Teenage pregnancy as a problem

In the last decades of the 20th century successive British governments came to regard teenage pregnancy as a significant public health and social problem. This view was shared, to varying degrees, by the governments of many developed nations, so that by the late 1990s eight of 28 OECD countries were actively intervening to reduce youthful conception and a further 12 countries considered teenage pregnancy to be a minor concern (Unicef, 2001). In the UK, before and after the election of the New Labour government in 1997, teenage pregnancy was seen as a problem requiring intervention, and the British programme to address teenage pregnancy is an example of one of the more advanced and long-running initiatives of its kind in the developed world.

As a long-time commentator on this issue has observed, teenage pregnancy has become a ‘veritable industry’ (Furstenberg, 1991), but anxiety about youthful pregnancy is a comparatively new phenomenon. In previous eras, the age at which a woman began child bearing was not significant from a policy or any other perspective; the marital status of a mother-to-be was more important than her age. Marriage offered economic protection to mothers and their children in a time when the burden of unwed motherhood fell solely on local communities, so unmarried parenthood was highly stigmatised. At some point in the late 1960s/early 1970s, in the US (Arney and Bergen, 1984; Furstenberg, 1991; Wong, 1997), and slightly later in the UK (Selman, 1998/2001) and in other countries, such as South Africa (Macleod, 2003), public and policy concern shifted from the marital status of mothers-to-be to their age, and the problem of teenage pregnancy came into being.

There are a number of possible reasons why this shift in thinking occurred. The growing popularity of cohabitation among the middle (as well as the working) classes made unmarried child bearing a more difficult behaviour to condemn. The extension of adolescence, and the subsequent dependence of young people on their families for economic support, rendered youthful parenthood an increasingly problematic event. Longer, more convoluted transitions into education, employment and family formation – fuelled by structural changes in the economy, the need for increased participation in post-compulsory education and the rising costs of setting up an independent home – meant that early fertility increasingly came to be viewed as undesirable in that it would disrupt successful transitions to adulthood (Melhuish and Phoenix, 1987).