- Title
- Teenage pregnancy
- Creator
- Macleod, Catriona I
- Date Issued
- 2013
- Date
- 2013
- Type
- Text
- Identifier
- vital:6301
- Identifier
- http://hdl.handle.net/10962/d1015906
- Description
- In a book on preventing early pregnancy and poor reproductive outcomes in developing countries, the World Health Organisation (2011) declares that ‘adolescent pregnancy’ contributes to maternal, perinatal and infant mortality, and to a vicious cycle of poverty and ill-health. This statement reflects the common public assumption that ‘teenage pregnancy’ represents an individual, social, health, educational and financial risk that requires remediation. This kind of public perception is spurred by media coverage in which young girls with large protruding stomachs are etched in profile and stories of calamity are told (e.g. Time (21 June 2005) magazine). And yet the very notion of 'teenage pregnancy' is a relatively recent one. Depending on the country one talks about, it has been around since between the 1960s and 1980s. In the United States, for example, the rise of ‘teenage pregnancy’ as a social problem was associated with a shift in gendered power relations. Prior to the late 1960s the morally loaded concepts of 'unwed mother' and 'illegitimate child' were used to describe young women who conceived. For the most part, young pregnant women were excluded from society, with the accompanying shame around the lack of proper conjugal arrangements. The use of the term 'teenage pregnancy' removed the implied moral judgment and replaced it with seeming scientific neutrality. Young pregnant women now became publicly visible and thus the object of scientific scrutiny (Arney & Bergen, 1984).
- Format
- 5 pages
- Format
- Publisher
- Springer
- Language
- English
- Relation
- Macleod, C. (2013). Teenage pregnancy. In T Teo (Ed.) Encyclopedia of Critical Psychology. New York: Springer: SpringerReference Published online at http://www.springerreference.com/docs/html/chapterdbid/304961.html.
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Collections
RU Department of Psychology
RU Books and Book Chapters
Macleod, Catriona Ida (Distinguished Professor)
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