Teenage Pregnancy: A Moral Panic
The media and class in noughties Britain.
I attended a boys’ state grammar school in England in the few years either side of 2010. Once a year, between the ages of 13 and 15, a day was set aside to talk about sex and drugs. We had visitors from campaign groups and charities. A man with a dent in his head told us all the street names for controlled substances. A kindly, willowy man attempted to engage us in a serious discussion about sexuality. Our Chemistry teacher showed us a video where Jonathan Ross asked you to examine your testicles.
This was enormous fun. Whether it was thought that grammar-school boys were unlikely to be sexually active, or that our school was secretly run by some mad natalist cabal, our sex education was neither thorough nor intense. At the girls’ school down the road, things seemed rather more serious.
The girls had regular ‘life skills’ classes. When they were about fourteen, to convey the responsibility of parenthood, the girls were given a bag of flour to look after for a few weeks. At the end of this period, many of these flour babies were eventually thrown from windows in celebration, but I recall the girls were able to have serious conversations about sex, gender, and pregnancy in a way that seemed – to my teenage mind – disturbingly un-puerile.
For a long time, I was more interested in books than girls. But, when I did start dating in my late teens, the mothers of both parties were extremely keen that we remained in sight at all times. For the girls at our sister-school, and for our mothers, the spectre of teen pregnancy loomed large. Even in the well-educated, middle-class world I grew up in, teenage pregnancy was perceived to be a woman’s problem.
In part, this world had been shaped by government policies. Successive governments had seen teenage pregnancy as a social ill to be cured; despite middle-class anxieties, young mothers were likely to be from the poorest parts of society, and were less likely to escape poverty. At the end of the 20th century, New Labour committed to halving the rate of teenage pregnancies by 2010. Their Teenage Pregnancy Strategy aimed to improve access to sex education and contraception, and to help young parents find employment. The hope was that this would break the cycle of poverty. Policy continued in the same direction under the Coalition and Conservative governments.
But, this was also a world shaped by our relationship with the media. Despite sincere efforts to reduce teenage pregnancy rates, anxieties around young mothers had an unusual intensity and reach in the first decade of the 21st century. Teenage pregnancy became the subject of a moral panic. It was treated as a social disease to be contained, and rates compared to other European countries were seen to be a national embarrassment. Negative images of pregnant teenage women were rampant in this environment. Young mothers were caricatured in comedy television, and were the subject of sensationalist documentaries. Even adverts that alluded to teenage pregnancy were banned.
In 2008, the Advertising Standards Agency (ASA) received 32 complaints about a television advert for Coca-Cola’s soft drink, Oasis. In the advert, a woman – who was played by a 22-year-old, but who looks quite young – is pregnant with the child of an anthropomorphic cactus and will now only drink Oasis. Complaints argued that the advert encouraged underage pregnancy and gave poor dietary advice. This weird – but not obviously harmful – advert was banned; the ASA found that Coca-Cola had breached advertising codes on the grounds of ‘Offence’, ‘Health and Safety’, ‘Mental Harm’ and ‘Physical Harm’.
2008 was apparently a year of acute distress. The Guardian website has a ‘Teenage Pregnancy’ tag, which links to every Guardian and Observer article about teenage pregnancy published since February 1999. Ten per cent of all their articles about teenage pregnancy in the last 25 years were published in 2008. These were mostly reports of changes in sex education policies or belated commentaries on Juno (2007). But, the Guardian was not above using teenage pregnancy to score political points. Attention was drawn to the pregnancy of Sarah Palin’s teenage daughter, calling the conservative credentials of John McCain’s running mate into question. The subtext was that the evangelical Palin was a hypocrite, that the mother of a pregnant teenager could not be an authentic family values candidate, and that she probably would not be a good vice-president. Events in the United States allow the British media to make judgements at a safe and entertaining distance, but judgements like this also hint at the ungenerous attitudes to teenage pregnancy closer to home.
On the right, the moral panic around teenage pregnancy had met the moral panic around welfare spending in a general whorl of anxiety around the poorest Britons. In 2007, the Daily Mail ran a story (syndicated from tabloid magazine Closer) on two sisters from south Wales, aged 16 and 19, who had two children each. The young mothers – and the young grandmother – in this story seemed content with their situation. Rather than considering the social conditions that had led to these pregnancies and the women’s attitudes to them, the story focused instead on their cost to the taxpayer, setting out the family’s child benefit, tax credits and jobseekers allowance in detail. This was indicative of attitudes to poverty in Britain that would develop over the next decade.
Government reports did consider the conditions in which these women lived. But these reports were often prime examples of the vast social chasm between the professional classes and the poor women who tended to become young mothers. A 2004 research briefing for the Department of Health argued that the ‘carnival atmosphere’ of deprived coastal towns was a primary factor in their relatively high rate of teenage pregnancy: ‘seaside resorts are generally characterised by a sense of detachment, the suspension of reality, and a considerable amount of movement in and out of the labour market, all of which can encourage casual sex and a lack of responsibility for the consequences of actions’. This somewhat unsympathetic picture of young mothers as careless and detached from reality re-emerges in fictional depictions of teenage pregnancy.
In British comedy, teenage mothers became objects of ridicule. In Little Britain (2003-2006), Matt Lucas portrays a grotesque parody of a young mother, Vicky Pollard. Lucas’s Pollard is irresponsible, incoherent, and indolent. In one scene, she swaps her baby for a Westlife CD. In another, she talks earnestly of a nine-year old with six children, who only got pregnant so she could get a council house. This might have provoked shocked laughter from its audience, but it also revealed attitudes to the poorest people in England and Wales. Alongside her bright pink tracksuit, Vicky’s baby marks her out as the image of the impoverished pregnant teenage girl – a stupid and promiscuous woman.
Poor young mothers in real life also became objects of sensationalised entertainment. The British documentary, 18 Pregnant Schoolgirls, aired on BBC3 at 2am in mid-April 2009. The programme is a ‘shockumentary’ rather than a careful account of young lives, and although it covers a story from the United States it reveals much about British attitudes to teenage pregnancy at the time.
The subjects of the documentary were schoolgirls in Gloucester, Massachusetts, who were reported in a 2008 Time article to have made a pact to get pregnant together. The filmmakers followed a few of these girls, before and after their pregnancies. The story of the ‘pregnancy pact’ – described in the Guardian as a ‘cult’ – was the hook for the documentary. This obscures much about the lives of these young women. They seemed to be from Gloucester’s underclass, but unlike Little Britain’s Pollard – ebullient, and often followed by a gaggle of prepubescent girls – the young women in this film seem like outsiders; lonely and marginalised. Another local girl described them:
When I heard of the pact, I thought about the group in the cafeteria that sat by themselves. They were the girls I looked at and I was like… ‘Questionable!’ I probably wouldn’t choose to hang out with them. But I don’t know any of the girls personally.
These women seemed to have a lot of support, however, from each other and from wider family networks. For the documentary makers, this was a barrier to their scoop on the pact, rather than part of the story. Much like in the Daily Mail report from south Wales, there was no interest in the social circumstances that had led to such a high number of pregnancies.
The women of Gloucester, Massachusetts, probably did not watch the documentary that was made about them, that aired on the other side of the Atlantic on a youth programming channel in the middle of the night. And the young, British people who the programme was aimed at – staggering back from a night out or riven by sleeplessness – were likely meant to be entertained, rather than discouraged from parenthood. The young mothers in on the other side of the Atlantic were not even a cautionary tale – they were objects caught up in a sensationalised story.
But, this tangling of motherhood, poverty, and entertainment still speaks to the middle-class anxieties around teenage pregnancy that I glimpsed as a teenage boy. Images of impoverished young mothers fused with the government message that teenage pregnancy was part of a cycle of poverty; poor people get pregnant, and pregnant people get poor. For young women anxious to do well, and for their parents anxious for them to succeed, teenage pregnancy was something to fear. The moral panic around the issue fuelled, and was fuelled by, these fears.
It was also fuelled by the idea that young mothers were distant and strange; they were not people like us. As the Coalition government looked to make savings in the wake of 2008’s financial crisis, austerity further inflamed our anxieties around Britain’s poorest. The crest of the moral panic around teenage pregnancy in the media passed by 2010 – but it swelled a new moral panic around Britons who were thought not to be paying their fair share. I remember this very clearly from my early teens; the evening news presented the image of an overindulgent ‘benefits Britain’ – large people, large televisions, large families. I remember these people being presented to me as immoderate and irresponsible. Although the people around me were not universally cruel to, or dismissive of, the disadvantaged, I do not remember that many attempts were made to understand their world.
But parenthood was a source of meaning for some teenagers. Motherhood offered young women in deprived communities a positive role in their world. The government wanted these women in the workplace: a wage would help lift mother and child out of poverty. But these women felt that full-time motherhood was more rewarding than part-time work. For example, one woman quoted in a study said: ‘When I actually had him I decided I couldn’t leave him… I thought, ‘oh, part-time mother’ it wasn’t for me that – I didn’t like that idea’. Another reported:
Well sometimes I feel I would like… to go out to work to earn extra money and that, but I also feel that I should be at home with her. So she’s more important. When she starts school I can start working. I chose to have her. It’s my place to stay with her.
This decision to live without employment might have seemed unreal for Britons whose jobs were a pillar of their identity, but it reflected the reality of the communities these young women had grown up in, where jobs were few and family were plentiful.
These young women would probably not have been moved to become pregnant by an Oasis advert, nor dissuaded by the unpleasant depiction of Vicky Pollard or the unglamorous young women of Gloucester, Massachusetts. Rather, motherhood helped them make sense of the world. It also made sense in their world; it created someone like them to love who would love them in turn. We see this in another study, from Britain in the mid-2000s:
I loved being pregnant. I thought it was brilliant… had this feeling of being worthy of something and I just felt… radiant all the time. And I was looking forward to having the baby… I couldn’t wait for this little thing to look after and love.
Men were not always absent from these women’s lives – the older sister in the 2007 Daily Mail story was married to the father of her second child. But they have been more or less absent from this story. As in the anecdotal differences in sex education between my secondary school and the girls’ secondary school down the road, so in the media coverage of the moral panic around teenage pregnancy. It was women who were challenged, caricatured and sensationalised, rather than men. What seemed fun or funny as a teenage boy was a source of fear and anxiety for some women, and an early introduction to the different – and unfair – expectations that our culture placed on them. It was just everyday life, for others.
Today, teenage pregnancy rates in England and Wales are an international success story. Between 2011 and 2021, rates of teenage pregnancy halved, and rates of childhood pregnancy decreased by two-thirds. Although our rates of teenage pregnancy remain high for Europe, New Labour’s Teenage Poverty Strategy has been exported abroad.
It is difficult to pin down a cause for this. In 2013, an ONS report mused that the decline in teenage pregnancies under New Labour was due to the success of anti-poverty campaigns, changing attitudes to education, and ‘the perception of stigma associated with being a teenage mother’. The law around further education might have made an impact: the Education and Skills Act 2008 raised the education leaving age from 16 to 18 from 2015 onwards. However, we can probably discount attitudes to higher education as a primary cause for this precipitous decline in pregnancies – the number of undergraduate students only increased by about five per cent between 2011 and 2021.
We can probably discount the stigmatisation of teenage pregnancy too. Attitudes to young motherhood must have changed in British culture since the turn of the millennium – the rate of teenage conception has fallen enormously, and the wider availability of contraception and sex education cannot be the only factor at work. But, this cultural change has probably been driven by schools and advice clinics rather than by journalists, documentary makers, and advertising regulators. Negative portrayals of teenage pregnancy probably only persuaded people of what they already believed. But, worse than this, they further distanced us from young women who were already at the margins of our society.
Interesting stuff, I like that we are both doing anthropological works looking back on growing up in the UK in the 00s.