage was more feasible back when high school was the expected level of education and people could make a living and raise a family with nothing beyond a 12th grade diploma.
Few middle- and upper- class teens are becoming parents nowadays, largely because they have the current manifestation of the “American Dream” reasonably within their grasp, or so they believe. They have plans to graduate from their safe high schools, go on to college or some other form of post-secondary education or maybe a life enriching experience like backpacking in Europe, and eventually, when they got bored enough, marry somebody like them, buy a house, and have a kid or two. Most aren’t willing to throw a kid into the mix during the years they are told to focus on being young and selfish and free of responsibility, unless they have a compelling reason. They saw their parents do it this way, so they know that’s pretty much what’s in store for them, if they keep on the right path. And even if they veer off it, someone will be there to nudge them back on again.
But what if you’re not throwing anything away? What do poor and working class teens see in their future? (And of course- not all- this is about large patterns, not every single individual) Many don’t see the point in waiting when their financial future doesn’t look any different at age 30 than age 20.
Of course sex education plays a huge role here as well right? The states with the highest rates of teen pregnancy have the crappiest sex ed, and the states with the lowest rates have mandated sex ed and do not teach abstinence-only. But abysmal sex ed policies go hand-in-hand with extremely religious states that also happen to be very poor, like Mississippi. Not only do those states have subpar sex ed, they also have restricted access to birth control and abortion- which may have a variety of its own barriers, ranging from financial to geographical to social. Even states with sex ed and accessible birth control, there are pockets with higher rates of teen pregnancy, and those pockets are in poor communities.
This may also be a good time to mention that 71% of teen moms are actually 18-19 years old, technically adults, and that few are under age 16- and when we’re talking about very young teens having sex, we’re usually talking about a crime, not "promiscuity"- they cannot legally consent.
I haven't even touched on the number of young women in abusive relationships; abuse which includes not only sexual coercion but birth control sabotage and statutory rape (a great number of the fathers of teenage girls’ babies are not teenage boys). And many- if not most- teen moms are survivors of childhood sex abuse.
All evidence leads back to the fact that the dreaded TEEN PREGNANCY is a symptom, not a cause, of greater social ills. So, you say, they should be more personally responsible, these underprivileged children of America- put on a condom (or better yet, don’t have sex), graduate high school, go to college, and rise above! Except social mobility is stagnant in the United States, so it’s really not that simple.
And should we take the statistics Bloomberg plastered on subways at face value? Blogger Rebecca Hawkes asked the question, "Are the dire predictions for teen parents and their children accurate?" and found:
[Gretchen] Sisson, who wrote “Finding a Way to Offer Something More: Reframing Teen Pregnancy Prevention,” in the Journal of Sexuality Research and Social Policy, says that, in most cases, teen mothers do better than do their peers who are not mothers. Sisson’s research shows that among young women who drop out of high school, teen mothers are more likely to complete their GEDs. And in their twenties, they spend more time in the work force than do their peers who are not mothers. -- Avital Norman Nathman, Teen Motherhood: When “Reality TV” Doesn’t Fully Reflect Reality, January 1, 2013
And by their 30s? Sisson finds the former teen moms are "a bit ahead of their peers in terms of earning."
So then what is the point of all this? The point is to change your perception. If we continue to see teen pregnancy as the issue to be “fixed”, we’re basically trying to cure a headache in someone who has a brain tumor.
First of all- and let this sink in fully- we will never, ever eradicate all pregnancies in people under age 21 or unmarried people, so if that’s your goal, stop wasting your time. It has never happened in all of human history and it never will. No amount of slut-shaming, ridiculing, begging, birth control, or religion will ever make that happen. We had public flogging and scarlet letters and STILL people were getting in on and procreating in socially unacceptable ways, so forget it.
When we see poverty as the root social ill to eradicate instead, it might seem a little more overwhelming, or a little more abstract, but really, it’s not, and will have a much greater effect. How to do it is a topic for a different essay, but it must be done. We must have equal access to quality education, healthcare, nutrition, and housing across race and class lines. (No, that’s not socialism, so if you were preparing to compose a comment that looks something like: OBAMA!!1!KENYA!SOCIALIZM! please don’t bother. We’ll still have filthy rich CEOs and people busting ass to clear your dinner for pennies, just the way you like it. But we’ll have a far healthier and wider middle, instead of this.)
As for me, yes, I was a teenage mother. I didn’t finish high school. I got a G.E.D. two weeks before my daughter was born, and I did not get married to nor did I stay with her father. I got some crappy jobs, and I went to school, but I had support, and now I am working on a second Master’s degree. My oldest daughter is in high school, and she is on track to not only graduate, but to finish at age 16, with AP credits. There are many more like me too, and it’s not that we are complete exceptions to some sort of rule that Teen Moms Will Fail, nor are we such exceptionally hard-working, amazing human beings that we were able to beat the overpowering odds. Maybe the odds weren’t really stacked that high against us in the first place; we were just told to believe they were.