As her little boy performs at an afternoon care middle around the highway, Michelle, an single youngster, is in algebra type, hoping to be the 1st member of her kinfolk to graduate from highschool. Will motherhood make this younger girl poorer? Will it make the U.S. poorer as a kingdom? that is what the voices raised opposed to "babies having infants" might have us imagine, and what many american citizens look prone to think. This strong publication takes us at the back of the stereotypes, the infected rhetoric, and the turn media sound bites to teach us the advanced fact and troubling truths of sweet sixteen moms in the United States today.

Would it shock you to benefit that Michelle is likely to be white than African American? That she is probably eighteen or nineteen--a felony grownup? That teenage moms are not any extra universal this day than in 1900? That two-thirds of them were impregnated by means of males older than twenty? Kristin Luker, writer of the acclaimed Abortion and the Politics of Motherhood, places to relaxation as soon as and for all a few very hot misconceptions approximately unwed moms from colonial occasions to the current. She lines the best way renowned attitudes got here to demonize younger moms and examines the profound social and fiscal alterations that experience motivated debate at the factor, specifically because the Seventies. within the early 20th century, reformers concentrated people's awareness at the social ills that led single youngsters to develop into pregnant; this present day, society has come virtually complete circle, pinning social ills on sexually irresponsible teens.

Dubious Conceptions introduces us to the younger ladies who're the thing of a lot opprobrium. In those pages we listen teenage moms from around the kingdom speak about their lives, their trials, and their makes an attempt to discover which means in motherhood. The ebook additionally offers a human face to those that criticize them, and exhibits us why public anger has settled on one among society's such a lot susceptible teams. delicate to the fears and confusion that gas this anger, and to the destiny that teenage moms and their childrens face, Luker makes very transparent what we as a state hazard by means of now not spotting teenage being pregnant for what it's: a symptom, no longer a reason, of poverty.