six - Contextualising teenage pregnancy

Summary

Introduction

The belief that teenage pregnancy causes the poor outcomes that lead to social exclusion has been interrogated by many commentators and there is still no consensus on this. Even where it is accepted that early child bearing might contribute to social exclusion, it appears to have a relatively marginal effect. Given this, the association of teenage pregnancy with social exclusion can seem like a flimsy basis on which to build initiatives such as the Teenage Pregnancy Strategy (TPS).

The reassessment of the effects of early child bearing in Chapter Five, though only an overview, provides some balance to the situation that prevails at present where teenage motherhood is considered to be an event of almost tragic proportions. It also reflects one of the more general aims of this book, to challenge the monolithic assertion that teenage reproduction is always problematic, for young women, their babies and society. This aim is further advanced in this chapter and the next.

The idea of context

In this chapter it is argued that policy, academic and wider social understandings of teenage pregnancy are decontextualised. The idea of something occurring in, or out of, a ‘context’ is a common enough one. The word's origins lie in the Latin for ‘joining together’ or ‘weaving’, which provides a sense of what is commonly understood by ‘context’. The concept of ‘decontextualised language’ – abstract language, removed from its original source – is used by scholars of language and education, especially those interested in young children's acquisition of literacy. One of these, Hamilton-Wieler (1988), in her discussion of texts, provides a useful working definition of decontextualisation, which she defines as: ‘… the abstraction of a written text or portion of written text from all of its contexts, with the assumption that the isolated text, or portion thereof, is an autonomous container of its own meaning’ (p 3, emphasis added).

In relation to teenage pregnancy, this definition is apposite. Stripped of context (or of a proper consideration of context), from an examination of the multitude of social, cultural, economic and other factors that influence adolescent sexuality and reproduction, the phrase ‘teenage pregnancy’ has come, on its own, to embody a set of powerful meanings. In late-20th-century developed societies, these meanings became increasingly negative, to the point where teenage pregnancy is now shorthand for social pathology.