Why is policy obsessed with teenage pregnancy?

The National Institute for Clinical Excellence (NICE) recently recommended that antenatal care should be provided inside the school gates.

This represents more than a pragmatic recognition that a small number of teenagers get pregnant and have babies. A decade-long policy obsession with the teen pregnancy ‘crisis’ has presented the teenager’s body as an inappropriate vessel for a baby. But it has become the perfect vessel for the social pessimism and moral disorientation that underpins contemporary policy making.

The discussion of teenage pregnancy contains many important questions. How should poverty and inequality be addressed? How should the boundaries of adulthood and childhood be defined? How and why should the family be defended? How should adults guide children through adolescence and into adulthood? Unfortunately, when these concerns are expressed through the prism of teenage motherhood, adult society often displaces its responsibility for resolving such fundamental questions into a distorted perception of the behaviour of children and young people. This is starkly revealed in the assumption that young people living in poverty will invariably make poor parents, in need of some form of official training.

Policy’s engagement with young people from poorer communities has become increasingly focused, not on encouraging their aspirations to reach beyond their disadvantaged circumstances, but by the depressing impulse to cauterise poverty’s ‘toxic’ effects. The cross-party influence of MPs Graham Allen and Iain Duncan Smith demonstrates the strengthening consensus that the only hope for socially deprived communities lies in ‘early intervention’; a formula for a better society built on bogus brain science, discredited American policy experiments and a slippery grasp of the distinction between the mental and emotional damage caused by extreme child abuse and the ordinary difficulties of tough lives. In their 2008 report for the Centre for Social Justice, tellingly titled ‘Early Intervention: Good parents, great kids, better citizens’, Allen and Duncan Smith propose that 0-18 year olds ‘at risk’ of  social disadvantage should be intervened upon so that when they do become parents before the age of 20, they will be ‘child-ready’.

This way of thinking underlies the increasingly common demand for sex and relationships education in schools to incorporate ‘parent training’, and demonstrates a staggering short-circuiting of any sense of teenagers’ potential. By the age of 18, policy moves away from the life chances of the young people themselves and priority moves to the threat posed by – and to – the future offspring of these allegedly ‘problem parents’. Policy makers should remember that young people are citizens themselves, not just incubators for ‘better citizens’.

* Simon Blake: A policy obsession with teenage mothers? Yes please!

Throughout October and November, The Independent Online is partnering with the Battle of Ideas festival to present a series of guest blogs from festival speakers on the key questions of our time.

Dr Jan Macvarish is a researcher with the University of Kent-based research centre, Parenting Culture Studies. She is speaking at the session “Too much, too young: why is policy obsessed with teenage mums?” at the Battle of Ideas festival on Saturday 30 October.

(Picture:Alamy)

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