Abstract
Researchers have long discussed the negative implications of discourses about teenage pregnancy. The authors of this article join this discussion by focusing on the tension between social/educational imperatives to prevent teenage pregnancy and the educational imperative to support all students. Drawing from data from the My Pregnancy Story Project—a mixed-method study of the lived experiences of 27 young pregnant and/or mothering women—this article illustrates that pregnant and mothering students often endure school environments in which they are consistently reminded of their “mistake” by teachers, peers, and sex education learning activities. Although some participants reported feeling stigmatized and silenced, these young women also articulated what they want from their schools. Reflecting on these youth voices, the authors call for school personnel and those making policy decisions to examine and revise school policies in the areas of harassment and bullying, school codes of conduct, personnel hiring and training, health and sex education pedagogy, and access to information.
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Notes
From this point on, we use the phrase “young pregnant and mothering women” to refer to the participants of our study. Two participants were pregnant and currently raising a child; most were either pregnant or mothering. Although it is important to distinguish pregnancy from motherhood, we refrain from using “and/or” to simplify our sentences. By referring to these women as “young,” we indicate that they were all under the age of 20 years old, which is often referred to as a young period for pregnancy.
We use the label Hispanic/Latina to reflect the terms used by the sources we are drawing on. We recognize that these terms are often contested.
All flyers were printed in English because the targeted participants were literate in the English language.
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Acknowledgments
We are grateful to the all of the MPSP participants for sharing their pregnancy stories with us and to the teachers, volunteers, and administrators who helped us coordinate the focus groups at each site. This project would not have been possible without the funding and support of the University of Arizona's Crossroads Collaborative and the Southwest Institute for Research on Women.
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Vinson, J., Stevens, S. Preventing Pregnancy OR Supporting Students? Learning from the Stories of Young Mothers. Sex Res Soc Policy 11, 322–336 (2014). https://doi.org/10.1007/s13178-014-0157-6
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s13178-014-0157-6