Talking about teen pregnancy

Dr. Andrea O’Reilly is a professor in the School of Gender, Sexuality and Women’s Studies at York University in Toronto, Ont. O’Reilly is the founder and director of The Motherhood Initiative for Research and Communication Involvement, founder and editor-in-chief of the Journal of the Motherhood Initiative and founder and editor of Demeter Press, the first feminist publication on mothering, sexuality and family.

How do you think education plays in relation to teen pregnancy?

“I think it will decrease teen parenthood, if anything. There is a direct correlation between sex education and teen pregnancy. When young adults are taught the facts about teen pregnancy, pregnancy goes down because they understand how pregnancy happens. There is a whole abstinence movement in the United States, but there is absolutely no evidence that says telling your kids not to do it (have sex), will result in less teen pregnancy.

Teenagers are having sex, full stop. Sex education in school is not going to increase that or decrease that, but it will hopefully make them smarter about it. Having said that, my sense is that most teens get pregnant by accident, birth control failures happen. It just happens. I believe the statistic is that 50 per cent of children are not planned. One of of two kids are not planned, but they are wanted. I hope it makes children more aware, and more mothering, but I don’t know if it will actually have an impact on the amount of teen pregnancies that we see.”

In a 2008 Macleans article, you are quoted saying that “teen pregnancy is not a death sentence.” What did you mean by that?

“Young moms are still stigmatized and demonized. I don’t think that has changed. One of my students is not a young mom, but she has nieces and nephews that she babysits. She is a very involved aunt, and she get comments all the time, because she is 28 but looks very young. People flat out make comments to her saying, “‘what are you doing having a baby?’ How old are you, 12?’” I used to teach young moms. The stories they would share! Unbelievable. I don’t think that with any other group of people you would have permission to say these things publically. Young moms constantly are barraged with comments about “babies having babies”. One student told me once that someone said, “You need a license to have a dog, and you should have to have a license to have a kid.”

What I meant about the death sentence is that it doesn’t have to be that way. Many mothers have children young and still go on to lead very successful lives. The thing that people say is, ‘young moms are poor.’ That may be true, but they were poor before they became a mother. It’s not motherhood that’s made them poor. They’ve been coming from marginalized neighbourhoods, or poor families. I think is a real misunderstanding. For many of these teen women that are having babies as they enter into adulthood, they aren’t going to university, and they aren’t doing the middle class life. What’s wrong with them having a child at 18 if they are supported? I’m not saying supported by the government; it can be from the community.

Do you think that there is a right time to have a child?

“If having a child gives you meaning in life, so what? The age thing, ‘they’re too young to have children.’ I don’t believe that, because people have been having children that young for thousands of years, and they make great parents. 13 might be too young, but 18 or 19 is not. If they are too young, then have been too young throughout history. Nobody talks about the drawbacks of being too old to be a mother. There are pros and cons with each.

I have a friend who became a mother at 43. I became a mom at 23. There are a lot of things I wish I had; money, stability etc. But then when I talk to her, there are things that she doesn’t have that she wished she did. Yes, she had a job, she had tenure, and financial security, but she was older, so she had physical issues. More than that, when you have a child later, you are more stuck in your ways. Your personality is fully formed. I think it is hard to adapt to mothering, because you have your sense of self, and you have your routines. When you’re young, you just go with it because you haven’t set up rigid routines in your life. You’re more flexible and fluid in your personality and in your life. I think you can adapt to mothering more when you’re young. You also have more energy.”

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