Scapegoating and Moral Panics: Teenage Pregnancy in Britain and the United States

Abstract

Changes in the last 40 years of the twentieth century mean that patterns of family formation and dissolution are now very different from the mid-twentieth century: higher divorce rates; lower marriage rates; a growth in non-marital cohabitation; more births outside wedlock; an increase in the number of lone parent families; more mothers in paid employment (Selman, 1996b). Most of these changes are represented to a greater or lesser extent in all ‘western’ capitalist democratic nation states: from Sweden to Ireland; from North America to Australia; and also in the newly industrialized countries of South East Asia. Van de Kaa (1987) has referred to this cluster of changes in Europe as a ‘second demographic transition’. In most of these countries birth rates have fallen again after a ‘baby-boom’ in the 1960s and the median age of childbearing has been rising. In Northern European countries, the number of births to teenagers fell dramatically in the 1980s (see Table 8.1), but in Britain and the United States adolescent fertility rates, although substantially lower than in the 1960s (Selman, 1996a; Arai, 2003), rose from the mid-1980s and remain much higher than in mainland Western European countries (UNICEF, 2001). This is despite a reversal of the upward trend in the US in the 1990s and in Scotland¹ where the rate has remained fairly stable since the 1996 and declines in England & Wales since 1999.

‘Public policies on adolescent pregnancy…have frequently misdescribed the problem and misled as to the solution’.

Deborah Rhode (1993)