Introduction

In the academic and policy literature, teenage pregnancy is sometimes assumed to be a problem, with little or no effort expended on explaining why it is considered so (Macintyre and Cunningham-Burley, 1993). In the same way that phenomena such as crime, homelessness and drug addiction are avowedly negative, teenage pregnancy is often held to be (in and of itself) a problem (Breheny and Stephens, 2007a). The fact that teenage pregnancy is so often referred to alongside crime, drugs and so on as if these were all part of the same thing, confirms this and reinforces the association between early conception and all kinds of social ills.

Where authors have justified their concern with teenage pregnancy, they usually point to its having consequences in two main areas. Daguerre and Nativel (2006) usefully describe four broad reasons why teenage pregnancy is considered problematic within policy discourses: teenagers are too young (biologically and socially) to bring up children; they lack the maturity needed to make informed decisions about sex; early motherhood causes poverty; and teenagers are financially dependent. These four could be condensed into two, even broader, categories: the alleged immaturity of teenagers (which has biological, emotional and social dimensions and impacts on sexual and parenting behaviours and reproductive outcomes); and teenagers’ economic dependency on others (which will likely be exacerbated by early child bearing). From this perspective, teenage pregnancy is both a socioeconomic problem and a (very broadly defined) healthrelated one. The socioeconomic consequences of early motherhood, which are focused on poverty and employment prospects, also touch on educational attainment and partnership behaviour, since these impact on poverty (lack of educational attainment leads to reduced job prospects, lone parents are poorer than couples). The health-related consequences are believed to relate to birth outcomes, maternal health, poor sexual health and, very importantly, the shorter- and longer-term impact on the children of teenage mothers, especially in terms of their physical and emotional development. These diverse outcomes of early child bearing are reflected in a large body of literature which straddles different disciplines.

When the TPS was presented to the British public in 1999, much was made of the ill effects of teenage motherhood. In relation to both health and socioeconomic consequences, early pregnancy was described as leading inexorably to social exclusion.