Introduction

In the UK, public perceptions about the kinds of women who experience pregnancy and motherhood in their adolescence often combine elements of truth (that youthful pregnancy is more common among working-class teenagers, for example) and also aspects of the worst prejudices (that young women connive to become pregnant solely to claim welfare benefits and social housing). In contemporary British society, negative stereotypes about young mothers dominate the popular imagination and teenage mothers are generally considered to be young women deficient in morals and conduct, and even appearance. These popular ideas are not peripheral in young mothers’ lives, as evidenced by the observation made by one practitioner running an ‘image-based initiative’ aimed at boosting the self-esteem of teenage mothers that ‘[young mothers] are aware of the Vicki Pollard negative press that all teenager mothers are the same and they wanted to put across a different image’ (Henry, 2005).

There is a large research literature on the factors associated with teenage pregnancy and motherhood in nations of the developed world, and it demonstrates that teenage pregnancy is not equally distributed in most populations. In addition to the widely acknowledged association of youthful conception and child bearing with relative poverty, teenage pregnancy can also be seen to have a distinct geography, to be a feature of certain family structures and, in some cases, to be associated with adverse childhood experiences, such as being looked after in the care system or childhood neglect and abuse. An exploration of these and other factors is the focus of this chapter.

Some caveats

Before the literature is described further, three caveats should be briefly made. First – despite broad patterns that can be discerned in relation to teenage pregnancy, such as its being clustered in certain geographic locations or more prevalent among girls with poorer educational attainment, for example – there is inevitable variety among young women who become pregnant as teenagers. Teenage mothers hail primarily from working-class backgrounds, but not exclusively so. Occasionally, a girl from a middle-class family has a child as a teenager (and many more become pregnant but elect for abortion). It is statistically rarer, but not unknown. Similarly, there is variety in outcomes among individuals from similar backgrounds.