The Age of Unwed Motherhood: Is Teen Pregnancy the Problem?

[owner-smartmarriages]

from: Smart Marriages

Press Release

For Release on September 22, 1999, 9:00 a.m.

To: Print and Broadcast Journalists

Re: The Age of Unwed Mothers: Is Teen Pregnancy the Problem? 

New York, NY, September 22, 9:00 a.m. / Why have three decades of 
intensive national effort to reduce teen pregnancy not been more 
successful? Because for three decades, we have misunderstood the problem, 
says Maggie Gallagher in a major new report that fundamentally challenges 
a generation of expert and popular thinking on this subject. Says 
Gallagher:

"What we have called our 'teen pregnancy' crisis is not really about 
teenagers. Nor is it really about pregnancy. It is about the decline of 
marriage."

In The Age of Unwed Mothers, newly released from the Institute for 
American Values, Gallagher points out that the number of young women who 
have their first child during their teen years was about the same in the 
early 1970s as it is today: 

"What has changed most in recent decades is not who gets pregnant, but 
who gets married. The single biggest change in recent decades has been 
the declining proportion of pregnant single teens who marry." 

Moreover: "Our 'teen pregnancy' crisis is inseparable from the disconnect 
between marriage and childbearing that increasingly characterizes the 
procreative behavior of adults in their 20s." In fact: "The majority of 
unwed births in the United States today are to adult women in their 20s. 
These are not 'children having children,' nor are they 'Murphy Browns.'"

For Gallagher, the key to understanding the teen pregnancy crisis is 
marriage: 

"For a young woman today who does not see marriage as an essential 
support to her motherhood, or who does not foresee much possibility of 
making a good marriage in the future, the decision to become a single 
mother at age 18 or 19 is not especially irrational or hard to 
understand. If it is not marriage that confers special meaning to the 
sexual act, then perhaps it is her giving the gift of unprotected sex, or 
making a baby. If it is not marriage that a young woman is waiting for 
before becoming a mother, then how much difference will a few more years 
of waiting really make?"

The Age of Unwed Mothers is a richly detailed, comprehensive review of 
the current scholarly literature on teen pregnancy. Carefully documented, 
it also draws upon interviews with experts in the field, school 
personnel, social workers, and teen mothers themselves. 

The report concludes with 16 recommendations for change, in areas ranging 
from adoption to Norplant, from what Congress should do to how public 
schools can both improve educational outcomes for pregnant and parenting 
students and help to reduce the incidence of teen pregnancy. 

The report's first recommendation is that "we retire the term 'teen 
pregnancy' from our public discourse." 

In a section on "School-Age Girls and the Wisdom of Mainstreaming," 
Gallagher investigates whether current federal law requiring communities 
to "mainstream" pregnant teens in the public schools is helping or 
hurting teenage mothers. Pregnant girls appear to perform better 
academically - and also have less welfare dependence and reduced repeat 
childbearing -- when they attend separate schools. The pregnant girls 
themselves often feel more comfortable in separate schools. Yet the 
current federal mandate for "mainstreaming" interferes with local school 
districts' efforts to deliver services to pregnant teens more 
effectively, including experimenting with alternative schools. 

Partly a work of scholarship, The Age of Unwed Mothers is also a work of 
cultural criticism and a passionate call for change. Consider:

"Why should a teenager postpone having a baby? What our society as a 
whole, and especially our 'teen pregnancy' rhetoric, currently tells 
these young people-until you reach age 20, having a baby is a huge 
mistake, as is getting married, but after that, it's up to you -- is not 
likely to capture their moral imagination. Does it capture yours?"

And: "To a degree that might make many of us uncomfortable, when young 
women today prefer unwed motherhood over adoption or early marriage, they 
have not been ignoring adult counsel. They have been heeding it." 

And: "When a teenager is postponing having a baby, what is she waiting 
for? Having more of our young people answer, "a good marriage," should 
become our highest priority." 

About Maggie Gallagher:

A nationally syndicated columnist and the director of the Marriage 
Project of the Institute for American Values, Maggie Gallagher is the 
co-author, with Professor Linda Waite of the University of Chicago, of 
The Case for Marriage (Harvard University Press, forthcoming, 2000). 

About the Institute for American Values:

The Institute for American Values, founded in 1987, is a private, 
nonpartisan organization devoted to research, publication, and public 
education on major issues of family well-being and civil society. The 
Institute's mission is to examine the status and future of the family as 
a social institution and the sources of competence, character, and 
citizenship. 

To arrange an interview with Maggie Gallagher, for more information about 
The Age of Unwed Mothers, or to get a copy of the report, please contact 
David Brenner at the Institute by phone (212-246-3942) or e-mail 
(info at americanvalues.org). 



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