Content area
Full Text
Each year, approximately one million teenage girls in the United States become pregnant. Whether these girls choose to have and keep their babies, marry, get an abortion, or consider adoption is based on myriad factors-where they live, their age, their cultural or religious background, and the amount of familial support available to them.
Some of these girls will come to the library media center for information. But will only girls ask for materials on pregnancy? Or will boys also seek information from the several nonfiction and fiction books aimed at teenage dads? We suggest that two main factors point to gender inequity in this matter: the treatment of teen pregnancy as an "epidemic" by the United States government and the media, and, subsequently, the representation of pregnant girls in young adult fiction.
Moral Panic or Moral Dilemma?
As recently as January 1997, President Clinton declared in a radio address that " . . .there's still a lot more to do if we're going to make sure the American dream is a reality for all of our citizens in the twenty-first century. And we still have some pretty big problems in our society. None stands in our way of achieving our goals for America more than the epidemic of teen pregnancy."'
President Clinton is not the first leader to rally around the seriousness of teen pregnancy in the United States. Yet it is interesting that he would continue to cultivate an image of a countrywide "epidemic" when in fact, birth rates for teenagers declined for the sixth straight year in 1996, the pregnancy rates for fifteen- to nineteen-year-olds fell 3 percent from 1991 to 1992, and recent studies show declines in teenage sex, abortion rates, and birth rates.'
This is not to say that the United States does not have a problem when it comes to teenage pregnancy and parenting, or that the government's efforts have not contributed to the decrease in the number of teenage pregnancies. We do have a problem. In 1992, sixty-one out of every one thousand teenage girls between age fifteen and nineteen gave birth.3Teenagers who give birth at a very young age risk health complications for their babies and themselves. Teenagers from disadvantaged backgrounds are less likely to use contraceptive devices...