Young mothers' needs have gotten lost in the fever to prevent their pregnancies.
Seventeen-year-old Gaby Rodriguez recently made national news when she revealed to her entire Toppenish High School that the baby bump she had been slowly developing over the last six months was actually a modified basketball with cloth and netting inside. Rodriguez, an enterprising Latina senior, told everyone she’d set out to do a social experiment. She lives in a town that is 75 percent Latino, making teen pregnancy an important issue for her community–half of Latinas nationally will become pregnant as teenagers (the same is true for black teens).
“I had heard dire predictions about teen pregnancy at school assemblies, seen billboards, and watched after-school specials that warned me of its perils.
Girls who look like me were routinely warned against what would happen to us and to our kids if we became parents too soon.
Barboa is describing an ironic source of the stigma young moms face: the web of campaigns that have been created to prevent teen pregnancy. Teen pregnancy prevention initiatives are often based on the premise that teen parenting is an indisputably bad thing and should be avoided at all costs. And as a consequence, teen moms are constantly presented as failures and victims. ”I love my life. I’m not gonna mess it up with a pregnancy,” says a teenager at the end of a video on the National Campaign to Prevent Teen and Unwanted Pregnancy’s website, Stayteen.org.
It’s a compelling formula–simply stop teen girls from having kids, and these disparities disappear. But the question that remains is what’s really behind these negative outcomes? Is young pregnancy and parenting the cause, or it a correlation with other risk factors, like socio-economic status and race, that recur at all ages? That’s what Verónica Bayetti Flores of the National Latina Institute for Reproductive Health (with which I have worked) believes.
Advocates like Bayetti Flores think that focusing narrowly on preventing pregnancy doesn’t address the root cause of these disparities, many of which exist among communities of similar socioeconomic status regardless of age of parenting. Instead, she argues, it turns a societal issue into an individual problem, where the blame for negative outcomes gets transferred onto the individual girls themselves–most frequently girls of color. Despite the fact that there are more white teen parents than teen parents of color overall, Latinas and African Americans are often the target of prevention programs because of the higher incidence of teen pregnancy and parenting within the communities.
Stigma is not an uncommon tool in public health prevention programs–think of how we’ve worked to reduce smoking–and it can often be very successful. But the stigma-based pregnancy prevention efforts also exists alongside the fact that, according to the CDC, one in every 10 new mothers is a teen. One can only imagine what a young mom who ran across the ads mentioned above in an issue of Seventeen magazine might have felt. “There is always a tension between what it means to prevent pregnancy and then providing support to teen [parents] who are vulnerable,” explains Heather Boonstra of the Guttmacher Institute.
“The current discourse surrounding young motherhood is both stigmatizing and insensitive, and presents young motherhood as a problem in itself as opposed to the real problems that often surround it,” National Latina Institute for Reproductive Health argues in a new campaign. Instead of focusing on stigma as a way to discourage teen parenting, the Institute pushes for more attention to challenges that too many moms face–things like poverty, lack of access to health care and closed off educational opportunities, all of which the group says are to blame for the negative outcomes associated with teen parenting.
Even advocates who are in favor of the new emphasis on teen pregnancy prevention agree that stigma is a concern.
Bill Albert, chief program officer at the National Campaign to Prevent Teen and Unwanted Pregnancy, acknowledges that teen pregnancy prevention programs are not well tailored toward teens who are already pregnant or parenting. But he says that’s not their point. “We are focused on primary prevention, helping teens avoid pregnancy in the first place,” he explains.
Bailey stresses that her experience as a young mother hasn’t been easy, and so she understands all too well why prevention campaigns focus on stopping teens from getting pregnant in the first place. ”Being a teen parent and dealing with everything that it entails, missing out on things that my friends do because I have a little girl at home, I had to grow up a lot quicker than I really wanted to,” she explains.