Destinies of the Disadvantaged: The Politics of Teen Childbearing

1. The History of Teenage Childbearing as a Social Problem

Chapter 1 The History of Teenage Childbearing as a Social Problem ACENTURY FROM NOW, social and demographic historians may be pondering the question of why the topic of teenage childbearing suddenly became so prominent in America during the last several decades of the twentieth century. The issue emerged from social invisibility during the 1950s and early 1960s, when rates of childbearing among teens reached historical peaks, and rose to a level of public obsession just as rates of teenage childbearing began to plummet in the late 1960s and early 1970s. In 1995, in his State of the Union address, President Bill Clinton singled out teenage childbearing as “our most serious social problem.” When he issued this bit of hyperbole, the overall rate of teenage childbearing was barely more than half of what it had been several decades earlier, and even the rate of nonmarital childbearing among teenagers had begun a decline that has continued for more than a decade (U.S. Bureau of the Census 2007; Ventura, Mathews, and Hamilton 2001). Clinton was not the first president to take note of the costs of early childbearing. Beginning with Jimmy Carter’s administration, every president since has put the issue high on his domestic agenda. Americans appear to agree with this emphasis. An advocacy group aimed at preventing teenage pregnancy, reporting on the results of a poll conducted in 1995, concluded that “the number one symptom of erosion in family cohesiveness is the spread of teenage pregnancy” (National Campaign to Prevent Teen Pregnancy 1997, 1). According to the poll, more people were troubled by teenage pregnancy than by the growth of nonmarital childbearing in the 1 population. Most recently, a poll conducted by the Public Policy Institute of California revealed that more than two-fifths of those surveyed in the state regarded teenage pregnancy as a “big problem” in their community, and despite a sharp and steady drop in the rate of pregnancy and childbearing over the past fifteen years, nearly three out of four believed that the problem had been increasing or staying at the same level. Just one in eight Californians knew that early childbearing had been declining. A veritable industry has grown up over the past several decades producing and disseminating information about teenage pregnancy and childbearing (Alan Guttmacher Institute 2006a; National Campaign to Prevent Teenage Pregnancy 1997). When I began my study on the consequences of early childbearing in 1965 in Baltimore, it was possible to read virtually every study that had ever been done on the subject by social scientists and medical researchers. “Teenage parenthood,” “adolescent mothers,” or similar terms to describe early childbearing were not even mentioned in the Reader’s Guide to Periodical Literature or in any of the standard medical and social sciences indexes because the issue was simply absent from public discussion. What an extraordinary contrast to today, when it is virtually impossible to read all the studies produced in a single year. Over the years, I have amassed an entire library of professional and popular books and articles on the topic, and no doubt it represents but a small fraction of the studies published on the subject. A recent search on Google of the term “teenage childbearing” yielded more than half a million references and counting. How did the United States traverse from indifference to public concern to moral crisis in a matter of two or three decades? Was the political, policy, and public concern justified by the evidence? If not, why has the issue loomed so large on the public agenda? Will social historians be intrigued and mystified by our nation’s fixation on teenage childbearing, as they are with our other periodic bouts of moral concern, or will they regard the singular attention given to adolescent childbearing as plausible, if not self-evident? This book seeks answers to these questions, building on my own research over the past four decades as well as the considerable contributions of the social scientists and policy analysts who have thought about and studied the causes and consequences of early childbearing. 2 Destinies of the Disadvantaged Of course, the answer I craft must confront a blend of “reality” drawn not only from demographic and social research but also from the popular perception promulgated by the media, political figures, and policy analysts from both the left and the right. Surely, no one could dispute that a dramatic transformation took place in patterns of...