Dubious Conceptions: The Politics of Teenage Pregnancy. - book reviews

Progressive, The, Jan, 1997 by Ruth Conniff

Another very good book that deals with the sticky topic of sex and politics in American life is Kristin Luker's Dubious Conceptions: The Politics of Teenage Pregnancy (Harvard). Luker provides a useful and intelligent analysis of a highly irrational debate.

Like Mike A. Males in his valuable new book, The Scapegoat Generation: America's War on Adolescents (Common Courage Press), Luker insists that we stop treating teenagers as if they were aliens. Conventional wisdom to the contrary, teenagers behave the way they do largely because of the influence of adults.

Males points out that at least half of all pregnancies among girls fifteen or younger are the responsibility of adult men. "The reluctance of the President and top officials to discuss the ugly truths of most `teenage pregnancy'--the backgrounds of poverty, of sexual abuse, of beatings, of initiation to sex by rape, of impregnation by older males, of abandonment by adult fathers with little child support--forms the chief fiction fueling the political malice termed `welfare reform,"' Males writes.

Luker agrees. Draconian welfare-reform policies that cut benefits and exacerbate poverty will likely make the problem of teen pregnancy worse.

Luker's central point is that "early childbearing doesn't make young women poor; rather, poverty makes women bear children at an early age." It is not enough, she argues, to exhort impoverished young women to delay childbearing in the hope of a better future, because poor young women know that regardless of when they have babies, the outlook for their futures is bleak.

Most provocatively, both Luker and Males suggest that teenage girls who get pregnant may in fact be making a rational choice.

Luker notes that poor women who have babies at an early age can get help from their own mothers, who often do a lot of the child-rearing. Despite public-service announcements that urge young women to wait until they are "ready" to have children, poor women know that they may never be "ready," economically, to fully support a child. Nor do the men in their lives make enough money to help much. It makes sense for young women in this situation to have their children while they still live at home with their parents.

"Early motherhood is increasingly the province of the `left behind'--poor women who realistically know that postponing their first birth is unlikely to lead to a partnership in a good law firm," Luker writes. "The idea that young people would be better off if they worked harder, were more patient, and postponed their childbearing is simply not true."

The question lurking behind the whole discussion is this: Should people who are poor have children at all? Given welfare-reform policy, the answer seems to be no.

Public officials talk about the "perverse incentives" created by welfare--meaning the incentive for poor women to have babies.

Luker refutes the misguided idea that poor women have children in order to get welfare. The decision to have children is much more complicated than that. It has to do with what we value most in life. Poor women do not measure the value of their own lives in terms of "human capital." Having children, while it doesn't make them any richer. is a way of seeking love and fulfillment. But as a society we've come to accept that such goals are "perverse, and that pure, cold materialism is the healthy approach.

Feminists have fought hard to get women into the workforce alongside men. Now we need to fight to make society confront the way motherhood and child-rearing have been so undervalued that having a baby is viewed as an inconvenient indulgence for professional women, and a privilege poor women should not be allowed.