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A teenage pregnancy is not a tragedy

By Madeleine Bunting
THE GUARDIAN, London
Saturday, Jun 04, 2005, Page 9

ILLUSTRATION: MOUNTAIN PEOPLE

Recent newspaper reports of three teenage pregnancies in one British family were met with the whole country chorusing its horrified disapproval. For right-wingers, it's a sign of the country's moral disintegration. But the left has its own equally harsh critique of teenage pregnancy. The argument used is that a baby ruins a girl's life and brings dire consequences, ranging from educational under-achievement and depression to alcohol misuse, drug abuse and poverty.

"A baby in your teens is a blight on your life" has become the standard government minister line.

The UK's newly-appointed children and families minister Beverley Hughes described these three teen mums as "a tragic loss of opportunity."

Leaving aside the completely atypical case of the family, let's nail one of the most widespread and pernicious misuses of social science. Hughes could not be more wrong: A teenage pregnancy is neither a tragedy nor does it, on average, entail lost opportunities.

But she is not alone, and besides, let's be fair, she's new to the job.

UNICEF WEIGHS IN

Take a recent UNICEF report that compared teenage pregnancy rates across Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development countries. It claimed that "giving birth as a teenager is believed to be bad for the young mother because the statistics suggest that she is more likely to drop out of school, to have no or low qualifications, to be unemployed or low-paid, to live in poor housing conditions, to suffer from depression, and to live on welfare."

"Similarly, the child of a teenage mother is more likely to live in poverty, to grow up without a father, to become a victim of neglect or abuse, to do less well at school, to become involved in crime, use drugs and alcohol," the report states.

Given that kind of misuse of the research, it's not surprising that teenage pregnancy has been demonized as one of the evils of our time.

DON'T MIX APPLES AND ORGANGES

In fact, what some of the most respected experts in the field -- John Ermisch at the Institute of Social and Economic Research at Essex university, and Roger Ingham, director of the Center of Sexual Health at Southampton university -- have found is that if you compare teenage mothers with other girls with a similarly deprived social-economic profiles, bad school experiences and low educational aspirations, the difference in their respective life chances is negligible. You must compare like with like.

The research has meticulously established the factors which exist prior to the teenage pregnancy and what factors are caused by it. In other words, if a teenage mum never holds down a good job, was there already a good chance of that long before the baby?

Ingham's research indicates that there are clear predictors of teen pregnancy: mothers who have low educational aspirations for their daughter at 12; the child has already got into trouble for conduct disorder at school by 10; the child has poor reading ability.

Put such factors together and this is a group of girls who are already highly vulnerable to a range of poor life outcomes -- a baby as a teenager makes very little difference.

Ermisch even tracked cases of girls from similar backgrounds who got pregnant against those who had miscarriages -- there was no difference to a wide range of life outcomes except one: the partner whom the teen mum ends up with at 30 will earn less and that has a knock-on effect on household income.

The other complex area of research is the extent to which social stigma and disapproval create the very problems which earn the stigma. A higher risk of depression, for example, could be a consequence not of the baby per se, but the way the young mother is treated. Poor-quality housing and lack of support can all increase the vulnerability of a young mother. Put those right and the mother can manage.

There is now good evidence in the US that with the right kind of emotional and practical support -- for example, good access to education and childcare -- teenage mothers can catch up by the age of 30 with the average outcomes for their age group -- ie, in comparison with women from all social-economic backgrounds.

So when a girl at 17 decides to go ahead and have a baby, there is no tragedy of lost opportunity other than the local checkout till waiting for her low-paid labor.

BLINKERS ON

Why is it that in British Prime Minister Tony Blair's Labour Party's crusade against teenage pregnancy, it can't recognize that some of these teen mums are making reasonable -- even moral -- decisions about what they value in life, and what they want to do with their lives?

How did opting for baby and motherhood over shelf-stacking ever become a tragedy?

So let's just call a spade a spade. The British government may have good reasons for wanting to reduce teenage pregnancy, but they are not to do with lost opportunities. They are more likely to do with the extra cost to the state of the support required to ensure these vulnerable young mothers can do a good job of parenting their children.

The government might, quite rightly, want to tackle entrenched inter-generational cycles of poverty, but the key to that is educational aspiration; teenage pregnancy is only a consequence of its absence.
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