Introduction

This book was written to explore the representation of teenage pregnancy as a problem and the ways in which policy makers, academics and the media have responded to it. Primarily focused on the period from the late 1990s on, its starting point was New Labour's Teenage Pregnancy Strategy (TPS), introduced to the British public in 1999 via Teenage Pregnancy (SEU, 1999).

There are three sections to this final chapter. First, the previous chapters are briefly summarised to provide an overview of the main contents of the book and the key messages arising from it. In the second section, the TPS and its future are discussed and Downs’ (1972) concept of the life cycle of social problems is revisited. In the third part of the chapter, and drawing on these earlier sections, a number of recommendations are made. These are aimed at policy makers, practitioners and researchers, as well as a more general audience.

Previous chapters: overview and key messages

The first part of the book focused on the ways in which teenage pregnancy has been created as a problem. The history of teenage pregnancy as a problem was briefly explored in Chapter One. Anxiety about teenage pregnancy dates back 30 years or so: before the 1960s, unmarried child bearing had been stigmatised, not the age at which child bearing commenced. From approximately the 1970s on, age became the focus of concern instead, although this change in public and policy attitudes did not coincide with peaks in teenage fertility. The latter occurred earlier in the US than in the UK, but it is significant that in both countries the perception of teenage pregnancy as a problem, and the drafting of policy to deal with it, emerged after peaks in teenage fertility, suggesting that teenage fertility rates alone were not responsible for the development of these new attitudes to youthful pregnancy. Instead, other social changes can be pointed to as significant in this regard, most notably, changes in marriage and the growth of cohabitation, as well as the extension of adolescence, which meant that teenagers were more likely to be economically dependent on their families compared with previous generations.

Once teenage pregnancy was perceived to be a problem, policy makers in the US, the UK and other developed countries sought to reduce it (to varying degrees). The English TPS represents a relatively advanced example of this kind of intervention.