Youth or disadvantage? The construction of teenage mothers in medical journals

Abstract

Teenage motherhood is routinely discussed in medical and nursing journals as a cause for concern and a social problem. Taking these accounts as a starting point, this paper uses discursive analysis to understand how the teenage mother is produced as an unsuitable mother. Beginning with a ‘Public Health’ discourse, early motherhood is understood as a disease requiring surveillance and a public health response. Using an ‘Economic’ discourse, teenage mothers are positioned as a financial drain on society and early motherhood as a cost to the mothers themselves. An ‘Ethnicity’ discourse classifies young mothers into ethnic groups and explains differential fertility rates through the resistance of appropriate reproductive technology among minority group members. These understandings are reflected in a ‘Eugenics’ discourse, which engages metaphors of parenting as a biological priority and highlights the unsuitability of young mothers as parents. An examination of these discourses shows that concern about teenage motherhood is as much about the wrong sort of young women becoming mothers, as mothering too soon.