The Scapegoat Generation: America's War on Adolescents.

• Author: Conniff, Ruth
• Position: Brief Article

Another very good book that deals with the sticky topic of sex and politics in American life is Kristin Luker's Dubious Conceptions: The Politics of Teenage Pregnancy (Harvard). Luker provides a useful and intelligent analysis of a highly irrational debate.

Like Mike A. Males in his valuable new book, The Scapegoat Generation: America's War on Adolescents (Common Courage Press), Luker insists that we stop treating teenagers as if they were aliens. Conventional wisdom to the contrary, teenagers behave the way they do largely because of the influence of adults.

Males points out that at least half of all pregnancies among girls fifteen or younger are the responsibility of adult men. "The reluctance of the President and top officials to discuss the ugly truths of most `teenage pregnancy'--the backgrounds of poverty, of sexual abuse, of beatings, of initiation to sex by rape, of impregnation by older males, of abandonment by adult fathers with little child support--forms the chief fiction fueling the political malice termed `welfare reform,"' Males writes.

Luker agrees. Draconian welfare-reform policies that cut benefits and exacerbate poverty will likely make the problem of teen pregnancy worse.

Luker's central point is that "early childbearing doesn't make young women poor; rather, poverty makes women bear children at an early age." It is not enough, she argues, to exhort impoverished young women to delay childbearing in the hope of a better future, because poor young women know that regardless of when they have babies, the outlook for their futures is bleak.

Most provocatively, both Luker and Males suggest that teenage girls who get pregnant may in fact be making a rational choice.

Luker notes that poor women who have babies at an early age can get help from their own mothers, who often do a lot of the child-rearing. Despite public-service announcements that urge young women to wait until they are "ready" to have children, poor women know that they may never be "ready," economically, to fully support a...