Dubious conceptions: The Politics of Teen-age Pregnancy.

The single pregnant teen-ager has unfairly become a lightning rod for public anger, says Kristin Luker in her provocative critique of public thinking on early pregnancy and childbearing. 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. 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. Yet, according to Luker, neither side has an adequate grasp of the main causes of teen-age pregnancy and parenthood.

Drawing upon historical and social scientific evidence, she shows how both economic and cultural forces have contributed to the problems associated with early childbearing. On the economic side, she says, poverty is a chief contributor to teen motherhood. Early childbearing doesn't cause young women to become poor or welfare-dependent. Rather, poverty causes women to bear and raise children at an early age and to seek welfare assistance. For example, 80 percent of all teen-age mothers were living in poverty or near-poverty long before they became pregnant.

On the cultural side, Luker sees the sexual revolution as a chief contributor to changing attitudes and behavior among teen-age girls. 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. The sexual revolution has all but erased the boundaries between adolescent and adult sexuality. A climate of permissiveness toward sex and parenthood outside of marriage exists for women of all ages.

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. Middle-class teen-agers 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. Poor teen-agers seem to be moving in the opposite direction: having children early, leaving school early, and never marrying. Moreover, says Luker, even if these teen-agers followed the middle-class script, it wouldn't help them escape poverty.

Further, single motherhood is now subject to a means test. 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. 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.

As Luker sees it, this divergence enables mainstream America to turn on the poor. Public mean-spiritedness and censoriousness toward poor young mothers undermine support for the very approaches that seem to work to reduce the rate of teen pregnancy. We know how to help teen-agers postpone pregnancy and motherhood, argues Luker, but we are less willing to offer such help. 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.

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. Only an array of expensive social programs will abolish poverty, but the public is in no mood to be generous, she laments.

Fortunately, things may not be as bleak as Luker imagines. Though her book contains many valuable insights, its argument is flawed. First and foremost, its defining premise is weak. Far from displaying an animus toward pregnant teens, the public is more solicitous of pregnant teen-agers than ever before. 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. Schools have lifted the stigma of early childbearing. Pregnant teens are cheer-leaders, homecoming queens, and commencement speakers. 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. (As for "politically motivated" activists who push sex education programs into the schools, the ideological fervor cuts both ways. There are also sex advocates on the cultural left whose approaches to sex education are equally lacking in social-scientific validation.)

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. On the other hand, they worry, often on practical rather than moral grounds, about institutionalizing early pregnancy and unwed teen motherhood. Based on their own life experience, adult Americans understand that the standards for even minimally effective childrearing are getting higher. 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.

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. 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. This is not poverty.

Luker herself provides the evidence and argumentation for a more hopeful scenario. The problem isn't the effectiveness of the middle-class script but the obstacles that prevent the most disadvantaged and discouraged teen-agers from following it. 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.