Teen.pdf

A Report to the NationMaggie Gallagher, Principal Investigator The Age of Unwed MothersIs Teen Pregnancy the Problem? This report comes from the Marriage Project of the Institute for American Values.
Maggie Gallagher, the principal investigator, is an affiliate scholar at the Institute and the director of its Marriage Project. The Institute is grateful to Amara Bachu, Douglas J. Besharov, Norval Glenn, Dana Mack, Steven L. Nock, and Maris Vinovskis for their scholarly and editorial suggestions, and to the William H. Donner Foundation for its generous financial support of this initiative. The contributions of other supporters 1999, Institute for American Values. All rights Oil on canvas, 32 X 46 inches. Collection of Sally reserved. No reproduction of the materials con- M. Avery. 1999, Milton Avery Trust/Artists Rights tained herein is permitted without the written per- mission of the Institute for American Values. The Age of Unwed MothersIs Teen Pregnancy the Problem? Why have three decades of intensive national effort to reduce teen pregnancy not been more successful? Largely because for three decades, we have framed theproblem falsely. What we have called our “teen pregnancy” crisis is not really aboutteenagers. Nor is it really about pregnancy. It is about the decline of marriage. What has changed most in recent decades is not who gets pregnant, but who gets married. Demographically, our “teen pregnancy” problem is inseparable fromthe disconnect between marriage and childbearing that increasingly characterizesthe procreative behavior of adults in their 20s. Culturally, the “teen pregnancy” cri-sis stems largely from a widespread ambivalence about marriage, and especiallyabout the importance of marriage when it comes to raising children, that afflictsadults in our society as well as teens.
The majority of unwed births in the United States are to adult women in their 20s. These are not “children having children,” nor are they “Murphy Browns.”Almost three-fifths of all births to unwed teenagers in the U.S. are to young womenwho are either 18 or 19 years old. Since the early 1970s, the proportion of allteenage mothers who conceived their children out of wedlock, but got marriedbefore the birth, has dropped from 47 percent to 16 percent. In choosing unwedmotherhood over marriage, these young women are not so much rebelling against,as responding to, reigning cultural values which strongly discourage early marriage.
Yet the evidence in this report suggests that marriage, even early marriage, is not afate worse than unwed motherhood.
Without a strong commitment to marriage as a life goal and as an essential gift to children, today’s teenagers find it much harder to come up with good reasons tosay “no” to sex, to use birth control conscientiously, to avoid men who are not goodmarriage candidates, or to consider adoption when marriage is not advisable. Forthis reason, more and better progress in reducing teen pregnancy will requirereturning the idea and ideal of marriage to the center of our national discussion.
Regarding teen pregnancy, the key question we face concerns what, if anything,today’s adults intend to tell the next generation about the meaning and importanceof marriage in their own and in their children’s lives.
This report contains five sections. The first introduces the topic and the goals of this inquiry. The second describes how we currently conceive the crisis. The thirdsection proposes that marriage is the missing dimension in our understanding ofcontemporary adolescent childbearing. The fourth section examines public schools’policies affecting pregnant teenagers. The report concludes with recommendationsfor change. TEEN PREGNANCYhas commanded intense national attention for more than a generation. As far back as 1976, the Alan Guttmacher Institute published awidely distributed booklet, “11 Million Teenagers,” proclaiming a teen preg- nancy “epidemic.” Two years later, Congress passed a bill doubling family planningfunds that the U.S. Secretary of Health, Education, and Welfare described as “thecenterpiece of President Carter’s strategy” to combat “the urgent problem” of teenpregnancy.1 Yet until quite recently, despite many successive government and community efforts to reverse the trend, the unwed teen pregnancy rate continued to climb, from23.9 births per 1000 single female teenagers in 1975 to 31.4 in 1985, and to an all-time high of 46.4 in 1994. Nothing that adults said or did seemed to matter. From1975 to 1994, the unmarried teen birth rate almost doubled.2 But in the mid-1990s, something remarkable happened. For the first time in a generation, teen birth rates began to drop. From 1994 through 1997, the unmarriedteen birth rate declined 9 percent, roughly returning to its 1990 level. Between 1991and 1997, the total teen birth rate dropped 16 percent. These declines have beenmodest, but encouragingly broad, a result both of lower unwed teen birth rates inmost ethnic groups and of declines in first births as well as repeat births to teens.3The sharpest drop has occurred among groups facing the highest risks. Between 1991and 1997, Black teenage birth rates, for example, dropped by about 25 percent.4 This recent turnaround is a welcome indication that social problems are not unconquerable. While the causes of social change are always complex, there is goodreason to believe that this recent decline stems at least partly from adult efforts toimprove contraceptive use among high risk teens and to encourage teens to postponesexual activity.5 We now know that concerted efforts by parents, community leaders,schools, and other professionals can make a difference. That’s the good news.
The bad news is that America still faces crisis levels of unwed teen pregnancy.
About ten percent of 15-19 year olds become pregnant each year. More than 40 per-cent of our teenagers will become pregnant before they reach their 20th birthday.
America’s teen birth rate is almost 9 times higher than the Netherlands’, four timeshigher than Sweden’s, more than twice as high as Austria’s, and 65 percent higherthan Great Britain’s.6 Currently in the United States, almost 400,000 babies annuallyare born to unmarried mothers under the age of 20.7 Who are these girls and young women? The image of teenage mothers as dis- proportionately poor, welfare dependent, and minority is somewhat misleading.
Girls and young women from low income, minority, and single-parent families areat far higher risk. But in recent years, young, unwed motherhood has been movingout of the inner city and up the class ladder, affecting more working-class and blue-collar families, including intact families. Even after taking ethnic differences into account, America’s teen birth rate remains quite high. The birth rate for White 15-19 year old females in the UnitedStates is 3.6 percent, more than 40 percent higher than Canada’s teen birth rate.8 And while the unmarried African American teen birth rate today is actually a bit lowerthan it was in 1980, the White teen birth rate has more than doubled since 1980.9 Girls and young women who have babies in their teens typically do come from less advantaged backgrounds. But they are not necessarily the poorest of the poor,with nothing to hope for and nothing to lose. According to an analysis of one large,nationally representative sample, 87 percent of teen moms came from families thathad not been on welfare in the previous two years. The average White teen moth-er went to a school in 8th grade in which almost three-quarters of the students were not poor (that is, were not eligible for the free lunch program); typical Black andHispanic teen moms attended schools in which almost 60 percent of students were not poor.1 0 Moreover, while living with a single parent sharply increases the risk of teenmotherhood,11 more than half of White and Hispanic teen moms lived with both biological parents at least throughthe eighth grade.1 2 Why are so many American teenagers and young women making choices that lead to young, unwed motherhood? Given the intensive attention both to promot-ing contraception and (more lately) to promoting abstinence, why have educators,parents, and community leaders made no more than a small and quite recent dentin the problem of teen pregnancy? In this report, we explore two sets of questions. First, what do adults currently think about teen pregnancy and how are they confronting the problem? In particu-lar, what are today’s adults telling the next generation about why teen pregnancy isa bad idea? Second, how are schools currently dealing with the problem of preg-nant teens? To answer these questions, we examined the academic literature on teen preg- nancy and interviewed experts in the field, paying special attention to studies thatinvestigated the attitudes and experiences of White teen mothers who are not poor.
We read suburban and small town newspapers to get a sense of what new projects— and problems — are currently evident in local schools regarding teen pregnan- cy. We conducted our own interviews with young, White, unwed mothers whosefamilies are not poor, both to uncover how they are treated at school and to under-stand how their own ideas about romance, marriage, sex, birth control, and father-ing may have led them towards unwed teen motherhood. We interviewed schoolpersonnel, primarily nurses and social workers, to ask how they encourage youngpeople to answer the question: “What’s wrong with teen pregnancy?” We talked toschool administrators about whether and how federal laws and regulations wereaffecting the way they deal with the problem of teen pregnancy in their communi-ties. Finally, we looked at a sample of recent high school health textbooks to seewhat they are telling young people about why and how to avoid teen pregnancy. From these sources, we have developed a fairly coherent understanding of how educators and other influential adults currently approach the teen pregnancy prob- WHYSHOULDwe care about teen pregnancy? And how should we care for pregnant teens? Today’s strong, bipartisan consensus against “childrenhaving children” was forged from a convergence of perspectives among a number of philosophically diverse groups: physicians, educators, social workers,feminists, taxpayers, psychologists, family planning advocates, and parents. Today’scommon concern over “teen pregnancy” thus masks diverse and sometimes com-peting conceptual approaches to teen pregnancy that have been adopted by differ-ent segments of society. Why is it a problem if a teenager decides to have a child? Depending on which expert or program leader is being asked, the answer can be one or more of the fol-lowing. She and her baby are more likely to suffer health problems. She is morelikely to drop out of school. She is less likely to achieve the means to support her-self and to advance her career. She and her baby are more likely to become depen-dent on the public purse. She is using a baby to work out psychological issues ofself-esteem or depression. Or finally, she got pregnant unintentionally and thusneeds help in avoiding unplanned pregnancy.
One way that this question is almost never explicitly answered in expert dis- course is: Because she is not married. Yet it is precisely the explosive growth ofunwed childbearing that has largely fueled the public sense of crisis. The teen birthrate is, and has been for many years, much lower today than it was in the 1950s andearly 1960s, when many teens married and began their families young. It is theunwed teen birth rate that has grown rapidly enough to earn the label “epidemic.”Yet too often, we omit this underlying cause of the crisis from our public descrip-tion of it. How we define a problem decisively shapes the range of possible solutions.
What has caused the rise in unmarried teen pregnancy? In America today there aretwo main ways of answering that question. Teen pregnancy is seen either as a con-traceptive crisis or as a premature sexuality crisis. The first paradigm is dominant inwhat might be called the teen pregnancy movement or “industry”: school nurses, ser-vice providers, educators, physicians, mental health professionals, and the authors ofhealth textbooks and teen pregnancy prevention materials. The second conceptualframework has been significantly more popular among the public than the profes-sionals, but, thanks to a 1996 federal law that provides funding for abstinence-onlyeducation, it is also growing in influence within the teen pregnancy movement.
Is “Children Having Children” the Problem? Perhaps one reason why so many young women are ignoring anti-teen preg- nancy messages is that they do not feel that we are talking about them. While thereis a powerful consensus against teen pregnancy, the message we are currently send-ing to the next generation centers on age, not marital status. We may be suggestingto large numbers of older teens, in particular, that our warnings need not apply to For the bulk of today’s teen pregnancy problem is less “children having chil- dren” than increasing numbers of young adult women having babies outside ofmarriage. The majority of unwed births in the United States today are to singlewomen in their 20s — neither “children” nor “Murphy Browns.” Unwed teen moms account for over 30 percent of U.S. babies born outside of marriage. Butunwed teen moms younger than 18 account for only 13 percent of babies bornout of wedlock.1 3 Thus, even arbitrarily confining our concern to mothers under 20, rising rates of teen births are being driven not primarily by minors, but by young women oldenough to vote, sign contracts, and serve in the armed forces. Almost three-fifthsof unwed teen births are to young adult women who are 18 and 19 years old. Moreover, rates of unwed childbearing among these older teens are most sim- ilar not to younger school-age girls, but to adult women in their early 20s.14 Trendsin the birth rate for single 18-19 year olds track quite closely with trends in thebirth rate for single women in their early 20s. Between 1975 and 1994, for exam-ple, the birth rate for unwed 18-19 year olds more than doubled, from 32.5 to 70.1births per 1000. For unwed women in their early 20s during this same period, thebirth rate jumped from 31.2 to 72.2 per 1000. The only noteworthy difference isthat the recent declines in unwed childbearing have been larger among 18 and 19years olds than among women between the ages of 20 and 24. In fact, the unwedbirth rate for White women in their early 20s continues to rise, up two percentsince 1994, and up 136 percent since 1980.1 5 This data is far from definitive, but itdoes suggest that teen pregnancy campaigns may be successful, but only in thelimited goal of persuading more young women to postpone out of wedlock child-bearing until their early twenties. HEREISthe paradox. As a society, we aim a fair amount of public money and many strong words at the problem of “teen pregnancy,” that is, at the376,000 births in one recent year to single teen mothers under the age of 20. Yet we pay comparatively little attention — regarding the 439,000 births that same year to single mothers in their early 20s.1 6 Are we against the former but indifferent to thelatter? If so, what is our reasoning? Consider the prospects for a typical 20- or 22-year-old single mother and her baby. Are they really that much different, or bet-ter, than those facing an 18- or 19-year-old single mother? Just waiting for a few more birthdays to roll around before having a child does not reduce the risk to mother or child by much, at least for older teen moms.
Researchers comparing the fate of sisters, for example, concluded that nationalestimates of the effects of unwed teen childbearing may have been exaggerated.1 7Why? One reason is that many of these young women who avoided “teen” child-bearing then had children out of wedlock in their 20s. Other recent studies havefound that single adult mothers resemble single teen mothers more than they resemble adult married mothers. According to one 1996 study, “adolescent moth-ers experience significantly more mental health problems and significantly less well-being than married adult mothers but report similar levels of psychologicaladjustment when compared to single adult mothers.”1 8 Teen childbearing, as opposed to adult unmarried childbearing, does impose some additional penalties. But the great divide regarding economic status andemotional well-being is clearly between single and married mothers.1 9 How muchwill waiting a few years to become an unwed mother help a teenager economi-cally? When it comes to family income, not much, according to a recent analysis:“The economic situation of older, single childbearers ismeager at best; their situation is much closer to that of teen mothers than that of married childbearers . . . ”2 0 A wealth of evidence accumulated in the 1990s has produced a new consensus among most family scholars that marriage matters. Overall, children raised by singleparents are five times as likely to be poor, twice as like- ly to drop out of school, and two to three times morelikely as adults to commit crimes leading to an incarceration.2 1 These children arealso more likely to be victims of crime, especially child abuse.2 2 Even after con-trolling not only for socioeconomic variables (parental education, occupation,family income, welfare receipt, and race), but also for family process variables(parental warmth, discipline, and time spent with children), “the net effects ofnon-intact family structure on child development outcomes are negative andstrong,” according to Lingxin Hao of Johns Hopkins University.2 3 UrieBronfenbrenner, one of the nation’s leading family scholars, sums it up:“Controlling for associated factors such as low income, children growing up insuch [father-absent] households are at greater risk for experiencing a variety ofbehavioral and educational problems, including extremes of hyperactivity or with-drawal, lack of attentiveness in the classroom, difficulty in deferring gratification,impaired academic achievement, school misbehavior, absenteeism, dropping out,involvement in socially alienated peer groups, and, especially, the so-called‘teenage syndrome’ of behaviors that tend to hang together early and frequent sexual experience, a cynical attitude toward work, adolescentpregnancy, and, in the more extreme cases, drugs, suicide, vandalism, violence,and criminal acts.”2 4 That unmarried birth rates among older teens are so similar to those of women in their early 20s should alert us to an important possibility. Perhaps the teens whoare becoming single mothers are responding not only to specific conditions affect-ing their age group, but also, and even especially, to broader cultural messagesinfluencing all young women. In short, perhaps our “teen pregnancy” problemstems from a larger issue that we have yet to confront. That issue is the weaken-ing of norms connecting marriage to childbearing throughout our society. Are wetransmitting a marriage culture to the next generation? Do we want to? What canwe say or do to encourage more girls and young women to see a good marriage,a committed partner and father, and not just an 18th or a 20th birthday, as the Is Teen Motherhood Mostly a Contraceptive Crisis? Within the expert discourse, the dominant way of constructing the teen preg- nancy crisis over the last two generations has been to view it as a contraceptive cri-sis: the failure of sexually active teens to use effective contraception consistently.
According to a 1995 review of teen pregnancy prevention programs, “the generalapproach is to target contraceptive use among adolescents, to promote the devel-opment of skills and resources conducive to effective contraceptive use, and toaddress barriers to the receipt of contraceptive services.”25 There is considerable evidence that teenagers as a group are inept users of con- traceptives. Teenagers are more likely than older women to use contraceptives spo-radically. About 28 percent of younger teenagers (and 23 percent of 18 and 19 yearolds) who are sexually active either do not use any method of contraception or useit only sporadically.26 But even teens who do use contraceptives experience high failure rates (as do single women in their 20s). In the hands of single teenagers, even the Pill is no guar-antee against pregnancy. One study finds that about 12 percent of poor and work-ing-class single (and not cohabiting) teenagers who rely on oral contraceptives getpregnant within the first 12 months of use. So do almost 23 percent of those girlsand young women who rely on condoms. (For middle-class teens, the contracep-tive failure rate is about 7 percent for Pill users and 13 percent for condom users.)Poor and working-class teens who rely on the Pill or condoms are about four timesmore likely to experience a contraceptive failure in any given year than are middle-class married women in their 30s, the group with the lowest rates of contraceptivefailure.2 7 The risk of out-of-wedlock pregnancy, not small in any one year, rises rapidly when measured with reference to the total number of years that a sexually activegirl or young woman remains unmarried. In 1994, about 21 percent of single, sex-ually active unmarried girls under age 18 got pregnant. So did about 18 percent ofsingle, sexually active 18-19 year old women. About 14 percent of single sexuallyactive minors, and almost 11 percent of sexually active 18-19 year old women hada baby.2 8 “The risk of failure during typical use of reversible contraceptives in theUnited States is not low,” concludes a 1999 study in referring to all women, not just teenagers. About nine percent of women becomepregnant within one year of starting use, and “the typical woman who usesreversible methods of contraception continuously from her 15th to her 45th birth-day will experience 1.8 contraceptive failures.”2 9 These high rates of unintended pregnancy lead many Americans to view better contraceptive education, often including easier access to contraceptives, as the mainsolution to the teen pregnancy crisis. But in light of recent research, it has becomeobvious that our teen pregnancy crisis cannot be understood solely or even pri-marily as a consequence of contraceptive ignorance. As one respected researchersummed it up in a 1999 article in Journal of School Health: “Twenty years of research has informed the field that knowledge level is only weakly related to behavior . . .
and that programs that focus on knowledge acquisition do increase student knowl- edge, but they do not significantly change sexual or contraceptive behavior.”30 Nor is teens’ access to contraceptives the main problem: “Most studies that have been conducted during the past 20 years have indicated that improving access tocontraception did not significantly increase contraceptive use or decrease teen preg-nancy.” Even when schools in high-risk areas dispensed free contraceptives, hiredtrained staff, and provided other health services to insure confidentiality, “school-wide rates of contraceptive use typically did not increase and pregnancy or child-bearing rates did not decrease.”3 1 High contraceptive failure rates are not simply due to ignorance. They must be at least partly a function of care- lessness and, in a larger sense, a function of culture. Thebasic problem for teens is not so much lack of information as it is the missing or ambivalent guidance from adults andthe larger culture, which, together, effectively reduce the motivation of girls and young women to avoid pregnancy.
To be more effective, anti-teen-pregnancy programs mustoffer girls and young women much better and moreauthentic answers to the key question: Why should I wait to have a baby? Those school programs that have had modest but encouraging success concen- trate on providing students with clear, direct guidance, as opposed to values-clarifi-cation or decision-making skills. They combine strong messages in favor of post-poning sexual activity along with contraceptive information, typically stressing com-munication, negotiation, and “refusal” skills for teens.32 There appears to be one exception to this general rule. While contraceptive edu- cation in general has had limited success in combating teen pregnancy, a significantpart of the drop in teen birth rates in the 1990s does seem to be the result ofNorplant. Efforts by medical professionals to get high-risk teens, such as those whohave already had a pregnancy or a baby, to use one of the two new contraceptiveoptions that have vastly lower failure rates — Norplant or the slightly less effective — have met in recent years with measurable success. Repeat pregnancies have been a particular concern for many researchers, physi- cians, and service providers. Without interventions, note two researchers, “nearlyhalf of first-time adolescent mothers become pregnant again within two years.” Yetof all the attempts to prevent or delay these second pregnancies, notes one medicalstudy, “postpartum levonorgestrel implant insertion [i.e., Norplant] is the only inter-vention that has been consistently associated with a significant reduction in therepeated adolescent pregnancy rate in this country.”3 3 The relative effectiveness of Norplant as a method of contraception among high- risk teens can also be seen in a recent study of 100 teen mothers. The predicted rateof pregnancy in one year of postpartum use was just two percent for Norplant users,as against 38 percent for Pill users, even though the two groups did not differ intheir future pregnancy intentions.34 According to the Alan Guttmacher Institute, theuse of long-acting contraceptives may have played “a particularly large role inreducing second pregnancies among teen mothers.”3 5 Even achieving only delays in repeat unwed childbearing may be important for children’s well-being. One new study following 116 first born children of African American school-age mothers in New Haven found that, when these teen mothersdelayed subsequent childbearing for 2.5 years, their female children were lesslikely either to drop out of school or to become teen mothers themselves. Boyswhose mothers delayed further childbearing for five years were more successful inschool at age 12, and less likely to be incarcerated by age 18.3 6 Is Teen Motherhood Mostly a Premature Sexuality Crisis? A less predominant but increasingly politically ascendant approach is to view the teen pregnancy crisis primarily as a teen sexuality crisis, a consequence of thegrowing number of teens who are ignoring moral norms that confine sexual inter-course to married people, or at least to adults. It is certainly true that the proportionof unmarried teenagers who have had sex has risen dramatically. The proportion of16-year-old girls who had ever had intercourse increased from about 8-9 percentduring the 1960s and early 1970s to about 21 percent during the mid-1980s. In theyears 1958 through 1960, only about 27 percent of 18-year-old women had ever hadintercourse, and many of them were married. By 1970-72, about 35 percent of 18-year-old women were no longer virgins. But by the mid-1980s, despite a rapid dropin teen marriage rates, the majority of 18-year-old women were sexually experi-enced.3 7 Currently, about a quarter of U.S. young women, and about one-fifth ofmen, remain virgins through their teen years.38 The likelihood that a teen will have experienced sexual intercourse is affected by a variety of family and neighborhood variables, including the proportion of sin-gle-parent families and the proportion of mothers who work. When it comes todelaying teen sex, reducing opportunity (or temptation) is important. Close super-vision, which is more easily accomplished when teens live in two-parent homes,especially those in which mothers at home supervise after school behavior, increas-es the likelihood that teens, especially young teens, will postpone sexual activity.3 9Indeed, mothers’ abstinence messages appear to be more effective than the samemessages coming from schools.4 0 One study of 751 Black urban young people andtheir mothers, mostly single mothers, found that those teens whose mothers hadexpressed opposition to premarital sex were twice as likely to be virgins as werethe teens whose mothers were more permissive.41 For these reasons, viewing the teen pregnancy crisis as a sexuality crisis has been helpful. In the mid-1990s, a new emphasis on abstinence in schools, commu-nity groups, and churches — such as the Southern Baptists’ “True Love Waits” cam- — appears to have helped reverse what once seemed to be an inexorable rise in the proportion of teens who have had sexual intercourse.4 2 In sum, both the contraceptive and the premature sexuality paradigms have led to useful approaches. A recent study by the Guttmacher Institute concludes that thedrop in teen pregnancy since 1991 is likely the result of both better contraceptivesand a drop in teen sexual activity.43 At the same time, the success of both of theseapproaches has been modest, in part because neither of them directly addresses the heart of the matter: the growing disconnection between marriage and childbearing in the minds and lives of young couples. YOUNGADULTwomen having children is not a new phenomenon. The num- ber of women who had their first child during their teen years was almostthe same in the early 1970s as in the early 1990s. But the proportion of teen moms who conceived their first child out of wedlock has increased signifi-cantly, rising from about 65 percent in 1970-74 to 89 percent in 1990-94. The sin-gle biggest change in recent decades has been the declining proportion of preg-nant single teens who marry.44 Over the past 30 years, two larger social trends have affected teen childbear- ing. First, higher ages at marriage, combined with earlier initiation into sex, haveled to an increasing number of single teens exposed to the risk of premaritalpregnancy for longer periods of time. The second trend is the decreased likeli-hood that a single teenager will either “legitimate” her pregnancy by marrying orgiving the baby up for adoption.
Overall, after holding steady at 15 percent for most of the 1950s, the propor- tion of teen births occurring outside of marriage doubled between 1960 and 1970,from 15 to 31 percent, then doubled again between 1970 and 1990, from 31 to68 percent.4 5 Between 1970 and 1974, for example, almost 47 percent of singleteens expecting their first baby married before the child was born same proportion as three decades earlier (1940-1944). By the early 1990s, the pro-portion of nonmarital teen conceptions that led to marriage had plunged to 16percent.4 6 Currently, nearly 78 percent of teen births occur outside of marriage.47 A dis- proportionate share of this increase has been the result of changes in the behav-ior of White teens. Since 1970, the proportion of births to White teens that areout of wedlock has more than tripled.4 8 The decline has been almost as dramatic among older teens as among those under the age of 18. As recently as the early 1970s, about 75 percent of 18- and19-year-old teen moms were married by the time of the birth. But by the early1980s, that proportion had plunged to 54 percent. By the late 1980s, only 42 per-cent of 18- and 19-year-old mothers were also married.49 Legitimation rates for women in their early 20s have also dropped, though not By the early 1990s, pregnant women in their early 20s were about twice as likely to pick unwed motherhood over marriage as they had been in the early1970s, while women age 18-19 were about three times as likely.5 0 Somehow, girlsand young women in this generation seem to be increasingly convinced that they are old enough to be mothers, but too young to marry. When it comes to insuring that most children grow up in stable, two-parent homes, society’s most important institution is marriage. But when a single youngwoman is pregnant, and marriage is not advisable, a second primary social insti-tution, similarly intended to secure for children the protection of married-couplehomes, is adoption. Culturally, the two institutions are closely connected and, inmany ways, dependent upon one another. Sadly, then, butnot surprisingly, as marriage rates in our society have Between 1971 and 1982, the proportion of unmarried White mothers who released their babies for adoption dropped by more than half, from 18 percent to 7 per-cent. For unmarried Black mothers, the proportion releasing for adoption during this period also dropped inhalf, from a very low two percent to an even lower one percent. “These declinesoccurred,” notes a RAND study, “despite recent data suggesting that relinquish-ment results in better outcomes for the birth mother, including delayed marriage,increased likelihood of employment six and twelve months after the birth, andgreater likelihood of living in a higher-income household.”5 1 By the mid-1980s,the proportion of unmarried White mothers releasing for adoption had droppedto just 3 percent.5 2 What used to be important differences between the propensi-ty of Black and White single mothers to give their babies to adoptive homes haveall but disappeared.
Waiting for What? The Limitations of the “Teen Pregnancy” Approach Despite our intensive campaigns against teen pregnancy, why are single teens more likely to have babies today than they were thirty years ago? Why do somany young adult women today find unwed motherhood either easier to arrangethan early marriage or preferable to early marriage? And why has adoption fall-en so far out of favor? Obviously, the reasons for these changes are varied and complex. But surely some important clues can be found by examining what current teen pregnancyprograms in particular, and today’s adults in general, are actually telling girls andyoung women about the relationship of marriage and adoption to motherhood.
The first thing to notice is that today’s adults seem to be saying remarkably little about these particular issues. Often, they say nothing at all. For example,most teen pregnancy initiatives concentrate almost exclusively on how teensshould behave before they get pregnant, typically focusing on encouraging teenseither to postpone sex or use contraceptives. But once a girl or young woman isactually expecting a child, adult guidance from the larger community, particular- ly regarding marriage and adoption, frequently disappears. In their comprehensive 1995 evaluation of teen pregnancy prevention programs, Kristin Moore and her colleagues find no “formal efforts that espouse legitimizationof a child via marriage when conception occurs outside of wedlock.”5 3 While manyprograms encourage pregnant teens to stay in school, there are few, if any, formalinterventions “that seek to encourage/discourage a specific pregnancy resolutionoption” such as “the occurrence of a birth within . . . marital union.” Moreover:“Only a minority of programs focus on pregnancy resolution decisions, includingabortion, marriage, and adoption; we found only one empirical evaluation of a preg-nancy resolution program.”54 Our interviews with teen mothers, as well as interviews conducted by others, suggest that most teen moms quite clearly feel the disapproval of society. But formany girls and young women, the social stigma apparently has less to do with theirmarital status than with their age. Obviously, then, the stigma is felt more acutely byyounger teens. “I don’t want to be a statistic fare,” one college-bound 16-year-old mother told the my daughter as good a life as someone older would.”55 Another teenager, defend-ing her decision to become a mother, also frames the issue in terms of age: “I don’tsee myself as a child. I am practically 18. I’m almost old enough to vote, and I’mold enough to drive.”56 ATTHE“Teen Center,” a program for pregnant and parenting teens located in the basement of a high school in an affluent university community,researchers studied 50 teen mothers and three teen fathers. Nearly 80 per- cent of the program participants were White; most came from lower-middle orworking-class families. “The culture at the Teen Center,” reports one researcher,“was characterized largely by its competitive nature. The teens tried to prove thatthey were better parents than other parents, not only other teenagers but also thosewho delay having children until their 20s, 30s, and 40s . . . By ‘winning’ these com-petitions, the teens hoped to combat the negative image associated with early child-bearing.” Fifteen year old Tracy, for example, looks down on older parents: “Like,they do what my parents did, with having lots of rules and being really strict.”5 7 Inour interviews, we found that many older teen mothers spontaneously contrastedtheir situations with that of younger, school-age mothers, who are viewed by these18-19 year olds as the real “teen pregnancy” problem. Isn’t it clear that something rather important is missing from the world view of these young mothers? Yet in their insistence on framing the issue as one of age,these young people are clearly imitating the experts and other grown-ups, who haveurged them to wait before having babies, while remaining unusually vague aboutwhat exactly they should be waiting for.
What’s wrong with a teenager having a baby? Examining the ways in which school officials and the relevant written material for teenagers seek to answer thisquestion, two themes stand out. First, educators consistently make age the primary issue. Moreover, they describe what they view as age-related risks primarily in med- — the very terms most likely to imply that these consid- erations do not necessarily or even obviously apply to older teens, who eitheralready have, or soon will have, a high school diploma, and who are already phys-ically mature enough to carry a child.
Second, the case presented to teenagers for avoiding pregnancy focuses nar- rowly and exclusively on the teenager herself. All the reasons revolve around “whatwill happen to me.” Your education will suffer. Your career will be set back. You’llbe overburdened and stressed. You won’t have time for fun and recreation. It “canbe very stressful to care for a helpless baby,” according toone high school health textbook. Such stress can interfere with enjoyable activities like dating, friends, movies, orrelaxing at home.58 A school nurse in Maine told us: “I try to tell the girls they’re compromising their own life. They are too valuableto interfere with their own growth and education at this point.”5 9 A typical high school health textbook gives threereasons why teen motherhood is a bad idea. It raises the chances that your babywill be born with low birth weight or other medical problems. It increases your riskof future health and learning problems. And it may cause you to drop out of school.
According to this textbook, moreover, it is primarily dropping out of school, ratherthan teen childbearing itself, that “increases the risk for continued poverty and childabuse and neglect.”60 Obviously, since teen childbearing frequently does lead to girls dropping out of school, the emphasis on the importance of staying in school is understandable. Butwhat is the basic message? Apparently, as long as you stay in school and stay healthy, having a baby has few long-term harmful consequences, or at least few consequences that the author-ities are able to specify. For older teens, especially, the message thus becomes fair-ly clear: If you are confident about a healthy delivery and a high school schooldiploma, you are probably not who the textbook authors and the other adults havein mind when they fret about the “teen pregnancy” problem. Here is our thesis. In restricting the conversation on teen pregnancy to narrow con- something important about the way all people, even teenagers, think. When educatorsact as if teenagers lack the capacity for moral realism, and do not need their mostimportant choices (such as whether and when to bring a child into the world) to makemoral sense, they are underestimating teenagers, thereby effectively miseducatingthem. By ignoring the best interests of the child in pretending that the most importantethical questions facing these teenagers do not even exist, these educators are neglect-ing some of the basic determinants of human motivation and action. As a result, theyare restricting themselves to narrow and ultimately unpersuasive arguments.
If avoiding pregnancy is consistently presented to teenagers as a matter of self- interest, how can adults complain, or even act surprised, when girls and young women decide that having a baby is essentially a matter of personal preference?“If they want to be moms, that’s their choice,” says an Idaho teenager whose sis-ter had a baby in high school.6 1 Just because being a teenage mom may be hard,doesn’t make it wrong. It all depends on how much you are willing to give up foryour child.
ABSENTADULTguidance, this view of the matter rings true for many young Of course we can. “A lot depends on how willing the teenagers are to give up their free time,” says one 14- year-old Maryland boy who participated in a roundtable discussion on the subject.
“Teenagers have just as good a chance to be good parents as adults . . . There areplenty of adults who are horrible parents, and there are horrible teenage parents,too.” Here is a 16-year-old girl from California: “If I were to have a child now, Iknow I’d definitely be a better parent than mine were to me.” And a 15-year-oldgirl from North Dakota: “Teenagers can be wonderful parents . . . I think witheffort and affection anyone can become a good parent.”6 2 There are numerous other problems, including scholarly problems, with limit- ing ourselves to what economists call an “opportunity cost” model for conceptu-alizing the risks of teen pregnancy. As Naomi B. Farber puts it, the economicmodel “does not offer insights into why non-poor Black and White teens mightchoose to become single mothers.”63 Indeed, we are unaware of any researchshowing why, in a purely rational-choice model of behavior, motherhood evermakes sense, at least for women interested primarily in maximizing education,career, and leisure opportunities.6 4 At any age, motherhood imposes both direct costs and opportunity costs on women. Especially in modern societies, a child costs a lot and, excepting the cur-rency of love, pays back little or nothing. Yet most women who are mothers viewthese costs as a small price to pay for motherhood. So do most young unwedmothers.
If material self-interest is the only criterion, pregnant teenagers who choose to bear a child rather than have an abortion have already rejected the most “rational”choice available to them. Young women who decide to be mothers are clearly act-ing in pursuit of a different sort of goal. This may help to shed light on the con-clusion of a recent scholarly review: “Although the Opportunity Cost hypothesis isgenerally proposed as an explanation for adolescent sexual and fertility behavior,the empirical evidence in support of this theory is limited and inconclusive.”6 5 Why is this theory flawed? Because in large measure, unwed teenagers who bear children are drawn by the same benefits, most of them decidedly extra-eco-nomic, that draw older, married women into motherhood. The maternal bond,similar to the sexual bond, is partly defined by the deeply human drive to tran-scend the self, to become capable of both giving and receiving love. At any age, much of the attraction of motherhood lies in this realm of sexual, moral, and emo- tional meaning. In one study, White teen mothers, despite the obvious hardships,actually reported greater enjoyment of life and a more positive sense of well-beingthan childless teens: “The adolescent mothers were developing a stronger purposefor living since the births of their infants.”6 6 This constant adult emphasis on teenagers’ material self-interest, insofar as it leaves an ethical vacuum, may actually enhance the attractiveness of unwed moth-erhood for some teenagers. Teen mothers, confronted by adults who urge them tobe selfish, can take the high road. They can admire them-selves for being good mothers, willing to sacrifice fortheir babies. “Today, pregnant teenagers are even begin- ning to be viewed by some of their peers as role mod-els,” reported the New York Times in 1993 after April Schuldt of Eau Claire, Wisconsin, five months pregnant,was elected her school’s homecoming queen. Said one ofher classmates: “‘You look at a girl who’s pregnant or hasa baby and think ‘she’s a better person than me, someone who is strong.’”6 7 In onestudy of teen mothers who never considered releasing their babies for adoption,about 18 percent of the teenagers said that a mother who gives up her baby foradoption was being “selfish.” About 31 percent said that these mothers were“abandoning the baby.”6 8 One powerful question is, “What is in my best interests?” But another ques- tion, rarely asked by adults, but surely at least as powerful, is, “What would agood mother do?” One study asked pregnant teens what might make them con-sider adoption. Relatively few of the teenagers cited financial or other practicalconsiderations. Among White pregnant teens, for example, only 23 percent saidthat they would consider adoption if “it would help you achieve your career goalsand financial security.” Only 19 percent were interested in adoption if “it wouldhelp you stay off welfare.” These teenagers were stirred much more dramaticallyby the idea that adoption might be in the best interests of the child. Among theWhite teens, 58 percent said they would consider adoption if they believed thatthe baby “would have a better chance in life with another family.”6 9 Expert and adult rhetoric notwithstanding, teen mothers themselves consis- tently describe their decision-making in moral terms. Reports Naomi Farber:“[B]ecoming a mother often represented what they considered to be the most eth-ical, responsible decision, one congruent with personal or familial values andbeliefs about abortion and adoption, the sanctity of life and family.”7 0 Anotherstudy of 430 young unwed mothers, about half of whom placed a baby for adop-tion, concludes: “[W]hether women plan to place or parent, they see their ownchoice as most likely to benefit the baby’s emotional growth and development.”Young women who choose to keep their babies acknowledge that adoption mightproduce financial advantages for their babies, but they believe that a mother’s lovematters more.
Is There a Stigma Against Unwed Childbearing? Today’s adults are increasingly willing and able to deliver strong messages to teenagers about sexual intercourse and contraception. Yet the same adults are typi-cally shy, almost tongue-tied, when it comes to advising a girl or young woman onwhat to do after she is pregnant, when the decision against abortion has alreadybeen made, and when the issue at stake is the life prospects of a child. This curious reticence reflects what some people, mostly conservatives, call the decline of social stigma, and what others, mostly liberals, call the growing toleranceof diversity. But everyone seems to agree on what is happening. Young motherstoday are less likely to be or get married, and less likely to release their babies foradoption, primarily because social pressure no longer forces them into these tradi-tional patterns of behavior. Is everyone right? Yes and no. In opinion polls, Americans give somewhat contradictory answers about marriage. Marriage remains a highly valued aspiration among all ages andraces. Most young people report that they want to marry. Almost 95 percent of col-lege freshman in 1997 said that they hope to get married. Only three percent saythat they do not hope to marry.7 2 The proportion of high school seniors who ratehaving a good marriage and family life as “extremely important” has actually risenslightly since the 1970s, and now stands at about 83 percent of girls and 73 percentof boys.7 3 Most young adults also take a dim view of divorce. More than 70 percent of young adults, for example, agree that “children do better with both parents.”Two-thirds agree that “when parents divorce, children develop permanent emo-tional problems.” More than 70 percent believe that divorcing couples do not tryhard enough to save their marriages; about 76 percent believe that currentdivorce laws are too lax.74 Some of these attitudes may stem partly from person-al experience. A 1990 survey of young adults age 18-29 whose parents haddivorced found that 42 percent say that their parents’ divorce has affected them“a great deal.”7 5 When it comes to their own families, Americans still clearly disapprove of unwed childbearing. Only about 14 percent of U.S. women in 1989 said that theywould consider it acceptable for their daughter to bear a child without being mar-ried.7 6 While Black adults are somewhat more accepting than Whites in thisregard, only 28.5 percent of African American adults say that they would consid-er it acceptable for their own daughter to have a child while unmarried.7 7Interviewing 28 unwed teen mothers in Chicago, Naomi Farber reports: “Oneconsistent pattern was the overwhelmingly negative reactions of the Black mid-dle-class and working-class teens and their families, ranging from disappointedshock to fury . . .” The White teens she interviewed typically described their par-ents’ reactions as “unhappy, concerned, and disappointed.”78 One White teen mother whom we interviewed put it this way: “‘Oh my god, oh my god, my parents are going to kill me!’ is the first thing I thought.” And a family drama did ensue: “My dad went straight to the bathroom and puked . . .
He freaked out because we weren’t married. We weren’t doing right.”7 9 Reports like these represent a challenge to the prevailing view about the decline of stigma. Clearly, most teens who get pregnant believe, correctly, that their parentswill disapprove intensely. Moreover, few teens describe their unwed conceptions asa choice. Asked whether or not they intended to get pregnant, the overwhelmingmajority of young unwed mothers say “no.” In 1987, only 11 percent of births tounmarried teens were “intended.”80 daughters, adult Americans have become decidedly moretolerant. In 1974, about 68 percent of women and 64 per- cent of men believed that it should be illegal for adults to have children without being married. By 1998, that figurehad dropped to about 48 percent of all adults. In 1974, about 31 percent of adults agreed that “there is no reasonwhy single women shouldn’t have children.” By 1985, the figure had jumped to 47percent.81 Moreover, despite their desire for marriage and their dislike of divorce, younger people today are even more permissive about unwed childbearing than older people.
In one poll, a majority of teens agreed that people who decide to raise a child out ofwedlock are either “doing their own thing and not affecting anyone else” or, evenmore amazingly, “experimenting with a worthwhile alternative lifestyle.”8 2 When U.S.
teenage girls today are asked whether they personally would consider having a childwithout being married, fewer than half answer unambiguously “no.”8 3 Today’s teenagers are clearly internalizing and personalizing a tolerance for unmarried childbearing. Not surprisingly, a large body of scholarly literature suggeststhat, even after controlling for family characteristics, attitudes about the acceptabilityof unwed childbearing have a powerful, independent effect on the likelihood that ayoung woman will experience an out-of-wedlock pregnancy.84 Taken together, these data suggest that the best word to sum up our society’s cur- rent approach to unwed childbearing is: ambivalence. Yet societal ambivalence maybe enough to tip the scales decisively in the direction of early, unwed motherhood.
After all, for unwed childbearing to spread, it is not necessary for girls actively to favorunwed childbearing. All that is necessary is for them to stop disapproving of it. As one recent survey of the literature of teen childbearing puts it: “Wanting a child or feeling ambivalent about having a child have both been found to predict having abirth.” In a study of Black urban girls under age 18 who went to a clinic for a preg-nancy test, only those girls who firmly did not want to become pregnant in fact hada lower probability of having a child during the next 18 months. Another study of highschool sophomore girls found that those girls who were unwilling firmly to rule outhaving a child outside of marriage were in fact significantly more likely to have a non-marital birth in the next two years.8 5 As the scholars put it: “The rate of conceptionassociated with ambivalence towards childbearing has been shown to be as high as that associated with a positive desire for a child.86 The failure of some parents to make their general disapproval explicit may also play a role. When teens in Battle Mountain, Nevada jokingly devoted a page in theirclass yearbook to profiling their pregnant classmates, they seemed to be surprisedthat many adults in the community disapproved. The yearbook staff had discussedand approved the photos. Teen motherhood is “something they’re pretty used toand it’s not any big deal to them,” reported Debbie Evans, the yearbook staff’s fac-ulty adviser.87 Battle Mountain is a blue-collar, mostly White community. In the 1990s, teen pregnancy came to be seen as a serious local problem. So when the pictures ofpregnant students appeared in the yearbook, it “did create a controversy in town,”acknowledges Carol Hensley, a parent and a member of the local Community ActionTeam for the Prevention of Teen Pregnancy. Yet: “The school nurse felt, in the end,it was a positive experience. Kids were upset to find we adults disapproved of theidea. That was a positive outcome. They learned the community doesn’t necessari-ly approve.”8 8 This type of ambivalence and tentativity bearing is wrong, sort of, an opinion with which the students seem only mildlyacquainted — seems to be increasingly common. Consider one sample of White junior high school students from two relatively affluent communities in rural Ohio.
These very young teenagers do not see any special advantages to having a child asa single teen, but neither do they detect any great disadvantages.
For example, these students were evenly divided as to whether a pregnancy would cause a rift with their romantic partner. They also split evenly over whetherbecoming a teen parent would keep them from becoming a successful adult. Aboutone in four were not sure whether, if their partner wanted to have sex and therewas no birth control, they would say “no” just to avoid getting pregnant.8 9 As traditional codes of sexual and procreative conduct weaken, it appears that young people do not so much abandon moral codes altogether as they create theirown out of whatever material is at hand. But unlike older marriage norms, thesenew sex codes often fail to orient young people’s behavior toward pro-social ends.
For example, in a racially mixed New York City high school for older troubled teens,one teacher reports that his male students have invented names to describe variousversions of sexual intimacy outside of marriage. A “wifey” is a boy’s main girlfriend.
A “shorty” is a second-string girlfriend, one who may seek to become a “wifey.” Agirl who is “cheese” is sexually available with no strings attached.9 0 According to a study of teen sexuality in a White, working-class Philadelphia neighborhood in which a majority of White births are out of wedlock, teenagersmake sharp distinctions between different types of sexual behavior. For example:“The most common reason for not using birth control among these youths is thatunprotected sex is a pledge of intimacy and trust which elevates [simple intercourse] to ‘making love.’” Consequently, concludes the ethnographer, these teens “believe in ‘natural sex’ as an expression of romantic love and commitment. Many teens in this study imbued steady relationships with a sanctity which sharply contrasted withtheir matter-of-fact portrayal of rampant casual sex.”9 1 For some young people, unprotected sex has apparently replaced the marriage proposal as the ultimate expression of romantic love. This cultural shift has beenassisted in part by high rates of parental divorce. In a marriage culture, where mar-riage is typically for keeps, the marriage vow is the ultimate expression of love. Butin a divorce culture, where confidence in lasting marriage is low, risking pregnan-cy and disease is now viewed by many girls and youngwomen as the ultimate in self-giving.92 Why should they hold themselves back? What else is there? Why do the dreams and desires of young pregnant women today so often fail to include a husband? Even iffewer pregnant women today are pushed into marriage by social pressure, why areso few into marriage by the powerful advantages, both for themselves and their children, of marriage over unwed motherhood? It’s not that young unwed mothers are hostile to or uninterested in marriage. In a study of a nationally representative sample of young people, drawn from theNational Longitudinal Survey of Youth, unmarried mothers were found to be no lessinterested in marriage than women who had not experienced a premarital birth.9 3Despite the prevalence of casual sex, young women still tend to have the babies ofmen with whom they are in love. One study finds that, even though most school-age mothers had sex the first time for reasons other than love, more than 80 percent of both Black and White teenmothers said that they were in love with their partners at the time of conception.
Most of the mothers hoped to marry the father.9 4 A recent report on fragile families— poor inner-city, unwed, minority couples with children of these couples, questioned soon after the baby’s birth, say that there is at least afifty-fifty chance they will marry.95 Another study of teen parents from the Pacific Northwest, the majority of whom were White and from homes that were not currently welfare-dependent, finds thatthree-fourths of these teen mothers were either “planning to marry” or “goingsteady” with the father at the time of the birth. Yet most of them, of course, do notget married.9 6 In another sample of mostly White, working-class, rural teen mothers,about one in five described herself as “engaged.” Many were cohabiting with thefathers of their children.9 7 Why aren’t they wed? What are they waiting for? What encourages so many young women to fall in love with men, to have babies with them, and to live with them, but to stop short of get-ting married? The data clearly show that the dream of marriage remains powerful, evenfor girls and young women in disadvantaged circumstances. But with each passingyear, fewer young women, especially young mothers, realize this dream. Current research, in our view, has not adequately examined or explained this phenomenon.
Perhaps some of these mothers cannot convince the fathers to marry. One study argues that, following the legalization of abortion in the early 1970s, many pregnantwomen who wanted marriage became less able to persuade their partners to seethings their way.9 8 On the other hand, in another study of a group of White unwedteen mothers, about 44 percent of the teens said that they and their boyfriends hadjointly considered marriage, but rejected it. Only 18 percent of these teen mothersreported that they had wanted to get married, but that the fathers had refused.
Nearly 30 percent said that they had never considered marriage.9 9 Economic factors clearly play at least some role in the movement away from marriage and toward cohabitation. For example, many researchers have argued thatthe declining economic prospects facing many young, poorly educated, Black maleshave contributed to lower rates of marriage and higher rates of divorce amongAfrican Americans. As William Julius Wilson recently put it: “The declining marriagerates among inner-city Black parents is a function not simply of increased econom-ic marginality, or of changing attitudes towards sex and marriage, but of the inter-action between the two.”100 Current tax and welfare policies also contain numerous disincentives for mar- riage.1 0 1 In our interviews, some White teen mothers told us that they are delayingmarriage until they complete their vocational education, which for many youngmothers would be impossible without means tuition, medical care, and child care costs become ineligible were they to marry an employable man. Some research also suggests that, while welfare benefits may not affect the like- lihood that a single female will become pregnant, they do reduce the likelihood asingle pregnant woman will marry the father of her child.102 One study also finds thatreceipt of welfare permanently reduces the likelihood an unwed mother will evermarry, even though there is no evidence that welfare recipients, compared to otherwomen, have less desire for marriage.103 In short, some poor and working-class cou-ples may be substituting informal unions for legal marriages at least partly in orderto maintain family income.
At the same time, however, why and to what degree money shapes family behavior must be understood within broader cultural contexts. Especially among theworking poor, wage rates matter. But so do subtle changes in values that are at leastpartly independent of wage rates. “Can’t play house” — is what a number of young Black men in Philadelphia recently told ElijahAnderson when he asked them why they were single.104 In part, these men arereporting a mundane economic fact. And in part, they are proffering a philosophy,describing a distinctive perspective on the meaning of marriage.
These young men seem to view marriage as a desirable but expensive con- — a luxury that you should postpone until you can afford it. White, working- and middle-class adults in their 20s seem increasingly to share this same philosophy. According to a study of non-college graduates in New Jersey by David Popenoe and Barbara Dafoe Whitehead, young adult women, in particular, “associ-ate marriage readiness with achieving certain economic goals. They place a high pri-ority on owning a home in a good neighborhood as an important personal goal, andsome suggested that this goal should be reached before marriage . . . there is littlesupport for the idea that you should marry and then struggle together to build a nestand nest egg. The nest and nest egg should come before marriage.” Several youngwomen told Popenoe and Whitehead that they would consider having children ontheir own if they did not find a suitable partner. Asked ifsuch a decision would require lowering their economic expectations, some of the young women reminded theresearchers that their parents would “be there for me.”105 exaggerated financial prerequisites for marriage, combinedwith what appears to be relative indifference toward the economic costs of unwed motherhood — stems fromyoung people’s intense desire to avoid divorce. Remember, these are the childrenof the divorce revolution. An unprecedented proportion of them have personallyexperienced, from a child’s perspective, the acute pain of divorce. If avoiding or atleast postponing marriage will reduce the chances of divorce, even at the cost ofenduring the economic and other hardships of single parenthood, then many ofthese young people may consider it a price worth paying. One infrequently acknowledged reason why fewer young mothers get married these days is that they are actively discouraged from doing so. As a society, our dis-approval of early marriage has become ever sharper and more powerful, while ourworries about unwed parenthood have become comparatively vague. In brief, per-haps young unwed mothers are not so much rebelling against, as conforming to,prevailing social norms. Consider the extreme scarcity of community and church programs aimed at helping unwed couples with children create good marriages. (Have you ever comeacross one?) Surely this absence is largely the result of overwhelming expert andcommunity disapproval of early marriage as an answer to the risks posed by non-marital pregnancies. In these sorts of ways, our campaign against teen marriage hasbeen much more thorough, and far more successful, than our campaign against teenpregnancy. As Maris Vinovskis points out, researchers and other experts during the past 25 years have actively discouraged looking at early marriage as anything other than aserious social problem, despite the relative lack of data comparing the consequencesof early marriage to the consequences of early unwed motherhood. Here is a 1973conclusion, typical and quite speculative, from two influential researchers: “[E]arlymarriages have not proved stable . . . It therefore appears unwise to encourageteenagers to marry to legalize their sexual activity or their offspring. The rapid mak- ing and dissolution of a marriage with all its legal and financial complications may be more of a psychic trauma to the mother and her child than an attempt to raise achild within her parent’s home or independently, or attempt to live unmarried in atemporary but loving relationship with a man.”106 Similarly, a social worker in a home for pregnant girls reported in 1972 that “the feeling here is that an early marriage . . . is not advisable.”107 School counselors have also made preventing marriage one of their explicit goals when counseling pregnant students. A 1973 paper on school-based programsfor pregnant teens proudly asserts that “counseling services . . . can reduce the num-ber of inappropriate marriages, diminish the number of repeat pregnancies, andhelp direct young mothers toward more satisfying lives.”108 More recently, a 1992RAND study reports that many educators “applaud the decreasing incidence of mar-riage,” citing studies “indicating that early and precipitous marriage usually worsensthe long-term outlook for the teenage mother and her child.”109 In fact, these repeated assertions notwithstanding, and especially given that early marriage remains relatively common for White and Hispanic teen mothers,researchers in the 1990s have taken surprisingly little interest in examining how mar-riage can affect outcomes for teen mothers and their children, especially older teens.
After all, a slight majority of White teen mothers, and almost 40 percent of Hispanicteen mothers, currently marry before or soon after the child’s birth.110 Yet the costsand benefits of early marriage versus unwed motherhood are relatively unstudied. Much of the research on teen pregnancy outcomes omits marriage from the range of variables to be investigated.111 Similarly, much of the research cited by anti-early-marriage writers fails to distinguish between older and younger teen marriages,or between early marriages undertaken to give a baby a two-parent home and thestill substantial fraction of teen marriages that take place without children.112 Whythis lack of scholarly curiosity? And given the relative scarcity of reliable evidence,whence comes this seemingly reflexive hostility to the notion that a young mothermight consider marrying the father of her child? INTHE1950s, the age of first marriage in the U.S. dropped significantly. Reaction among opinion elites was varied, but most of it leaned in one direction. By the1960s and 1970s, many feminists were criticizing early marriages as homemaker traps that effectively derailed women’s educational and career opportunities. Expertsworried about overpopulation frowned at the link between early marriage and larg-er families. People worried about rising divorce rates pointed out that teen mar-riages, especially those following a premarital pregnancy, are unusually prone todivorce. Compounding all these cultural trends, especially beginning in the 1970s,efforts to lighten the stigma against unwed childbearing increasingly took the formof stigmatizing early marriage. Or marriage for the “wrong” reasons. Or sometimesjust marriage itself. From the early 1970s to the mid 1980s, with shocking speed, the United States changed from a marriage culture to a divorce culture. Philosophically, a new world was born. “I knew I was never going to get married,” an affluent single mother, New York Times in 1972: “It’s too great a leap of faith.
It would be the end of me. I don’t want to be assimilated.”113 That same year, aBaptist minister whose daughter just had an out-of-wedlock child told his congre-gation that he is proud of his daughter’s “realistic and thoroughly human attitude”:“[The child’s] mother and father made the decision thoughtfully and deliberately,not to marry . . . the two young people decided against marriage, feeling, amongother things, that to get married just for the child’s sake was not adequate groundsfor a healthy marriage.”1 1 4 These attitudes have been mainstream for many years now. Moreover, in the 1990s, the higher the income and social class, the lower the likelihood of an early marriage.
For example, having a highly educated mother today low- ers the likelihood that a pregnant teen will get married.115 In earlier generations, daughters of single parents wereless likely than daughters from intact families to legitimate a pregnancy by getting married. In recent years, that gap Certainly, the experts’ current disapproval of early mar- riage is hard to miss. Here is an author writing in 1994 in a Catholic religious jour-nal: “Surely teen-age weddings are one of the most consistent and preventable mis-takes made in marriage today.”117 Here is a 1996 high school health textbook: Earlymarriage “can be disastrous.” Married teens “often feel like social outcasts.” Theydon’t fit in with their peers, and they are likely to “blame each other for their unhap-piness,” since they are too young to have learned “effective ways to resolve con-flicts.”118 Many parents seem to agree with this general assessment, actively discouraging their pregnant teenage daughters from considering marriage. Part of the reason, ofcourse, is that some of these girls and young women are impregnated by boyfriendswho are, to speak with moderation, uninspiring candidates for marriage. But someof this parental sentiment also seems to stem from the fear that marriage will hurttheir daughter’s educational and career prospects, and, perhaps relatedly, from theconviction that they, the pregnant girl’s parents, are financially more capable thanthe father of supporting the child.
All of which may be true enough. But why must a young pregnant woman, especially one who is already past high school, so often choose between the sup-port of marriage and the support of her family? Indeed, why must she choosebetween marriage and career aspirations? Marriage: A Fate Worse Than . . . Unwed Motherhood? Research on the effects of early marriage on educational and employment out- comes for young mothers is too sparse to yield definitive conclusions. One recentstudy finds that school-age pregnant teens who marry before birth are not signifi-cantly less likely to graduate from high school, or go on to college, than are unwedschool-age mothers. School-age mothers who marry after birth, however, are only half as likely as single teen mothers to get a high school diploma.119 Another analysis of high school students in 1972 found that marriage was more detrimental than parenthood to a woman’s likelihood of enrolling in college,although, 25 months after the wedding, the negative effects of marriage haddeclined substantially.1 2 0 A Canadian study looking at women at age 30 found thatmothers who married before age 20 had lower educational attainments than singleteen moms. But lower educational achievement among early-married moms did notnecessarily translate into lower labor force participation or career achievement atage 30.1 2 1 Little research has looked specifically at how marriages may affect older teen mothers who are already past typical high school age. One 1989 study, focusing ongirls and young women who married at or before age 18, finds that marriage doesnot impose any more long-term career or education disadvantages than eitherremaining single or postponing marriage into the 20s.122 A study from the late 1980sbased on nationally representative data concludes: “[T]een parenthood alone great-ly reduced the likelihood of school completion, but early marriage, especially forWhites and Hispanics, did not increase the deleterious effect significantly.”123 RESEARCHTOdate suggests that it is primarily early childbearing, with or with- out marriage, that reduces short-term educational and employment attain-ments for mothers. This general conclusion is consistent with a larger body of research suggesting that the comparatively lower earnings of adult women in thelabor market are attributable primarily to parental status, not marital status.124 Clearly,the common image of early marriage as typically a “disaster” is not supported by theweight of evidence. Indeed, one study finds that high educational aspirationsincrease the chances that an unwed pregnant teenager will marry prior to thebirth.125 Another study suggests that marriage itself has little or no effect on the like-lihood of rapid repeat childbearing.126 Moreover, the growing practice among young people of substituting cohabita- — what our previously quoted optimistic researchers from 1973 called the “attempt to live unmarried in a temporary but loving relationship with aman” — has turned out to be a remarkably poor bargain from the 1990s perspec- tive of young mothers and their children. For example, married women are less like-ly than cohabitors to be victims of domestic violence. This finding does not simplyreflect what scholars call “selection effects”: the likelihood that people who are lessprone to violence are also more likely to marry instead of cohabit. Getting marrieditself seems to reduce levels of aggression in the male-female relationship.127 To takeanother example, even after controlling for income, rates of contraceptive failureamong cohabiting teens are far higher than those among married teens. About 32percent of lower-income cohabiting teens who use the Pill get pregnant within thefirst 12 months of use, compared to nine percent of similar married teens.1 2 8 When early marriages survive, the benefits to a young woman are substantial.
Most obviously, she benefits from her husband’s earnings and the gradual accumu- lation of wealth that is typical of married couples, but not cohabiting couples, and The independent importance of marriage in increasing the incomes of young mothers is suggested by a national study of single women age 16-22 who had theirfirst birth in the 1970s and early 1980s. Five to seven years later, when those chil-dren were entering school, fewer than a third of these mothers were generatingenough income on their own (including child support payments and help from rel-atives) to avoid poverty. The mother’s age at birth seemed to have no effect: moth-ers who had first given birth in their early 20s were no better (or worse) off thanmothers who had first given birth as teenagers.
Financially, for this group of mothers, the great divide was between the roughly 50 percent who had married andthe 50 percent who had not. When husbands’ earnings were taken into account, the proportion of these mothers who were able to avoid poverty increased from less thana third to more than 60 percent. Even though only half of the women had married, husbands’ earnings caused the average annual family income for the sample as a wholeto more than double.130 For children, as well, the advantages stemming from a mother’s choice of mar- riage over unwed motherhood are impressive. Even brief marriages may yield ben-efits for children. For example, marriage seems to protect young mothers againstdepression. One nationally representative study finds that, among White 18 and 19year olds, about 41 percent of unmarried, first-time mothers reported many symp-toms of depression, compared to 28 percent of married, primiparous mothers of thatage.131 Maternal depression is a significant risk factor for children, often leading toproblems in adjustment that may linger for years after the mother’s recovery.1 3 2 Can teen marriages succeed? Several studies suggest that, even in the most dis- advantaged circumstances, a surprising number of young marriages do succeed. Inone study, 85 percent of all 18- and 19-year-old brides were still living with theirhusbands five years later.1 3 3 Another analysis finds that, among Whites, 75 percentof young pregnant women who married before the birth were still married tenyears later.134 In Frank Furstenberg’s longitudinal study of a sample of mostly Black, poor, urban teen mothers in Baltimore, early marriages often played a role in helpingteen mothers to avoid welfare dependency and achieve middle-class economic sta-tus. Overall, about 40 percent of these mothers married, either before or soon afterthe birth. Seventy percent of these marriages began with unwed pregnancies or births, among mostly disadvantaged women introubled neighborhoods and had the bad fortune to be launched during a time inwhich the entire society was undergoing a profound divorce revolution ended in divorce or separation by the time the child had reached age 16. But inter-estingly enough, 30 percent of these marriages survived.135 Teen marriages as a whole, especially those involving older teens, are signifi- cantly more likely to succeed than many Americans, including many experts, seem Oddly enough in our gender-conscious era, our society’s nearly categorical hostility to marriage for older pregnant teens, as well as our deep and growingskepticism about marriage for adult pregnant women in their early 20s, frequent-ly fails to acknowledge the importance of gender differences. A young man whogets his girlfriend pregnant, but declines to marry on the grounds that he is tooyoung, will typically enjoy ample opportunities in the coming years, as he “growsup,” to enter into a lower-risk marriage with another woman. The same cannot besaid for the girlfriend. Entering into single motherhood, as against marriage, islikely permanently to compromise her future prospects for marriage. Even after controlling for family background and the young woman’s own desire to marry, one major study finds that bearing a child out of wedlock dra-matically reduces the likelihood that a young woman will ever marry. The nega-tive effects are strongest for “older” young mothers; they are particularly strong forwomen in their early 20s. Unwed mothers were just as likely as their childless peers to say, prior to preg- nancy, that they expected to marry within five years. Yet whereas 45 percent ofthe women who both remained childless and expected to marry actually did marrywithin five years, only 28 percent of the unwed mothers who had expected tomarry actually did marry. The researchers conclude: “Despite provocative conjec-tures to the contrary, it seems women generally are not having children nonmar-itally as a response to poor marriage prospects. Rather, having a child outside ofmarriage appears to derail young women’s existing plans.”1 3 6 Moreover, because the presence of biologically unrelated stepchildren in a home increases the risk of divorce, a single mother who eventually marries a manother than her child’s father also faces a significantly greater likelihood of divorce.
One scholar concludes: “several excellent studies provide unassailable documen-tation of the fact that premarital childbearing increases the risk of divorce in sub-sequent marriage but that, by itself, a premarital conception does not.”1 3 7 One study found that adolescents “who had a premarital conception and mar- ried before the birth are at no higher risk of separation than those who had a post-marital conception” but that “having a premarital birth . . . significantly increasesthe probability of marital dissolution.”1 3 8 According to another study, women whopostpone both marriage and childbearing into their 20s end up with more stablemarriages. But among Whites, women who had a child by age 18, but delayedmarriage until their 20s, are no more likely to be in intact first marriages than arewoman who both had a child and got married by age 18. Among Blacks, by con-trast, women who had children by age 18 appear to do better if they postponemarriage.139 A recent unpublished analysis of data from the 1995 National Survey of Family Growth found that the decrease in early marriage (before age 23) was the singlemost powerful explanation for the recent decline in divorce rates, confirming that teen marriages face an especially high risk of divorce. Still, about half of all mar- riages contracted by young adult teens do succeed, compared to about 70 percent of first marriages that taking place at age 23 or older.140 An earlier study found that,after controlling for family background, an early age at marriage appeared toincrease the risk of divorce Overall, from the perspective of maternal and child well-being, do the risks of nonmarriage outweigh the risks of early marriage? The evidence is admittedlymixed, but not so mixed as to justify our current blanket rejection of early mar-riage. Marriage significantly improves the well-being of adult women, especiallymothers.1 4 2 For this reason, a young mother’s failure orinability to marry her child’s father will frequently elevate the economic, educational, psychological, and other risksfacing her and her child. For many of these young women, marrying the baby’s father represents not only their best chance for marital success, but also, after all,their only real chance to give their babies the gift of Recent research on the effects of early marriage simply does not support the grim vision of young wives trapped in domesticity, having baby after baby untildivorce or abandonment forces them into minimum wage labor or welfare depen-dence. If we as a society were able to view early marriage less as a punishmentfor mistakes, and more as a potential social good, we might be more successful indeveloping the family, religious, and community supports that would help youngcouples to build strong marriages. The basic marital values of the surrounding community — can make a big difference in shaping out- comes for young couples. In particular: “the vulnerability of early marriages dueto inexperience, lack of preparation, unconsolidated identities, and problems car-ried over from families of origin is greatly increased by the failure of communitiesto provide the basic economic and human supports formerly offered by family net-works.”143 Clearly, very few institutional, policy, or cultural supports are availabletoday either for young married couples or for unwed “fragile family” couples lack of societal support which stands in sharp contrast to the considerable publicand private sector support that has emerged in recent decades to assist unwedmothers. In particular, we as a society should make a much greater effort to strengthen early marriages undertaken to legitimate a pregnancy. Few such programs are cur-rently in place. Maris Vinovskis reminds us: “Most service programs for adoles-cents who are pregnant focus almost exclusively on the needs of the teenagemother and her child . . . [W]e should also help those married couples who try toraise their children together. We should not forget another ‘truly disadvantaged’person in our society today — the young man who accepts responsibility for fathering a child by marrying the adolescent mother and helping to rear the Young couples considering early marriage today are much more likely to encounter knee-jerk disapproval than balanced counseling. In current high schoolhealth textbooks, for example, students are repeatedly told that, with determina-tion, a good attitude, and support from others, many single parents can overcomethe problems they face and do a terrific job. No textbook, however, is evenremotely as optimistic regarding the prospects of people who marry early.
Melissa is 18 years old. Her son, Austin, is eight months old. They live in a mostly White, blue-collar community. Melissa’s mother and stepfather live in “anice house,” says Melissa, although their family life has been marred by her step-father’s alcoholism and his periodically abusive behavior. Melissa is engaged toSean, a 23-year-old chemical warfare inspector who works in the Bangor, Maine,National Guard. She has dated him for over four years, except for a brief buteventful interlude during which she broke up with Sean, got involved with Bobby,“this gangster kid from New York,” and conceived Austin. Bobby left three daysafter learning that Melissa was pregnant. Sean wants to adopt Austin and help to support the child financially. Melissa says she adores Sean. “I want to be with him,” she says. “I’ve gotten two promiserings.” So why isn’t she married? Right now, she does not believe that she is old enough to marry. “I’ll be more ready in two years,” she tells me. Melissa plans to become an ultrasound techni-cian and “I want to get a two year degree in radiology.” Melissa does not believethat she is too young to be a good mother.1 4 5 Regarding marriage, how old is old enough? Most authorities today seem to agree with Melissa, and then some. Here is a current high school textbook: “Ingeneral, the older you are before you marry, the greater the probability your mar-riage will succeed, particularly if you are a woman . . . The chances of a success-ful marriage are even greater for a woman who marries when she is in her thir-ties.”146 Yet current evidence on this question suggests a more complex answer. While both teen marriages do face higher risks of divorce, recent research suggests that“little or nothing in the way of marital stability is to be gained by postponing mar-riage beyond about age 23 for women and age 25 for men.”147 Meanwhile, a growing number of middle-class teens agree with Melissa. They are convinced that they are mature enough to be good mothers, but too youngto get married.148 In this view, while there are both advantages and disadvantagesto having a child when you are young, marriage is definitely something that youshould do later, after you finish your education, when you can afford it, whenyou are older. Just because you jump ahead of your age group in one area, moth- erhood, doesn’t mean that you should rush things when it comes to marriage.
School-Age Mothers and the Wisdom of Mainstreaming ODDLYENOUGH, although most teen births are to young women who are either 18 or 19 years old, and therefore either past the typical high schoolage or nearly past it, most programs to prevent teen births are aimed at high school and junior high school students. Consequently, school officials todayplay a major role in crafting and passing on the messages about teen pregnancy thatsociety wants young people to hear. Moreover, school officials must necessarilydevelop and implement policies regarding students who become pregnant. Sincethe early 1970s, the dominant trend in school policies affecting pregnant and par-enting students has been what is often called “mainstreaming.” This policy is rein-forced, and to some degree even required, by a U.S. federal statute. The policy’smain objective is to improve the graduation rates of pregnant and parenting studentsby encouraging them to remain in their regular schools. Until the late 1960s, the almost universal response to teen pregnancy in public schools was expulsion. Although expulsion reflected the strong social stigmaattached to premarital sexuality and unwed childbearing, the general policy also typ-ically applied to married students as well as to teachers who were pregnant andbeginning to “show.” But by the late 1960s and early 1970s, a number of large urbanschool districts, as well as a handful of states, were overturning this policy, takingconcrete steps to keep pregnant students enrolled in school.149 As recently as the early 1970s, most states still viewed these matters as best han- dled locally, by the various school districts. At the same time, a trend did emergeduring this period in which some states sought to intervene, as one authority put itat the time, “with regard to whether or not a [pregnant] girl will receive an educa-tion and what kind of education she will receive.”1 5 0 During this time, Florida andMichigan passed laws liberalizing the treatment of pregnant teens; Maryland andCalifornia used administrative by-laws to improve services to pregnant teens; and inPennsylvania, rulings by the state attorney general sought to improve the educa-tional environment for pregnant teens.1 5 1 Moreover, by 1973, more than 200 local school systems in the United States had created programs to encourage school-age pregnant girls and young mothers to con-tinue their education, obtain prenatal care, and engage in group counseling “to helpsolve problems that either may have led to or been caused by the pregnancy.” Mostof these programs offered young mothers a “regular educational program in a spe-cial setting.”1 5 2 Meanwhile, at the federal level, a growing tendency to advocate for school-age pregnancy policies in the language of “rights” coincided with, and to some degreehelped to advance, the emerging push nationally for mainstreaming. Here is SydneyP. Marland, Jr., President Richard Nixon’s assistant secretary of education: “Every girlin the United States has a right to and a need for the education that will help herprepare herself for a career, for family life, and for citizenship. To be married or pregnant is not a sufficient cause to deprive her of an education . . . The U.S. Office of Education strongly urges school systems to provide continuing education for girls who become pregnant. Most pregnant girls are physically able to remain in their reg-ular classes during most of their pregnancy.”1 5 3 In 1972, Congress waded into the fray, creating, through Title IX of the Education Amendments of 1972, new federal law governing school policies towardpregnant students. Actually, in the Congressional debates surrounding adoption ofTitle IX, we find no mention of mainstreaming pregnant students. Congressionalattention focused primarily on the potential effect of the new gender equity lan-guage on athletic and physical education programs, espe-cially football teams, and on school busing.154 Today, as well, Title IX generates much more attention and contro-versy for its impact on girls’ sports than its impact on Yet with Title IX, mainstreaming pregnant teens became more than a growing educational trend. It became the law of the land. Three years later, when the imple-menting regulations were announced, it became clear that the government had cre-ated something very close to a national right to teen motherhood. On pain of los-ing federal funding, U.S. schools were prohibited from treating pregnant students — any differently than those who are not pregnant. In this respect, Title IX both reflected and legislated the emerging new expert consen-sus that our society must dismantle all remaining institutional traces of disapprovalfor unwed childbearing. “Habilitation and rehabilitation are difficult to achieve within the context of a value system that views the client as bad or evil,” argued a proponent of main-streaming in 1975. Taking a pregnant girl out of her regular school deprives her ofher “civil rights,” her “peer group, friends, and significant adults,” and her “extracur-ricular activities.”156 “Continuing in school is a key point in breaking the ‘unwed mother cycle,’” said a group of scholars in 1979: “A comprehensive, non-judgmental, interdisciplinaryprogram of educational, social, and medical services administered in a sympatheticand loving manner is very important to pregnant adolescents . . . A separate schoolsetting exclusively for pregnant adolescents may result in the [sic] increased feelingsof isolation. Moreover, a special school may present problems because duplicationof facilities and personnel deprive regular schools of resources. We concur with oth-ers who feel ‘It is helpful for the girl to stay in her own school, with her own friends,in the mainstream of adolescent growth.’”157 — that mainstreaming represents compassion, while sep- — remains influential. As one scholar put it in 1998, using child care or other incentives to encourage pregnant girls to attendspecial schools or programs is “overtly a kind of stigmatized tracking,” intendedlargely to create a “curriculum of [male] domination.”158 Because the debate is typically framed as one of compassion versus punishment and stigma, surprisingly few scholars have sought to answer the basic empirical questions. First, do pregnant girls do better or worse when they are mainstreamed? Second, does the presence of pregnant students in regular classrooms encourageother students to become teen parents? We located one scholarly attempt to answer this second question. In this small study, most students said that a pregnant classmate either does not affect, or actu-ally decreases, their own desire to have a child. About 11 percent reported that hav-ing a pregnant classmate increased their desire to have a child. This finding com-ports with the view, frequently expressed by school officials, that allowing studentsto observe firsthand the difficulties of teen motherhood may act as a disincentive toearly childbearing. On the other hand, the minority of teens who said that observing a pregnant student made them want to have a child were precisely those teens who werealready most at risk of a school-age birth: poor students with low educational aspi-rations who are taking few steps to prevent pregnancy.159 For these at-risk students, the issue of who constitutes their peer circle at school may be significant. As one study reports: “peers are a critical component in influ-encing adolescent pregnancy risk-taking behavior. Peers can be both a tremendoussource of support and pressure for adolescents.”160 Students merely sitting next topregnant teens may not be at increased risk. But the pregnant girl’s own social cir-cle may well be.
ISMAINSTREAMINGcompassionate? More specifically, does mainstreaming improve educational outcomes for pregnant and parenting students? Current research isfar from definitive, but it is suggestive. For example, one national study finds that teen moms who attended vocational programs serve as special programs for pregnant teens ilar teen moms in regular schools to graduate.161 More generally, there is nothing inherent in the policy of mainstreaming that produces an especially charitable or compassionate attitude toward pregnant teens.
In the wake of Title IX, for example, some school officials who shut down specialschools for pregnant teens rallied local support by arguing that separate schools“cost the taxpayer money and reward girls for their bad behavior.”162 Theresa Smith,an attorney from Tennessee who works with victims of domestic violence, alsorecently represented a young mother who was expelled from high school for poorattendance. According to Smith, girls in this school with morning sickness, child careproblems, or health or welfare appointments are frequently harassed, or at least fre-quently feel harassed. Some drop out. Some are suspended. Because pregnancy cre-ates special needs and obstacles, strictly or formally equal treatment may actuallyhinder pregnant and parenting students from doing well in school and may dis-courage them from staying in school. Even when schools attempt to accommodate the needs of pregnant teens with counseling, medical, and other services, the girls themselves often say that they feeluncomfortable. An almost universal finding among interviews with pregnant teens and service providers is the sense of relief that teens find in the company of other young mothers-to-be, who understand what they are going through. Says Smith, the attorney from Tennessee: “Girls were embarrassed about getting stuck in deskchairs. They have to go to the bathroom a lot and they need to eat in the classroom.
. . Imagine being 16 years old and getting stuck in the chair!”1 6 3 “When you say ‘mainstream’ it sounds right. It has a catchy ‘we’re-very-inclusive, we-don’t-judge-you,’ ring to it,” says Nancy Apfel, who has studied the Polly T.
McCabe School in New Haven, Connecticut, an alternative school for pregnant stu-dents and their children. “But picture going up the staircase in a large urban highschool, eight months pregnant, with those big male highschool students barreling down.” Girls from the McCabe school “often speak about the comfort of being with eachother, in a place where everybody is in the same boat.
Recent research confirms the importance of the central goal of Title IX: keeping pregnant teens in school through the pregnancy and early postpartum period. For example,continuous schooling reduces the likelihood that a teen mother will have a second,closely spaced teen birth. But what kind of educational approach is most likely tokeep young mothers enrolled in school? The McCabe school functions as a short-term “crisis intervention” program for — an example of the type of program that was more common in the era prior to Title IX-mandated mainstreaming. Girls transfer to McCabe soon after their pregnancy becomes known.
Interventions focus around reducing medical complications and in other waysimproving the early postpartum functioning of mother and child. A 20-year study ofthe effects of the Polly T. McCabe experience shows that this separate school,according to the researchers Nancy Apfel and Victoria Seitz, “functioned as an excel-lent dropout prevention program for students who had been ‘D’ and ‘F’ studentsprior to their pregnancy.” If girls spent more than one semester at McCabe, educa-tional success rates improved. Moreover: “If students were allowed to remain in theprogram approximately two months postnatally, then five years later, more than halfof them still had not had a second child.”165

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