The Culture of Fear_ Why Americans Are Afraid of the Wrong Things - Barry Glassner [57]
Reporters, politicians, and social scientists all give intricate explanations for why adolescents get pregnant. But why not account for teen pregnancies the same way we do other pregnancies? As the British sociologists Sally Macintyre and Sarah Cunningham-Burley noted in an essay, “Ignorance about contraception, psychopathology, desire to prove adulthood, lack of family restraint, cultural patterns, desire to obtain welfare benefits, immorality, getting out of school—a host of reasons are given for childbirth in women under 20, while ‘maternal instinct’ is thought to suffice for those over 20.”9
America’s Worst Social Problem
The causes of teen motherhood must be treated as distinct and powerful. Otherwise, it would make no sense to treat teen moms themselves as distinct and powerful—America’s “most serious social problem,” as Bill Clinton called them in his 1995 State of the Union address. Nor would it have seemed rational when legislators included in the 1996 Federal Welfare Law $250 million for states to use to persuade young people to practice premarital abstinence.
In what may well qualify as the most sweeping, bipartisan, multimedia, multidisciplinary scapegoating operation of the late twentieth century, at various times over the past decade prominent liberals including Jesse Jackson, Joycelyn Elders, and Daniel Patrick Moynihan and conservatives such as Dan Quayle and Bill Bennett all accused teen moms of destroying civilization. Journalists, joining the chorus, referred to adolescent motherhood as a “cancer,” warned that they “breed criminals faster than society can jail them,” and estimated their cost to taxpayers at $21 billion a year. Members of my own profession, social science, had alarming things to say as well. “The lower education levels of mothers who began childbearing as teenagers translates into lower work force productivity and diminished wages, resulting in a weaker, less competitive economy,” Stephen Caldas, a policy analyst, wrote in an educational research journal. (Translation: You can thank teen moms for America’s declining position in the world economy.)10
These claims are absurd on their face. An agglomeration of impoverished young women, whose collective wealth and influence would not add up to that of a single Fortune 100 company, do not have the capacity to destroy America. What these pundits did was to reverse the causal order. Teen pregnancy was largely a response to the nation’s educational and economic decline, not the other way around. Girls who attend rotten schools and face rotten job prospects have little incentive to delay sex or practice contraception. In 1994 at least 80 percent of teenage moms were already poor before they became pregnant.11
Early motherhood in itself does not condemn a girl to failure and dependency. Journalists put up astounding statistics such as “on average, only 5 percent of teen mothers get college degrees, compared with 47 percent of those who have children at twenty-five or older” (People, in an article bleakly titled “The Baby Trap”). Yet the difference is attributable almost entirely to preexisting circumstances—particularly poverty and poor educational opportunities and abilities. Studies that compare teen moms with other girls from similar economic and educational backgrounds find only modest differences in education and income between the two populations over the long term. Some experts report that young women tend to become more motivated to finish school and find jobs once they have offspring to support. Data indicate too that teen moms are less likely than their peers to engage in other self-destructive behaviors, such as drug abuse, participation in gangs, and suicide. Motherhood can bring about what sociologist Joan Moore of the University of Wisconsin, an expert on delinquent girls, calls “a conversion to conventionality.”12
The failure of greater public