Why I DO NOT want to "prevent teen pregnancy"

[Bellarose0212]

I have expressed this opinion many times in my own way, but here is a great article which describes the issue with eloquence. I STRONGLY suggest you read the whole article if you want a full understanding (its not super long), but I provided a few highlights. These opinions are provided by Heather Corinna, who is a sexuality educator and counselor for the Cedar River Clinics/Feminist Women's Health Center, and the director of the CONNECT teen outreach and education program, as well as the founder and directer of the site where the article is located (a site dedicated to the sexual education of young people).


Preventing Teen Pregnancy- Three words most likely to make my blood boil




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I hate the shaming or demonization of teen parents or teens who become or are pregnant, the widespread assumption that all of that is always bad or always wrong, and must always be prevented based on anyone's standards but those of young people themselves. I hate teen pregnancy being presented as if it were a pandemic, and teen parents presented as automatically incapable of parenting just as well as anyone else. I hate the often-dishonest moralizing that often goes with all of this, and teens being told that all sex = pregnancy and that the only way to prevent pregnancy is to avoid all kinds of sex, and/or that choosing to be sexually active means choosing to be pregnant. I hate the other words so often used around this topic, which make teen pregnancy sound like Hurricane Katrina. I hate the defeatist messages we give teens or young women who have become pregnant and who are deciding to parent. I hate that we seem to hold teen or young mothers to higher standards of parenting than we hold older parents.

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Perhaps even more than that, I hate some of the attitude that seems to inform that presumption, which feels to me a whole lot like older people saying that it is okay for older women to become pregnant, but not for younger women. Which is a pretty odd thing to say about women who both have actively working reproductive systems, who both have the ability to become pregnant and to parent, or to make other reproductive choices. In fact, it sounds a whole lot like eugenics to me.

I'm not going to beat around the bush (as it were) here. In a whole lot of ways, women in their late teens and early twenties are in a better position than women in their thirties or forties are to reproduce, whether anyone likes it or not. They are more fertile, their bodies will bounce back more quickly from a pregnancy, and they have more energy both for pregnancy and for keeping up with small children. A 19-year-old woman and a 39-year-old woman, on average are not in the same space physiologically when it comes to bearing children. The younger woman is in the better, healthier position physically, and the same is likely so for her fetus, particularly if (and that's a big if) she has healthcare of the same quality the older woman has. And for most of human history -- though there are certainly aspects of this, such as gender inequality and sexual violence, very worthy of critique and change -- teen or young adult mothers have been who so many of our mothers were.

There is another side of that coin, which is that young women are without some things many older women have. They more frequently will have less financial resources to care for children, their partnerships (if they are co-parenting) can tend to be less stable or shorter-lived, and they have less access to things like day care at school or work, good transportation, health insurance and the like. Obviously, too, a younger person has often had less life experience, and an older person may have greater perspective in certain areas which can be of great benefit when it comes to good parenting. But there are corrections for those inequalities. So many of the troubling statistics that we have on teen pregnancy and parenting aren't around the pregnancy or parenting itself, or the age of a parent, but instead, arise from many inequalities young people suffer because we have set things up so that they do.

For instance, it's not likely because someone is 16 when they become pregnant that they will be less able to finish high school, but because so many opportunities for schooling are cut off to young, pregnant women, and so few concessions are made to help a pregnant or parenting teen finish high school or enter college. Given the higher teen pregnancy statistics when it comes to young women of color, immigrant women and rural women, the fact that our culture often doesn't privilege education for those groups in the first place is no minor detail. It's not likely because someone is a teen that their child can be more likely to wind up in the corrections system, but because someone is a parent of any age who is without the resources they need to actively parent. Older people can help younger parents by sharing life experience and perspective gleaned with them rather than hoarding it or lording it over them.

Given that we know that that lack of resources is a central issue, why do we see so much money and so much effort put into "preventing teen pregnancy" yet so relatively little put into efforts to get free or affordable daycare into high schools and colleges, providing counseling, schooling and housing for young mothers? Why do we hear so much about preventing teen pregnancy yet meet so much resistance when it comes to contraceptive and abortion access for teen and young adult women? Why does the left and right alike tend to have so much to say and offer before or while a teen is pregnant, yet so little post-pregnancy or when a teen has become a parent?

Why is so much money put into developing and doing fertility therapies for women moving outside of their reproductive years, and so little for supporting women at the dawn of them; women of an age where even the best contraceptive methods, used perfectly, fail most often? Why are the celebrity teens or those of fame and wealth "speaking out against teen pregnancy" so often the loudest voices we hear? Why are the representatives of teen pregnancy and parenting so often so non-representative? Knowing about the disparities between white women and women of color with teen pregnancy, those between women in poverty and those who are affluent, and about the achievement limitations teens who choose to become parents so often feel they have, what the heck is up with the vast majority of those representing teen pregnancy being so wealthy, white and pampered (or male!?!) all the time?






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When our bodies are of an age where they can reproduce, any of us then -- be we 16 or 36 -- has the right to choose to do that with our bodies if we want to. By all means, once a child is born, we're talking about someone else, someone outside of a woman's body, and not our own body. That's a huge and tangled discussion of its own, especially given the way children are so often framed as the property of their parents, rather than as the responsibility of parents and all the rest of us. But until there is an actual child born and independently present? We are talking about a woman and her own body. Not ours, hers.

For the record, I also have a problem with the notion of "preventing unplanned pregnancy." A LOT of wanted children, children who are loved, children who are parented well, come from unplanned pregnancies: at least half of us have. As a sexuality educator who knows very well how many people don't understand how reproduction works, and as someone who has a good handle on human history per how long most people didn't know, it's safe to say MOST pregnancies throughout history have been unplanned to at least some degree. Even now when we do know more, when far more people are educated, when we have many contraceptive methods which are highly effective, a lot of people approach pregnancy not as something they exactly plan, but leave themselves more or less open to at given times depending on how okay they are with pregnancy. For sure, we do want to fill people in on the things which might make a pregnancy more or less healthy when it happens, make parenting go better or worse for everyone involved, but while planning can certainly contribute to healthy pregnancy and sound parenting, it really isn't a requirement or a reality for many people.




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If your heart is in the right place, what you want to do is to not to prevent anything. Rather, you want to nurture and support conscious conception and contraception, conscious birthing; to enable wanted and healthy pregnancy, wanted and healthy parenting. You want to help support all of us in having exactly the reproductive life we want and feel is best for us to the degree that we can control that.

If you're still stuck on prevention as an approach, why not try making it about helping teens to prevent unwanted pregnancy or unwanted parenting?

Is age really even relevant? Only so much. An unwanted pregnancy has the capacity to disrupt or cause hardship in a woman's life whether she is 17 or 37. A parent who is unprepared for parenting, who doesn't want to parent, or who just can't parent can do damage to a child no matter how old they are or are not.

What you really want to do -- I hope -- is to help women of all ages to understand what all their possible choices are for their whole lives, to have a good idea of what making any given choice can entail, the possible positives and negatives alike, and how it could impact them and others. What you probably really want to do is to help young people, all people, make choices around sex, pregnancy and parenting which are most likely to result in a happy, healthy life, and the life any given person most wants for themselves and those in their lives. What you also probably want to do is work just as much towards creating a culture of support for those who do become pregnant -- by choice or by accident -- and choose to parent as you work to support those making different choices. And if you really want to help to prevent unwanted teen pregnancy, you need to make sure your efforts are directed just as much towards young men as they are towards young women.

I know for a fact that many of the people who use the current language around teen pregnancy are people whose intentions are stellar, totally laudable, and all about the good things I'm talking about here. So, why diminish or mislead those great intentions with words and phrases that undermine them and disrespect the population we're claiming to care so much about? Why use the negative when you're trying to support the positive?


My response to a reply that said, in part, "I can stand the "unplanned" teen pregnancies, it's the "planned" ones that irk me."


Planned or unplanned is irrelevant, its the way the person parents that is the key. If a teen chooses to become pregnant, its really none of my business. If a 30-year-old chooses to become pregnant, its really none of my business. As I said, I would rather focus on the way they parent. I know someone (indirectly) who chose to support both her daughters choices to become pregnant as teenagers, and I believe the resulting children are being raised in a loving and supportive and reliable family (who also ascribe very much to attachment parenting ideas). I don't see anything wrong with this. We all have only so much time to live our life and I don't really see fit to judge the priorities or choices or desires of other people. And really, isn't every pregnancy planned to some degree, since termination and adoption are both legal options. So, really, every teen and young parent has chosen to be a parent.

I think I know what you are talking about though. The young teen who is searching for love and acceptance and probably has misconceptions about the source of these things and/or a less than loving and supportive home life consciously gets pregnant to keep a boyfriend or because she thinks her baby will love her more. Here too, I don't really take issue with this teen but the sad set of societal and familial failures that led her to believe this falsehood. And hopefully, there are actions we can take through community support and education to prevent this kind of thinking and help the children who may result from such thinking. Still, I don't think judgement or tisk-tisking will help these young women or their children, rather its community and social support for their options, including long-term parenting classes and support (modeled to follow the extremely successful Harlem Children's Zone "Baby College" ) that will benefit this.

[MamaMulder]

Jan. 3, 2010 at 3:09 PM

Ahhh~Such a breath of fresh air to read all of this. I was 17 when I had Dom and he was totally unplanned, but so wanted! This is just a great article all around.. I think a lot of the issues we are facing in all of this teen pregnancy mumbp jumbo is the fact that people are always wanting to change things.. There were women parenting at the ages of 15-16 for many many generations.. What changed the fact that that was ok? Why have we pushed the age so far back? Is it because in our corrupt country the insurance is so unobtainable to so many that we are really believing we need to afford *good* health insurance to have babies? Which is usually unaffordable for quite some time. I am 23 and still have yet to see the day when I will afford it?! Oh, and I am *high risk* because I had Dom at such a young age that my rates are double the normal woman my age.. It's just sick. I am so happy that I will be young to watch my children grow and age and be able to spend much time with my grandchildren and possibly even great grandchildren... Isn't that how it was meant to be??

Sorry for my rambling! Thanks so much for sharing!! :)

[Bellarose0212]

Jan. 3, 2010 at 9:41 PM

No, you weren't rambling, those were valid points/questions.

Thanks for the response!

(Original Poster)

[Katie1991]

Jan. 30, 2010 at 1:42 PM

Great Post!  I totally agree.

[livewell]

Jul. 15, 2010 at 8:24 PM

We are probably the only culture that has prolonged childhood well into adulthood...heck, some of my friend who never had kids are 40 year old adolescents!!

[FelipesMom]

Nov. 3, 2010 at 9:35 AM

wow awesome... I need to read more of your JPs, I don't think I have read many... are we friends? Off to make sure right now! :o)