Policy discourse and teenage pregnancy: the making of mothers /

Abstract

This research is situated within my own interests in political theory, social policy and educational organizations as arenas for change.I am influenced by postmodern and feminist writers who provide far-reaching critiques of the ways we go about knowing what we know.I am particularly interested in issues of "difference"-across gender, race, ethnicity, sexuality and class-and how "difference" as a category may be assigned to reinforce normative practices.This research grew unexpectedly out of a pilot study for a qualitative methodology course I was taking.I did my pilot research at a school which had a program for teenage mothers basically because I had access to the school.I knew little about teenage pregnancy except what I had been exposed to through the media.As I began spending time in the classroom and getting to know the girls with whom, as a parent, I had much in common, I found I had to question many of my own assumptions about adolescence, teen sexuality, and teenage pregnancy.The girls I got to know were not the girls shown to me on the cover of Newsweek or Time magazine.As I began to collect data and skim the literature in this area I became aware that teen pregnancy is an issue ripe for feminist, ix poststructuralist discussion and analysis.Teen pregnancy is an issue which is entangled, emotional, conflictual and physical.When I first began collecting data, I assumed I would write a story with the girls "about" teenage pregnancy, highlighting "their" voices and their constructions of their lives as young women and mothers.However, I began to feel there were gaps in such a story-gaps which continued to place a focus of attention and responsibility on the teen mother herself without questioning the larger social construction of teenage pregnancy as a social, education and policy problem.Beyond research papers, governmental reports and numerous books this research is situated in the physical and contextual lives of young women who are pregnant and/or parenting.However, this research does not place the focus of its gaze and inquiry only upon teen girls but also upon the discourse and assumptions of the field of policy studies.Like everything else, in the human sciences policy studies is being critiqued for its modernist inscriptions, especially its dependency on regulatory and scientific discourses.This research, through a case analysis of teen pregnancy policy, asks what it would mean to "unthink" these modernist traditions?What rethinking would then be possible?* demographics (race, income, education, urban/rural location); * family (family size, relationship with family members); * individual (educational and occupational aspirations, sense of the future); * peer group; and * couple (relationship with the boyfriend and interpersonal communication skills) Nathanson (1991) aligns such characterizations of teen pregnancy with a discourse of medical illness which subjects teen pregnancy to diagnosis and treatment.Current attempts to find monocausal links to teen pregnancy have been overly