Dubious Conceptions
Luker, Kristin
KIDS HAVING KIDS: WHAT TO DO? Dubious Conceptions The Politics of Teen-age Pregnancy Kristin Luker Harvard University Press, $24 93 283pp Barbara Dafoe Whitehead The single pregnant teenager...
...On the cultural side, Luker sees the sexual revolution as a chief contributor to changing attitudes and behavior among teen-age girls...
...A climate of permissiveness toward sex and parenthood outside of marriage exists for women of all ages...
...The public mood might better be described as sympathetic yet pragmatic...
...On the one hand, Americans believe in giving single teen-age mothers a second chance...
...Fortunately, things may not be as bleak as Luker imagines...
...What's more, she argues, the political debate over what to do about unwed teen motherhood has been polarized by competing conceptions of its causes...
...The Right defines adolescent childbearing as moral breakdown which can be best addressed through moral exhortation...
...Given her sense of the hostility of the public and the futility of the middle-class script, it's easy to understand why Luker throws up her hands in despair...
...Though patterns of female sexual behavior have been converging across age groups, there is a sharply divergent pattern in the way women of different socio-economic backgrounds deal with the consequences of their sexual and reproductive behavior...
...Rather, poverty causes women to bear and raise children at an early age and to seek welfare assistance...
...On the other hand, they worry, often on practical rather than moral grounds, about institutionalizing early pregnancy and unwed teen motherhood...
...The sexual revolution has all but erased the boundaries between adolescent and adult sexuality...
...This is not poverty...
...Only an array of expensive social programs will abolish poverty, but the public is in no mood to be generous, she laments...
...Early child-bearing doesn't cause young women to become poor or welfare-dependent...
...In local school districts across the nation, communities have made a conscientious effort to keep pregnant girls in school, providing them with counseling, health services, and in-school day care...
...As for "politically motivated" activists who push sex education programs into the schools, the ideological fervor cuts both ways...
...Second, the socioeconomic evidence refutes Luker's speculative assertion that the middle-class script wouldn't work for poor teens even if they tried to follow it...
...The problem isn't the effectiveness of the middle-class script but the obstacles that prevent the most dis-advantaged and discouraged teen-agers from following it...
...On the economic side, she says, poverty is a chief contributor to teen motherhood...
...Further, single motherhood is now subject to a means test...
...Middle-class teenagers follow a middle-class script: they postpone motherhood through some combination of abstinence, contraception, and abortion, get an education, enter the workforce, get married, and then begin their childbearing careers...
...There are also sex advocates on the cultural left whose approaches to sex education are equally lacking in social-scientific validation...
...First and foremost, its defining premise is weak...
...For example, although there are sex education programs that can be effective in helping teen-agers avoid early pregnancy, "politically mobilized activists" push abstinence-based sex education into the schools before such programs have been properly evaluated...
...Poor teen-agers seem to be moving in the opposite direction: having children early, leaving school early, and never marrying...
...Though her book contains many valuable insights, its argument is flawed...
...Luker herself provides the evidence and argumentation for a more hopeful scenario...
...The Left sees the same behavior as a consequence of limited access to sex education, contraception, and abortion which can be changed by greater access to all of the above...
...A dual-income married couple household with children whose head has no education beyond high school enjoys a median family income in the upper half of the nation's income scale...
...Public mean-spiritedness and cen-soriousness toward poor young mothers undermine support for the very approaches that seem to work to reduce the rate of teen pregnancy...
...Far from displaying an animus toward pregnant teens, the public is more solicitous of pregnant teen-agers than ever before...
...Barbara Dafoe Whitehead's The Divorce Culture will be published by Alfred A. Knopf in 1997.Alfred A. Knopf in 1997...
...Dubious Conceptions The Politics of Teen-age Pregnancy Kristin Luker Harvard University Press, $24 93 283pp Barbara Dafoe Whitehead The single pregnant teenager has unfairly become a lightning rod for public anger, says Kristin Luker in her provocative critique of public thinking on early pregnancy and child-bearing...
...Based on their own life experience, adult Americans understand that the standards for even minimally effective childrearing are getting higher...
...After all, poor teen-age girls do not live on a separate planet, and their behavior has also been shaped by the changes in sex, marriage, and motherhood that have so dramatically reorganized American family life...
...As Luker sees it, this divergence enables mainstream America to turn on the poor...
...Yet, according to Luker, neither side has an adequate grasp of the main causes of teen-age pregnancy and parenthood...
...Unwed motherhood is okay for affluent, middle-aged women and not harmful to their children but not okay for young and poor teens and extremely harmful to their children...
...For example, 80 percent of all teen-age mothers were living in poverty or near-poverty long before they became pregnant...
...Schools have lifted the stigma of early childbearing...
...Though there have been strenuous bipartisan efforts to alter the welfare system, these efforts have foundered whenever they have proposed harsh measures for fifteen-year-old girls and their babies...
...It makes sense to direct public dollars and civic energies toward constructing a bridge to the middle-class script for girls who now see early motherhood as the only attainable path toward adulthood...
...We know how to help teen-agers postpone pregnancy and motherhood, argues Luker, but we are less willing to offer such help...
...Pregnant teens are cheerleaders, homecoming queens, and commencement speakers...
...In a postindustrial society, it takes two parents and often two incomes to give children the upbringing and education they will need to make it on their own...
...Moreover, says Luker, even if these teen-agers followed the middle-class script, it wouldn't help them escape poverty...
...Indeed, suggests Luker, society subsidizes single motherhood for middle-class women through private health insurance coverage for expensive fertility treatments but "taxes" single motherhood for poor women by cutting welfare and family planning services...
...Drawing upon historical and social scientific evidence, she shows how both economic and cultural forces have contributed to the problems associated with early childbearing...
Vol. 123 • September 1996 • No. 16
