Scandal or Scapegoating?

- New York Times

September 1, 1996

Scandal or Scapegoating?
By KAI ERIKSON

DUBIOUS CONCEPTIONS

The Politics of Teenage Pregnancy.

By Kristin Luker.

283 pp. Cambridge, Mass.:

Harvard University Press. $24.95.

IT is hard to think of a topic in recent years that has attracted more misinformation, more convoluted reasoning or more sheer meanness than teen-age
pregnancy. In some circles, the bearing of children by mothers who are themselves scarcely out of childhood seems to serve as a symbol of all the miseries
that bedevil us as a society -- a drain on the public treasury, a rot eating away the tissue of the moral order, even the root cause of poverty in our time.

In ''Dubious Conceptions,'' Kristin Luker, who teaches sociology and law at the University of California, Berkeley, has taken on the task of providing some
definition to all this distracted flailing about. She reviews and puts into perspective the considerable data that have been collected on matters relevant to
teen-age mothering. And she locates current conversations about the issue in the larger sweep of American history so that they can be seen in context. On
both scores, she has given us a very important work.

At the rate we are going, Ms. Luker writes, something like 50 percent of America's children ''will spend at least part of their childhood in a single-parent
family,'' about half of them as a result of divorce or separation, the rest as a result of being born to a mother who has never been married. That is a striking
departure from the pattern we have always assumed to be typical of child rearing in this country, and it makes a number of people profoundly nervous. But to
what extent should we credit that shift to an increase in pregnancy and childbirth among the young?

Not very much, Ms. Luker says -- certainly not enough to explain the national sense of crisis and alarm. Roughly 12 percent of children born in the United
States in any given year have teen-age mothers, both married and unmarried; the vast majority of those mothers are either 18 or 19 years old, and thus
teen-agers only in the most technical of senses. In point of fact, the data indicate that teen-agers have been producing children at about the same rate for most
of the century.

What makes childbearing among the young stand out in recent years is that increasing numbers of teen-age mothers are unmarried at the time they give birth.
The proportion was 30 percent in 1970 and 70 percent in 1995. The number of single mothers among the relatively young is going up at a rapid rate, then, but
so is the number of single mothers at every age. Fewer than a third of single mothers are teen-agers, even when we include those 18- and 19-year- olds, and
that proportion is declining.

The reasons for single parenting have been changing in recent times as well. In 1947, virtually every single mother either was a widow or was living apart
from her mate as a result of divorce or separation. Fewer than one out of a hundred had never been married. At latest count, that proportion has reached a
third, and all the present indications are that it will continue to grow.

So the idea that teen-age childbearing is an epidemic raging out of control is simply wrong. Ms. Luker makes a compelling case that the familiar portrait we
have been shown so often is the reflection of a public mood rather than a demographic reality. Pregnant teen-agers, she says, have become ''a convenient
lightning rod for the anxieties and tensions in Americans' lives.'' The raging, in other words, is going on inside people's minds. There are no good reasons to
suppose that the teen-age birthrate is going up in any significant way. (It was higher in the 1950's, as a matter of fact.) It is the rate of single parenting that is
going up, and that, of course, is quite another matter.

Future historians looking in at our time might very well conclude that we were participants in (or at least witnesses to) an important shift in the nature of
family life throughout the whole of the industrialized world. The development of new forms of contraception in the 60's made it much easier for people to
have an active sex life outside marriage, and as a result of the new cultural climate this helped to create, the last years of this century may turn out to have
been the beginning of a time when the very notions of child rearing on the one hand and family life on the other were increasingly disconnected. People will
continue to join together in families, of course, and they will continue to bear children, but those two spheres of life may become ever more independent of
each other. The rate of out-of-wedlock births is clearly on the way up, while the rate of marriage may be on the way down. Indeed, the very expression ''out-
of-wedlock births'' is beginning to sound a bit antique, since it appears to imply that bearing children outside of the marriage contract is almost incongruous
enough to rank as an anomaly. That is no longer so. Sixty percent of American families, Ms. Luker tells us, have a single parent; and more than half of those
families are headed by a parent who has never been married at all. This may prove in the long run to have been no more than a temporary deviation from a
stable pattern of long standing, but, on the other hand, it may prove to have been the first hesitant appearance of an important new pattern altogether. That is
what Ms. Luker -- and most other experts, for that matter -- would bet on.

It is interesting to consider why this is happening. Ms. Luker thinks a number of shifts in behavior and outlook may be contributing to this emerging pattern.
The concept of illegitimacy (now there's an antique for you!) has lost much of its moral sting, and many women have come to the sensible realization that they
do not need to put up with all the abuse and domination and untidiness and other burdens they associate with married life in order to have children. This way
of looking at things has a very special resonance among poor women, as we shall see.

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Ask most people what they have in mind when they speak of teen-age mothers or out-of-wedlock births, and the image that flashes on the screen is that of
young black women in the inner cities. How accurate is this picture? Well, about 15 percent of female teen-agers in this country are black, while a third of all
teen-age mothers are black. That is a disproportion by any measure. But figures such as these need to be seen in context. Two-thirds of teen-age mothers are
white. If you are astonished to learn, as I was, that 90 percent of black teen-age mothers are unmarried, you should be just as astonished to learn not only that
60 percent of white teen-age mothers are also unmarried, but that the differential is becoming ever narrower. The problem may be more heavily concentrated
in certain parts of the American social landscape, but it is by no means peculiar to them.

It is widely taken for granted that the country as a whole would be better off if its poor young women had fewer offspring. How might such a thing be
accomplished? One solution we hear more about these days, now making its way into law, is to remove the welfare ''incentives'' that ''encourage'' unmarried
young women to have children. The thinking here, of course, is that teen-age women are engaged in a shrewd calculation. They decide to have children, you
see, because they profit from doing so, and since that is the case, it follows as relentlessly as a logical syllogism that if you remove the incentive the behavior
will change.

That is absurd, as Ms. Luker makes clear. It makes no human sense to assume that the behavior of most teen-agers -- never mind the rest of us -- is as cunning
as is being supposed here. Most teen-age pregnancies (according to those who endure them, at any rate) just happen. Members of Congress and other
interested parties who insist otherwise are simply not attending to the flows of real life. To deny benefits to women who have children out of wedlock is not to
correct their wicked ways but to penalize children as yet unborn for their poor judgment in choosing unmarried mothers.

The available data are emphatic on this point. Teen-age pregnancies are on the rise throughout the industrialized world despite the fact that the real value of
welfare benefits is on the decline. In this country, states with relatively generous benefits do not have higher teen-age birth rates than states with relatively
stingy benefits. The evidence cannot be anything more than tentative on so elusive a topic as this, Ms. Luker notes, but even so the only conclusion one can
reach is that a vast majority of teen-age pregnancies are unintended.

So long as teen-agers are sexually active, the most effective way to reduce the chance that they will produce children is to assure that they have access to
contraception before the fact and abortion after the fact. Those who object to either measure on whatever grounds can only hope that a way can be found to
reduce sexual activity itself. That, clearly, is a tall order -- all the more so because Americans on average are becoming sexually mature at an ever younger
age and are getting married at an ever later age. Admonitions to ''just say no'' are scarcely going to suffice as the basis of a workable national policy in
conditions like that.

Real incentives do work, however. People are far more likely to postpone childbearing when they have good reasons for doing so. For example, those who
have realistic expectations of going to college or otherwise sharing in the national wealth somehow manage the trick -- check the prevailing birth rates of
college students and young professionals if you have any doubts on that score. But were we to say to poor young women that they too would share the good
things of life if only they put off bearing children for a year or two, we would be participating in an immense cruelty. Ms. Luker writes: ''The idea that young
people would be better off if they worked harder, were more patient and postponed their childbearing is simply not true -- and is unlikely to become true in
the foreseeable future -- for a great many people at the bottom of the income scale.'' And the same is true of families. The life chances of a teen-age mother
would not on the average improve very much even if the father agreed to join her in marriage, since he is so likely to be young, poor and without much in the
way of prospects himself. The poor understand these things even when others do not.

It has always been the case that our national problem is not teen-age childbirth or single-parent families but poverty itself. Ms. Luker writes: ''Americans have
every right to be concerned about early childbearing and to place the issue high on the national agenda. But they should think of it as a measure, not a cause,
of poverty and other social ills. A teen-ager who has a baby usually adds but a slight burden to her life, which is already profoundly disadvantaged. . . . Early
childbearing may make a bad situation worse, but the real causes of poverty lie elsewhere.''

To continue to insist otherwise after publication of this wise, thoughtful book is to be either obdurately ill informed or ruthlessly ideological in the face of
compelling evidence to the contrary.

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