Embodying the Problem: The Persuasive Power of the Teen Mother

By Jenna Vinson

The dominant narrative of teen pregnancy persuades many people to believe that a teenage pregnancy always leads to devastating consequences for a young woman, her child, and the nation in which they reside. Jenna Vinson draws on feminist and rhetorical theory to explore how pregnant and mothering teens are represented as problems in U.S. newspapers, political discourses, and teenage pregnancy prevention campaigns since the 1970s. 

Vinson shows that these representations prevent a focus on the underlying structures of inequality and poverty, perpetuate harmful discourses about women, and sustain racialized gender ideologies that construct women’s bodies as sites of national intervention and control.

Embodying the Problem also explores how young mothers resist this narrative. Analyzing fifty narratives written by young mothers, the recent #NoTeenShame social media campaign, and her interviews with thirty-three young women, Vinson argues that while the stigmatization of teenage pregnancy and motherhood does dehumanize young pregnant and mothering women, it is at the same time a means for these women to secure an audience for their own messages.  

More information on the author's website (https://jennavinson.com)

• Language: English
• Publisher: Rutgers University Press
• Release date: Dec 11, 2017
• ISBN: 9780813591025

Book preview

Embodying the Problem

Embodying the Problem

The Persuasive Power of the Teenage Mother

Jenna Vinson

Rutgers University Press

New Brunswick, Camden, and Newark, New Jersey, and London

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Names: Vinson, Jenna, 1984– author.

Title: Embodying the problem : the persuasive power of the teenage mother / Jenna Vinson.

Description: New Brunswick : Rutgers University Press, [2017] | Includes bibliographical references and index.

Identifiers: LCCN 2017020839 (print) | LCCN 2017011494 (ebook) | ISBN 9780813591018 (cloth : alk. paper) | ISBN 9780813591001 (pbk. : alk. paper) | ISBN 9780813591025 (epub) | ISBN 9780813591049 (Web PDF)

Subjects: LCSH: Teenage mothers—United States.

Classification: LCC HQ759.4 .V56 2017 (ebook) | LCC HQ759.4 (print) | DDC 306.874/3—dc23

LC record available at

https://lccn.loc.gov/2017020839

A British Cataloging-in-Publication record for this book is available from the British Library.

Copyright © 2018 by Jenna Vinson

All rights reserved

No part of this book may be reproduced or utilized in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, or by any information storage and retrieval system, without written permission from the publisher. Please contact Rutgers University Press, 106 Somerset Street, New Brunswick, NJ 08901. The only exception to this prohibition is fair use as defined by U.S. copyright law.

www.rutgersuniversitypress.org

For my mother, Beth

Contents

Preface: Embodying the Problem

Chapter 1. The Role of the Teen Mother in Narratives of Teenage Pregnancy

Chapter 2. Seeing Is Believing: How Visual Representations of Women Established the Problem of Teenage Pregnancy

Chapter 3. Challenging Experts, Commonplaces, and Statistics: Teen Mothers’ Counter-narratives

Chapter 4. Resisting Stigmatizing Pregnancy Prevention Initiatives: The #NoTeenShame Campaign

Chapter 5. Confronting the Stranger on the Street: Embodied Exigence in Everyday Rhetorical Situations

Conclusion

Acknowledgments

Appendix A

Appendix B

Appendix C

Notes

Bibliography

Index

About the Author

Preface

Embodying the Problem

The body has been made so problematic for women that it has often seemed easier to shrug it off and travel as a disembodied spirit.

—Adrienne Rich, Of Woman Born

This book is about the ways in which stories and images of teenage pregnancy position young pregnant and mothering bodies as exigencies—that is, urgent matter demanding an immediate response, often an expert response. I explore how pregnant and mothering teens have been represented as problems in US newspapers, political discourses, and teenage pregnancy prevention campaigns from the 1970s until the present; how these representations communicate particular cultural logics; and, most importantly, how these narratives impact the everyday experiences of young pregnant and mothering women. I also investigate how young pregnant and mothering women seize the opportunity engendered by the public attention to the so-called teenage pregnancy problem to speak back to those who confront them in public and to write counter-narratives of pregnancy and motherhood—stories that explicitly resist the statistics, experts, and assumptions that dehumanize them as a supposed coherent category of problem people. By exploring the productive tensions between conflicting narratives about young pregnant and mothering women, this book has a lot to say about rhetoric, resistance, bodies, stories, and agency.

Rather than pretend to shrug my body off and take you through this book as a disembodied spirit, as feminist activist Adrienne Rich writes, I want to make clear how the arguments I lay out in this book stem from my embodied experience as a pregnant and mothering teen. When I was seventeen years old, I could see that my pregnant body spoke to people, grabbed their attention, and communicated things that I was only vaguely aware of. When I decided to keep my unintended pregnancy, I knew that, eventually, my visibly pregnant form would garner attention for being wrong. And it did. However, I found that there were other things my body seemed to communicate. A brief example will highlight this point. One day, in my senior government class, our teacher tried to engage us in a rather polarizing discussion of current political issues by having us stand and walk to opposite sides of the classroom. He would announce an issue (e.g., The death penalty, The legalization of marijuana, Bush’s refusal to sign the Kyoto Agreement on climate change) and those who were for it ambled over to the left side of the room; those who were against it marched to the right side. From across the room we would yell at each other for having the wrong outlook on whatever issue we had staked a claim to by moving our bodies to that specific side of the room. When the teacher called out legalization of abortion! I assumed that we would have another legalization of marijuana on our hands, with all the students moving to the left. I was shocked when the room settled and Megan—curiously the only other girl that I remember being in that particular government class—and I stood alone on the for side. Megan scoffed, shouting to those on the other side of the room: What the hell guys?! Come on! Even the pregnant girl is over here!

Everyone laughed, but no one budged.

Looking down, I thought about the contradictory message communicated by my visibly pregnant body positioned on the prochoice side of the room. If anything, abortion was supposed to be for people like me: girls with (assumed) potential who had obviously made a mistake and needed to rectify the situation. The narrative of a young, single woman needing access to a safe and affordable abortion procedure to avoid the doomed fate of teenage motherhood was a common rhetorical appeal in my state, which often sought to limit women’s access to such procedures (e.g., at that time in Arizona, minors had to get parental consent to have an abortion, but did not yet have to get that parental consent notarized as they do now). There was a Planned Parenthood clinic three miles from my high school; perhaps the only reasonable explanation for my pregnancy was that I was antichoice. And, yet, there I stood on the left, embodying the right-to-choose location in my made-the-wrong-choice form.

This process of critically reflecting on the things my body seemed to communicate did not end in that government classroom. The impetus of this specific book project began when I wrote about my experiences as a teenage mother for a writing workshop my junior year of college. That semester, my teacher asked us to write a social witness essay—a genre that explores current social issues through the lens of personal experiences, observations, and research. After racking my brain for a week I remembered that I was considered a teen mother (something that, even at nineteen years old, I often forgot). So, I set off to do the work of reimagining my experience of motherhood—something that had been part of my day-to-day school, work, and home life for two years—as a social issue by using Internet search engines to discover what teenage pregnancy meant to the rest of the world. As I sifted through the research which, in 2004, told me only that my child was more likely to go to prison, rely on welfare, struggle with health issues, and become suicidal, I searched more fervently for the light at the end of the tunnel—some indication that this research was wrong. The process brought back memories of painful encounters with strangers and not-so-strangers eager to comment on my youthful pregnant body, my doomed future, my perceived sexual promiscuity, and my participation in a craze of superficial adolescents who supposedly became pregnant because it was trendy. I remembered and became reattentive to what teen mother and activist Allison Crews called the Teen Mom Look—the scrutinizing glares that I received at grocery stores, doctors’ offices, and school (When I Was Garbage 37).

So I wrote. Amid the confusion and pain brought on by my research and memories, I found my satiric writing voice and drafted a paper—a social critique of the teenage-pregnancy-as-epidemic trope I witnessed in American discourse: I called it the Dis-ease of Teen Pregnancy. In my essay, I wrote about the difficulty of deciding what to do about the pregnancy when I made very little money ($5.15 an hour at my part-time job to be exact) and had wanted to be the first in my family to go to college. I wrote about the pressure I felt to hide or terminate the pregnancy to ensure my success in life; I wrote of the constant inappropriate comments I experienced like the security guard at my school asking if I knew who the father was and the older ladies in the grocery store line who would loudly castigate young single welfare mothers as I waited in line behind them, baby on hip and WIC check in hand. I wrote of my college friend who, aged nineteen and eight months pregnant, was walking to class when two young men called out to her, Should’ve used a condom! Intertwining research with these narrative vignettes, I showed that teenage mothers do graduate high school, that the normal age for motherhood has varied across history, and that public responses to teen mothers are often cruel and unusual.

The process of researching and writing this paper was cathartic. I finally had a place to release the emotions I had suppressed over the years and an opportunity to bear witness to the everyday microaggressions I had experienced and just kind of accepted or perhaps forgotten. It was also one of the first moments I really explored, in writing, the politics of my body—the ways in which expert discourses about sociopolitical issues shaped my embodied experiences as a woman at that particular point in time.

I was terribly frightened the week after I submitted the paper for peer review. After all, I was outing myself as a mother and challenging a way of looking at young motherhood that even I had come to think was the capital T truth. Yet, much to my surprise, most of my peers praised the piece. My teacher even pulled me aside after class to share that she, too, had her daughter during her teens and she appreciated my bravery for telling this story.

After receiving positive reviews from my peers and teacher, I submitted the paper for publication in an undergraduate literary magazine. I read it aloud to an audience of professors, college students, and parents at the celebration of the magazine’s release. After the reading I was approached by an audience member who complimented my point of view and asked how I thought that she could help. I was ecstatic. Sharing my personal narrative, it seemed, did create some semblance of social change. My curiosity about the persuasive potential of the teen mother story stems from my experiences telling my story and the fact that each and every time I tell it, I am approached by people who say that they had never thought about it that way and that they want to treat young mothers a bit differently after hearing it.

Yet, if I am to be honest, the reviews were not all good. One peer in particular, Marisol, fervently critiqued my essay during our writing workshop.¹ Looking down with disgust at my paper in her hands, she told me (and the class), You can’t talk about teenage motherhood in this way. You make it sound too easy. My sister just told us she is pregnant. She just started high school and now she has ruined her life!

At the time, I had pretended to jot down Marisol’s comments and sighed with relief when class ended a minute later. For a long time I assumed she had not understood my argument. Did she not read the part where I explicitly acknowledged that motherhood is hard? Where I noted that balancing school and raising children is challenging? Did she not get that I was trying to interrupt the assumption that her sister had simply ruined her life?

From my subject position as a white young woman experiencing explicit stigmatization really for the first time, I did not understand how teenage motherhood signified differently across lines of difference, nor did I understand how discourses about teenage pregnancy produced and reflected the politics of racism. Perhaps, for Marisol and her sister living in a Mexican American community in Tucson, Arizona’s south side, becoming a mother was not just becoming a statistic as I had put it in my paper. Perhaps, it was perpetuating the vicious stereotype that Latinas are hyper-breeding women, as Elena Gutierrez points out in her book Fertile Matters. Perhaps it was indicative of putting family life before studies and career success. Perhaps it was potentially confirming that those with skin colors other than white do not know how to do things right and are the cause of their own group oppression.

Looking back, I realize that in my junior year I had spoken in universals about stereotypes of teenage motherhood, falling into the trap devised by the seemingly race-/class-neutral categorization of teenage pregnancy as I will discuss in this book. When I wrote that my biggest struggle as a teenage mother was dealing with how others perceived me, I was speaking from the experience of a white woman—from a mirage of normalcy that often allowed me to pass without scrutiny even though I was a single, low-income teenaged student and mother who used state-funded benefits and extended kin to support myself and my child. I was the good girl gone wrong; I was marked as an outsider only by the bulge of my belly or the baby on my hip; I was not the wrong girl with something to prove. It took me years of research of the racialization of good motherhood to figure out that talk about teenage pregnancy often covers deeply entrenched racial and class biases.

I tell these stories both to make transparent (and valued) the embodied ways of knowing that led to this project and to demonstrate that I am both an insider and outsider to the subjects of this book. I have experienced pregnancy and motherhood as a teen much like the women pictured in the cover stories and news articles I analyze in chapter 2. I have published counter-narratives and I have spoken back in moments of everyday embodied exigence like the authors, participants, and activists I discuss in chapters 3, 4, and 5. But I am not the same. Teens are not all the same. Mothers are not all the same. And it is important to keep in mind those differences as we proceed (I say as much to myself as I say to you). I must consistently reflect on the ways in which my particular subject position shapes my understanding of narratives of teenage pregnancy and motherhood.

At the time of this writing teenage pregnancy is still tracked and reported in ways that measure teen births as indicators of public health and national standing. Googling teenage pregnancy produces over seven million results, the top eight sites demonstrating that teenage pregnancy is constructed as a problem for credentialed medical and family planning experts to solve. The so-called problem is defined and addressed by government agencies, health/family planning nonprofit organizations, and medical communities.

In response to young mothers’ counter-narratives as well as research that busts myths about the effects of fertility timing, a few sites have tempered the stigmatizing force of their discourse. Some acknowledge that teen pregnancy and birth rates have been declining for decades and write that parenting is hard at any age. Although some of the claims have been nuanced since I first began tracking this pathologizing discourse (e.g., I no longer see claims that the children of young mothers are more likely to become suicidal), teenage pregnancy is still forcefully positioned as a social problem that demands attention to the embodied experiences of young mothers, particularly young women of color.

While the public’s focus on teenage pregnancy as a social problem most certainly impacts the experiences of the men who father teen pregnancies, particularly young dads, this book focuses on the writing and representations of young women who resist this discourse. This is because, as I argue in chapter 1, the argument to prevent teenage pregnancy functions on the stigmatization and surveillance of young women.

Throughout this book I use the terms teenage mother, young mother, and—when I need to distinguish pregnancy from motherhood—young pregnant and mothering women to refer to the writers, participants, activists, and photographed subjects I address in this book who have had children before the age of twenty. However, I want to make clear that I do not think all women who have had children by age twenty are the same. Also, I think that the stigma attached to teenage pregnancy and motherhood negatively impacts women who have reproduced outside of the bounds of their teens who may appear too young to others. I do not think there should be a defining boundary, based on chronological age, placed between mothers. In debating over whether to call myself, the counter-narrative authors, and the participants teen mothers, I stumble upon the contested site of identity formation. I recognize that the discursive constructions of teenage mother and young mother function to divide mothering women on the basis of age, suggesting that the years we have only fairly recently decided to call adolescence are an unacceptable time to engage in childbearing. Using these loaded terms repeats what feminist philosopher Judith Butler calls the forcible citation of a norm (232). In other words, women aged twenty and under are young mothers as opposed to women aged twenty to thirty-five who may escape a qualifying label (based on age, that is; there are still plenty of other qualifiers) by reflecting the norm. Childbearing women aged thirty-five and older are older mothers and face their own set of pathologizing discourses.

Teresa de Lauretis explains that actually using the terms constructed by the dominant discourse is important because the only way to position oneself outside of that discourse is to displace oneself within it—to refuse the question as formulated, or to answer deviously (though in its words), even to quote (but against the grain) (7). Put differently, de Lauretis suggests that it is only in using the terms of dominant discourse, like teen mother, that we are able to speak to those terms, challenge them, and perhaps shift what they mean. In the field of rhetoric, we often claim that a speaker or writer must be recognized in order to influence an audience. Embracing a well-known identity marker is one way to gain an audience, build ethos or credibility, and potentially enact change.

This book intervenes in the rhetorical practices that continue to prompt the public to see young pregnant and mothering women as problems. It encourages a critical gaze on representations of teenage motherhood and promotes the authority of women to make their own decisions about their bodies with full access to the resources and respect to be able to do so. The book adds to feminist rhetorical studies another example of rhetorical analysis that focuses on how embodied, visual, and narrative rhetoric(s) both challenge and (re)produce hegemonic ideologies. I also practice, as modeled in this preface, an embodied ethic, consistently bringing attention to my own subject position, not to interrupt the focus on the task at hand, but to bring attention to the ways in which the knowledge from this book stems from a partial vision. Finally, it is my sincere hope that this book serves as documentation and validation of the creative and compelling rhetorical tactics young pregnant and mothering women continue to use to resist the stigmatizing and altogether damaging rhetoric of teenage pregnancy.

I write this book not to stake claim on an academic theory, perspective, or topic but to continue conversations and collaboration around feminist issues of importance. In some ways, by authoring an academic book, I embody a problem once again by positioning myself as an expert on these writers and activists. By writing about women’s representations of their experiences I do not mean to suggest that my analysis renders me the sole authority on these stories. I hope to speak, as rhetorician Jacqueline Jones Royster argues we must, both with and about the communities I address (275). As a teenage mother, I am deeply invested in discovering the strategies women use to join the disembodied expert discourses that seek to define who they are and to resist the hegemonic ideologies that silence young mothers’ perspectives. Furthermore, I agree with sociologist Nancy Naples that feminist professionals can function as allies helping to effect positive change and need not always function as experts who silence the perspectives of others (1178). I hope to function as an ally in a movement to end pathologizing perspectives on young motherhood by using my expertise in rhetoric and creative writing to identify persuasive narrative strategies that can be deployed to trouble dominant (mis)understandings.

1

The Role of the Teen Mother in Narratives of Teenage Pregnancy

At 15, I was a good student and determined to apply for college. But after I had my daughter, my high school guidance counselor refused to see me and help me with my applications. She never expected me to graduate. Most people, even within my family, assumed I wouldn’t amount to anything and would be dependent on government assistance for the rest of my life. . . . Today I am a student, an advocate for young parents and, above all, a proud mom.

—Gloria Malone, I Was a Teenage Mother

On March 4, 2013, the New York City Human Resources Administration, under the leadership of Mayor Michael Bloomberg, launched a controversial teenage pregnancy prevention campaign designed to promote the difficulties of teen pregnancy, and why it is better to wait until you are a financially stable adult in a committed relationship to have children (New York City Human Resources Administration). The campaign included five ads placed in subways and bus shelters throughout New York City as well as an interactive texting program that prompted participants to experience the apparently tragic life of a teen parent. The Bloomberg campaign’s primary strategy was to characterize teen parents, but more clearly young mothers, as problems—problems that even their own children didn’t want to be a part of. Four of the public ads featured an image of a crying or frowning one-year-old posed against a blank background. Adjacent to each child was a statement, seemingly from the child, directed to his or her parent:

• A black little girl wonders, Honestly, Mom . . . chances are he won’t stay with you. What happens to me?

• A black little girl asks, Got a good job? I cost thousands of dollars each year.

• A brown-skinned little boy bemoans, I’m twice as likely not to graduate high school because you [mom] had me as a teen.

• A white little boy—in a shirt that labels him Mommy’s—states, Dad, you’ll be paying to support me for the next 20 years.

The final ad features a photo strip of all four child portraits adjacent to a statement directed to non-pregnant/parenting NYC teenagers: If you finish high school, get a job, and get married before having children, you have a 98% chance of not being in poverty.

Each ad included what the NYC Human Resources Administration called a sobering fact or generalization about teenage parenthood highlighted in a yellow banner cutting across each poster. For example, the Honestly, Mom question is followed by the statement Are you ready to raise a child by yourself? 90% of teen parents don’t marry each other. The ads did not provide citations for the statistics, but those who were curious and had access to the Internet could temporarily find sources listed on the HRA’s website. A close look at the studies these statements were adapted from demonstrates that the numbers are quite misleading.¹ As one example, the ad claiming young people can avoid poverty by finishing school, working, and marrying before reproducing comes from Ron Haskins and Isabel Sawhill’s Creating an Opportunity Society. In this book, Haskins and Sawhill make clear their philosophical orientation or firm belief in the social norm of personal responsibility (70). For Haskins and Sawhill, this means waiting until the age of twenty-one to have kids and marrying before having children. In other words, their claim is a value statement, not a sobering fact. The authors readily admit that their interpretations of data may be critiqued as erroneously based on numerical correlations, not firm evidence of causation (71–72).

As another example, the Bloomberg campaign claim that 90% of teenage parents don’t marry is construed from a 2005 Child Trends Fact Sheet indicating that within one year of their child’s birth, fewer than 8% of unmarried teen mothers had married the baby’s father (Franzetta et al. 2). A statistical snapshot of the child’s first year of life does not tell us much about the martial status of the birth mother or father (who could have been any age despite the ad’s emphasis on teen parents) in the long run, nor does this 8% tell us much about why these women did not marry within one year. Nevertheless, the judgmental-phrase-to-misleading-statistic formula encourages viewers to quickly accept the unstated and often contested premises of the claim such as marriage is the marker of good child rearing, all women need/want state-sanctioned male companionship, and teenage motherhood is always the result of consensual sex between teenagers.

Viewers of the campaign are prompted to feel for the weeping infants—symbolic of all seemingly doomed children of teen parents—and adopt the second-person perspectives that characterize teen parents as irresponsible people worthy of public condemnation. Teen mothers of color, in particular, are represented as naïve, abandoned women who are the source of their children’s educational failure. The Bloomberg campaign, like many US teenage pregnancy prevention campaigns, participates in the long-standing practice of conditioning the public to regard the bodies of women as problems—in this case, as people who lack (fiscal/personal) responsibility, the resources to care for the children they produce, and the authority to know what is best.

The campaign potentially silences young pregnant and mothering women as emblems of shame that we (i.e., viewers who are not teen parents) should scrutinize and take action to prevent. However, on March 15, 2013, black Latina blogger and activist Gloria Malone critiqued the campaign by publishing an op-ed titled I Was a Teenage Mother in the New York Times. A resident of New York, Malone seized the timely opportunity engendered by the campaign’s release to publicly claim her identity as a former teenage mother as a means of expertise on issues of sex education, prevention, child rearing, and poverty. Her article draws readers in with the familiar, heart-wrenching scene of a fifteen-year-old girl telling her mother she was pregnant: ‘Everything’s going to by O.K., mamita,’ my mother said, before walking into her bedroom and crying her eyes out. Yet, rather than following the scene with the prescribed young-mother-as-cautionary-tale script, Malone narrates her experience of teenage pregnancy as a struggle with people . . . [who] assumed I wouldn’t amount to anything in conjunction with the demanding daily tasks of child rearing, school, and work. Malone encourages readers to empathize with her as a hardworking student, worker, and mother who faces discrimination.

Malone also brings attention to the few people who encouraged [her] not to listen to the stereotypes—teachers and a nurse—to suggest, these bits of encouragement are what kept me going and helped her to achieve conventional middle-class signifiers of success: good grades, a high school diploma, and admittance to college. Prompting readers to respect her accomplishments and, perhaps, even to think differently about teen moms considering her outcomes, Malone cultivates an ethos of responsibility to counter the Bloomberg campaign’s claims of teen irresponsibility. Malone writes, Today I have a 6-year-old daughter, and I’m not a teenager anymore. But I can’t help but be affected by New York City’s controversial new anti-teenage pregnancy campaign. . . . All [the campaign ads] do is take the insults and stereotypes directed at teenage parents every day, and post them up around the city. Strategically using moments of her lived experience as a stigmatized young mother, Malone sets the stage for her argument that the ads are ineffective as pregnancy prevention tools and perpetuate stereotypes and blame that keep teenage parents from seeking the help and support they need. Malone still narrates her life as a young mother as marked with struggle—something most audiences would expect—but she encourages readers to see the struggle as the result of the pathologizing perspectives on teenage parenthood, such as the ones promoted by the Bloomberg campaign (New York City Human Resources Administration). Malone claims the teenage mother identity as a means for public recognition (by the New York Times editor who chose to run her piece and by the public who ultimately read it) and credibility—she has experienced the consequences of the disparaging rhetoric about teenage pregnancy and motherhood and, thus, knows the damage it causes.

I open with the example of Malone and the Bloomberg campaign because it highlights the conflicting narratives and clashing worldviews explored in this book. The Bloomberg campaign (re)produces what I call the dominant narrative of teenage pregnancy: the hegemonic depiction of young motherhood as the tragic downfall of a woman’s life.² It is a rhetorical practice of words and images that persuade many to believe that a teenage pregnancy always leads to devastating consequences for a young woman, her child, and the nation in which they reside. The story goes something like this: an immature, unsuspecting, or irresponsible young woman makes the mistake of having sex and is plagued by a pregnancy that—if she carries to term and keeps the baby—leads to an unsuccessful child-rearing experience and a life of poverty.

Composed of visual, narrative, and numerical representations of young mother’s bodies and lived experiences, this story authorizes experts to talk about and for young mothers in order to justify a particular action that experts portray as solving the problem of young mothers’ existence. In other words, the story of the teen mother has persuasive power, potentially generating collective pity or rage—emotional responses useful for a variety of agendas. Any young mother whose lived experience does not reflect the dominant narrative (e.g., she graduates college, achieves financial independence, gains public notoriety, raises healthy children, or simply refuses to perform the cautionary-tale life script) is dismissed as exceptional (i.e., not like the others) or condemned as potentially dangerous (e.g., glamorizing) so as to reaffirm the truth of the narrative of failure. The fact that many people perceive teenage pregnancy as a social problem—often sandwiched