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This chapter attempts to use some of the same perspectives on adolescence that inform modern theories of juvenile justice to evaluate policies toward teen pregnancy. The concerns that provoke special policy toward teen pregnancy were an important part of the first two-thirds of the twentieth century, when girls at risk were frequently classified as “status offenders.” The problems associated with severe punishment for status offenders led to a tactical withdrawal of delinquency classifications and institutional placement for girls at their sexual risk. But teen pregnancy remains a policy problem of concern. The chapter first discusses the reason why teen pregnancy might be regarded as a special problem. It then examines a range of potential public policies that have been proposed to prevent or respond to teen child bearing. A final section emphasizes the hazards of punishment as a tool to discourage teen childbearing.

This chapter explores how rhetorics of crisis have reshaped contemporary reproductive politics. First, it examines the significance of crisis teen pregnancy narratives in popular media (e.g., Juno, 16 and Pregnant, Glee, and Teen Mom) and how these narratives manage collective anxieties over abortion, adoption, and teen motherhood. It traces these trends alongside the colonization of comprehensive women’s health clinics by the evangelical crisis pregnancy center movement. The logic of homeland security culture, present in this case study through rhetorics of “crisis,” fuels the differential protection of domestic bodies and works to produce and reproduce national identity through the bodies of particular women and families.

Communities are the outer circle of the social worlds interviewees described when talking about norms and social control around teen sex and teen pregnancy. Families, peers, and schools are embedded in communities. People and institutions in the community try to control teens’ access to opportunities for sex, contraception, and abortion. They can strengthen their control by collaborating or weaken it through conflict. The threat of social sanctions from the community affects teens’ behaviors and their public portrayals of those behaviors, as well as other people’s enforcement of teen sexuality norms. Although the norm sets and metanorms in a community are usually confusing and contradictory, an underlying moral or practical rationale provides a cohesive logic. These rationales, which tend to track with the importance of religion in the community, combine with its socioeconomic status to shape teens’ behaviors and their public portrayals and justifications of these behaviors.

This chapter explores school-based pregnancy prevention practices and programs currently in use in schools across the nation. It identifies programs and program components that have been evaluated and demonstrated to be effective in modifying adolescent sexual behavior and preventing adolescent pregnancy. It provides guidance for assessing program goodness-of-fit to the needs and values of the local school and community, and for planning and carrying out programs demonstrated effective in school settings. A bibliography of resources provides program specifics and contact information for locating programs that have been demonstrated to be effective.

Teen childbearing is widely considered a major social problem. This chapter focuses on program interventions, but it also includes a brief discussion of the potential impacts of relevant public policies. The effectiveness of teen pregnancy prevention as an antipoverty strategy depends on two key elements: (1) the effectiveness of teen pregnancy prevention interventions in preventing teen pregnancies and births and (2) the effectiveness of reducing teen childbearing in driving down rates of poverty. There is a lack of evidence demonstrating the effectiveness of many program interventions, but there is some cause for optimism that the best programs may work in the right settings. The chapter discusses the evidence on the link between teen childbearing and subsequent economic outcomes including rates of poverty among teen mothers. The evidence is weak that driving down rates of teen childbearing per se will lead to measurable reductions in poverty.

A Gallup poll conducted in May 1999 found that 7 percent of those surveyed reported that youth/teen pregnancy was the most important problem facing the United States today. The concern about teen pregnancy has even led to national goals regarding its reduction. This chapter reviews the theory and empirical evidence regarding teens' sexual activity and use of birth control with an emphasis on the contribution that economic analysis can make. It first presents a series of descriptive statistics designed to document recent trends in these activities for the population as a whole and for racial/ethnic subgroups. It then analyzes two data sets to provide correlational evidence regarding who engages in sexual activity and uses contraception. State-level data are also used to identify whether changes in “prices” affect these activities, where prices are measured by economic conditions, AIDS incidence, welfare generosity, and the restrictiveness of abortion policy. The chapter also looks at the evidence on the effect of teen childbearing on the subsequent well-being of women.

This chapter analyzes teenagers’ perspectives on how their parents and family members convey and enforce norms about teen sex and teen pregnancy. Teens see parents as important communicators and enforcers of teen sexuality norms. Their norms tend to reinforce the normative messages teens are getting from their schools and communities, and the norms are justified using the practical or moral rationale. Parents and teens are motivated to keep silent about actual sexual behaviors, so hypothetical situations, gossip, conspiracies of silence, and cautionary tales are important methods of indirect communication. Parents use emotional and material threats, as well as social control and physical control over the teen’s body and contraceptive options, to try to enforce norms, but nonetheless most teens have sex while they are still in high school.

This chapter introduces the book’s main questions: What norms about teen sexuality are being communicated to U.S. teens by their families, friends, schools, and communities? How are these norms conveyed and enforced? And what strategies do teens use to negotiate the normative pressures they experience? The chapter previews the book’s new ideas about norms and social control and its real-world approach to understanding norms by studying the in-depth case of U.S. teen sexuality. The chapter describes teen sex, teen pregnancy, and teen parenthood and how they have changed over time. It closes with a description of the book’s interviews with college students and teen parents and an overview of chapters.

School plays a complicated role in regulating teenagers’ sexuality. School is a fishbowl that contains peer interactions and social exclusion. It also represents the key institutional pathway to socioeconomic success that parents emphasize when communicating the practical rationale against teen sex. School administrators and staff exercise powerful social control in their own right, within constraints placed by the district, state, and nation such as Title IX legislation. They communicate teen pregnancy norms through hidden agendas, act as agents of formal socialization through sex education, and often exercise physical control over pregnant girls’ bodies by facilitating their transfer out of the school. In many cases, these actions encourage a climate of silence and invisibility around teen pregnancy in the school. In communicating and enforcing teen sexuality norms, schools often act as a mouthpiece for the broader community.

This chapter reviews a few selected evaluated programs in three fields — delinquency, substance abuse, and teen pregnancy — and takes a look at programs in AIDS/HIV prevention. Many programs focus on increasing knowledge or changing attitudes. To determine whether a program really works, the methodology of evaluation research is examined. Multiple components have to be put together to strengthen the impact of the programs. Single-component efforts such as classroom curriculum or individual counseling are useful but not sufficient for changing the environment in which the high-risk behaviors are taking place. Most of the report cited also deal with policy issues. Violence prevention requires restrictions on the sale, purchase, and transfer of guns. Substance-abuse prevention calls for enforcement of law and taxes on cigarettes and alcohol. Teen pregnancy and HIV prevention depend on the availability of forms of birth control.

Who is winning the struggle between teens and norm enforcers over teen sex? Nobody is. Most teens are abstinent throughout much of high school, but most end up having sex before finishing high school, many don’t use contraception consistently, and many end up with unintended teen pregnancies. The norm enforcers around them aren’t achieving their goals. This social control does have many negative unintended consequences, though. This chapter summarizes the book’s theoretical contributions to the study of norms and discusses the findings in light of recent societal trends. The chapter closes with specific policy suggestions for improving U.S. teens’ sexual health and reproductive health, including action recommendations for parents, schools, community members, and teenagers.

This chapter draws upon the work of both critical-race theorists and feminist sociologists to analyze how the California Department of Health Services’ “Partnership for Responsible Parenting” disguises national and local concerns about changing racial demographics and non-traditional family structures within the rhetoric of the “teenage pregnancy” problem. The discourses that mark the maternal bodies of women of color as racialized, sexualized threats to moral and civic “responsibility,” “family values,” and “public health” achieve their distinctly racialized character and racializing function through their status as part of deviant sexuality, deficient motherhood, and national economic and social threat burden. The chapter also locates the visual print media components of state-authored teen pregnancy prevention initiatives within the same public “screening space” as other U.S. visual constructions of maternal bodies.

This chapter provides a nuanced look at the romantic and sexual relationships of Port City youth. Popular culture, media, public policy, and academic scholarship alike have pathologized the romantic and sexual relationships of economically marginalized youth of color by constructing their sexualities as “risky,” teen pregnancy as an epidemic in their communities, and men in these communities as predatory. Their romantic and sexual ties are, however, more complex. This chapter highlights the many joys of first love, the heartbreaks of romance, the resources generated within romantic and sexual relationships, as well as the sacrifices people make out of love. It shows how gender ideologies impact the everyday lives of youth, and it highlights how young women manage the pregnancy panic by distancing themselves from risk narratives and from some of their pregnant and parenting peers. They distance themselves by drawing on feminist ideologies of self-development and, in the process, police their own bodies and bodies of their peers, often reproducing dominant race, class, and gender narratives. Drawing on women-of-color feminisms, this chapter argues that the ubiquitous problematization of teen parenthood and sexuality interferes with resources that could be used to support all young people’s educational and occupational goals.

Too often, families are unable to provide children with the strong, stable, positive relationships that are essential for individual and societal well-being. This chapter describes the substantial challenges facing families today—including domestic violence, teen pregnancy, child abuse and neglect, divorce, poverty, and unemployment—that make it much harder for parents to form these kinds of relationships with each other and with their children. This chapter also addresses the seismic demographic changes in families, particularly the decline in marriage rates and the accompanying rise of single-parent households and nonmarital children, which often complicate a family’s ability to nurture children.

Proactively nurturing strong, stable, positive relationships is not just a lofty ideal. There are practices already in place—albeit underfunded and not uniformly adopted—that reflect the four cornerstones described earlier. This chapter describes several of these promising reforms to demonstrate that it is possible for family law to nurture strong, stable, positive relationships, serving the interests of both families and the state. Examples include visiting nurses for at-risk mothers, early-childhood education, teen-pregnancy prevention, and zoning laws that encourage family interaction and social ties among neighbors. Family law need not, and in many cases should not, directly intervene in family life. Instead, the government will often be more successful, and likely meet less resistance, if it attempts to encourage these kinds of relationships through indirect means such as subsidies, incentives, choice architecture, and influencing social norms.

This concluding chapter concentrates on the final film in the Twilight Series, Twilight: Breaking Dawn (2011), a pregnancy film that draws together many of the themes presented throughout the book, such as choice, romance, teen pregnancy, excess, abject pregnant bodies, the fetus versus maternal body, the cult of maternity, and the fears of hybridity. It asks: since pregnancy is depicted as the transformation that unites unlikely couples in romcoms, what does it mean when pregnancy, birth, and the transformation from human to inhuman are all part of the same process? Ultimately, the pregnant body has become the bio-political example of struggles over principles of domesticity, patriarchal norms, and cultural authenticity as they are influenced by changing technologies that make it possible to imagine reproduction in laboratories.

This chapter examines the narratives of Puerto Rican Pentecostal women in ministry in New York City. They have led ministries that have sought to live and teach a holistic gospel. They have been able to usher in some level of urban social transformation in their communities. Latina Pentecostals' desires to impact society are rooted in their belief that God is concerned with the person as a whole. To them, it is not an option to sit idly and do nothing as people suffer. It was the call of God over their lives that moved them beyond the four walls of the church to depart altogether from traditional church ministry to do what some may have deemed “ungodly” work—addressing drug addiction, the HIV/AIDS crisis, mental health issues, children with disabilities, and teen pregnancy.