The Culture of Fear (17 page)

Throughout a four-day period during which the Texas police hunted for her the media ran stories about how, as Britain’s
Daily Telegraph
put it, “police and doctors are in a race against time,” knowing that “with a 10-year-old body, she is going to require a Caesarean section and a lot of medical attention.” Talk radio show hosts had a field day with the story as listeners and legislators discoursed on how sick our society has become.
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Only grudgingly did the news media eventually take note of the fact, revealed after the girl’s capture, that she was actually fourteen and had said as much from the start. Never mind that neighbors had told reporters that Cindy was a pregnant teenager, or that social workers said her reading and math skills were those of a ninth or tenth grader. In the story’s brief heyday reporters casually dismissed these observations. “The truth is, she’s a 4th-grade dropout. She hasn’t been to school for more than a year,” the Associated Press had avowed.
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As it turns out the girl’s name wasn’t even Cindy Garcia, it was Adella Quintana. Her mother, Francesca Quintana, had gotten a phony
birth certificate for her daughter when she moved from Mexico to Houston to enroll the girl in American schools.
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The real story here is not about “babies having babies,” as commentators put it, but the plight of a mother and her teenage daughter who, like millions of families before them, fled their homeland for what they hoped would be a better life in the United States only to experience a sea of new troubles. In the latter part of the twentieth century, however, this story was scarcely being told. It had been nearly obliterated from American public discourse, partly by intense fear mongering about Spanish-speaking immigrants and partly by what magicians call the art of
misdirection.

To make an object seem to vanish, a magician directs the audience’s attention away from where he hides it. Stories such as the one about Cindy-Adella likewise misdirected, focusing public attention away from real and enduring struggles of women trying to care for their children in an uncaring world.

During the early and mid-1990s teen mothers were portrayed as much more ominous and plentiful than they actually were. Although only about one-third of teen mothers were younger than eighteen, and fewer than one in fifty was fourteen or younger, you would not have known it from the media. An edition of the
Ricki Lake
Show in 1996 titled “I’m Only 13 But I’m Gonna Make a Baby” began with the popular TV talk show personality asking her studio audience, “Is it possible for a thirteen-year-old to be ready to be a mother?” The audience yelled “No-o-o!” as Lake introduced Kassie and Angela, thirteen-year-olds who looked even younger than their age. For close to an hour the two girls had insults and allegations hurled at them by members of the audience, by their own mothers, by Ricki Lake, and by a regretful sixteen-year-old mother of two.
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Kassie and Angela proved themselves remarkably composed and articulate. Accused of having no experience raising children, they pointed to skills they had gained from bringing up their younger siblings.
Asked who would take care of their babies when they were at school, the girls nominated relatives who could help out and said they knew of schools that provided day care. Told by a member of the audience that her boyfriend would abandon her once the baby arrived, one of the girls calmly replied, “I know he’s not going to be around.”
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All in all they came off as more thoughtful potential parents than some I have known who are twice or three times their age, but no matter. Neither of these girls was actually “gonna make a baby” anytime soon. Kassie’s mother let it be known that she had had her daughter injected with a birth control drug that would make her infertile for several months, and Kassie herself blurted out at one point that she knew she wasn’t ready yet. Angela, meanwhile, made it clear that she had no intention of getting pregnant, though she did hope to convince her mother to adopt a child whom she would help raise. In other words, Ricki Lake’s producers had come up with a pregnant topic but no pregnant thirteen-year-olds.

More high-minded programs also promulgated the fiction of an epidemic of pregnancy among very young teens. In an interview on National Public Radio’s “Morning Edition” in 1995 Gary Bauer of the conservative Family Research Council intoned: “It was not many years ago in this country when it was not common for thirteen-year-olds and fourteen-year-olds to be having children out of wedlock. I’m enough of an optimist to believe that we can re-create that kind of a culture.” The interviewer, NPR’s Bob Edwards, failed to correct this patently misleading statement. Nowhere in the segment did he indicate that it remains extremely uncommon for thirteen- and fourteen-year-olds to have children.
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Nor did Edwards note that, until relatively recently, most thirteen-and fourteen-year-olds were
unable
to bear children. Considering the tendency of American journalists to overemphasize studies that show biochemical causes for a range of other social problems, such as hyperactivity in children, depression in adults, and crime in the streets, they have done little to call the public’s attention to a fundamental statistic about teen pregnancy. As recently as a century ago the average age for menarche was sixteen or older, whereas today girls typically have their
first menstrual period by age thirteen, and some as early as age nine. Some scientists blame high-calorie diets and sedentary lifestyles for the early biological maturity of contemporary girls, but whatever the reason, the implications of early menarche are plain. Only lately have girls been called on by society to wait so long from the onset of sexual maturity before having children.
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Reporters, politicians, and social scientists all give intricate explanations for why adolescents get pregnant. But why not account for teen pregnancies the same way we do other pregnancies? As the British sociologists Sally Macintyre and Sarah Cunningham-Burley noted in an essay, “Ignorance about contraception, psychopathology, desire to prove adulthood, lack of family restraint, cultural patterns, desire to obtain welfare benefits, immorality, getting out of school—a host of reasons are given for childbirth in women under 20, while ‘maternal instinct’ is thought to suffice for those over 20.”
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The causes of teen motherhood
must
be treated as distinct and powerful. Otherwise, it would make no sense to treat teen moms themselves as distinct and powerful—America’s “most serious social problem,” as Bill Clinton called them in his 1995 State of the Union address. Nor would it have seemed rational when legislators included in the 1996 Federal Welfare Law $250 million for states to use to persuade young people to practice premarital abstinence.

In what may well qualify as the most sweeping, bipartisan, multimedia, multidisciplinary scapegoating operation of the late twentieth century, at various times over the past decade prominent liberals including Jesse Jackson, Joycelyn Elders, and Daniel Patrick Moynihan and conservatives such as Dan Quayle and Bill Bennett all accused teen moms of destroying civilization. Journalists, joining the chorus, referred to adolescent motherhood as a “cancer,” warned that they “breed criminals faster than society can jail them,” and estimated their cost to taxpayers at $21 billion a year. Members of my own profession, social science, had alarming things to say as well. “The lower education levels
of mothers who began childbearing as teenagers translates into lower work force productivity and diminished wages, resulting in a weaker, less competitive economy,” Stephen Caldas, a policy analyst, wrote in an educational research journal. (Translation: You can thank teen moms for America’s declining position in the world economy.)
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These claims are absurd on their face. An agglomeration of impoverished young women, whose collective wealth and influence would not add up to that of a single Fortune 100 company, do not have the capacity to destroy America. What these pundits did was to reverse the causal order. Teen pregnancy was largely a response to the nation’s educational and economic decline, not the other way around. Girls who attend rotten schools and face rotten job prospects have little incentive to delay sex or practice contraception. In 1994 at least 80 percent of teenage moms were already poor before they became pregnant.
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Early motherhood in itself does not condemn a girl to failure and dependency. Journalists put up astounding statistics such as “on average, only 5 percent of teen mothers get college degrees, compared with 47 percent of those who have children at twenty-five or older”
(People,
in an article bleakly titled “The Baby Trap”). Yet the difference is attributable almost entirely to preexisting circumstances—particularly poverty and poor educational opportunities and abilities. Studies that compare teen moms with other girls from similar economic and educational backgrounds find only modest differences in education and income between the two populations over the long term. Some experts report that young women tend to become
more
motivated to finish school and find jobs once they have offspring to support. Data indicate too that teen moms are less likely than their peers to engage in other self-destructive behaviors, such as drug abuse, participation in gangs, and suicide. Motherhood can bring about what sociologist Joan Moore of the University of Wisconsin, an expert on delinquent girls, calls “a conversion to conventionality.”
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The failure of greater public awareness of conventional teenage mothers results in part because studies about them receive relatively little media attention and in part because adults in positions of power actively strive to make their achievements invisible. In 1998 two seventeen-year-old
mothers in Kentucky filed suit against their school board after they were denied membership in the National Honor Society. Exemplary students with grade-point averages of 3.9 and 3.7 on a scale of 4.0, the girls were told they did not meet the “character” requirement. The admissions committee announced they did not want the girls to be seen as role models for other students.
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Another stereotype of adolescent mothers envisions them as invariably incapable of rearing healthy children. This one too has been conclusively refuted. Researchers document that teenagers having recently cared for younger siblings are sometimes more realistic in their expectations about parenthood than older parents, and more devoted to parenting as a primary endeavor. They tend to have more help than most of the public realizes because as a rule they live with parents or other relatives. At the height of the teen motherhood scare fewer than 22,000 teen moms throughout the entire United States lived without supervision, according to a report from the Congressional Budget Office.
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Evidence of adolescent mothers’ own competence turns up in a variety of studies but usually goes unnoticed. An ironic case in point is a famous set of experiments conducted by the psychologist René Spitz in the 1940s. Spitz compared two groups of babies, the first housed in a nursery where their mothers cared for them, the other in a foundling home where they were cared for by nurses. The babies tended by their mothers flourished, while those cared for by strangers cried and screamed excessively, became depressed, and lost weight. Within two years more than a third of the second group died, and much has been made of their sad fate by those who advocate the importance of early bonding between mothers and their children. Largely neglected in the debates over Spitz’s studies is the fact that the nursery where he observed mothers taking care of their babies was a penal institution for delinquent girls. The mothers of the children who developed normally in Spitz’s experiments were adolescent moms.
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Over the longer haul and out in the real world children of teenage mothers do appear to fare poorly compared with other children, thereby providing politicians and reporters with the oft-cited finding that 70 percent of men in prison were born to teenage mothers. The
implication, however, that their mothers’ age when they were born was the single or most important variable that caused them to end up in jail is iffy at best. When the children of teenage mothers are compared to the children of older mothers from similar socioeconomic circumstances there is little difference between the two groups in outcomes such as criminality, substance abuse, or dropping out of school. The age at which a woman gives birth appears to be far less consequential for how her child turns out than are factors such as her level of income and education, and whether she suffered physical and emotional abuse in her own youth.
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In addition to all the contemporary evidence contradicting their position, those who would blame teen moms for the nation’s social ills confront an awkward historical reality. The teenage birth rate reached its highest level in the 1950s, not the current era. Indeed, between 1991 and 1996 the rate declined by nearly 12 percent.
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Demonizers of today’s young mothers either ignore such facts, or when they cannot, direct the audience’s attention away from them. Jean Bethke Elshtain, a professor of ethics at the University of Chicago and contributing editor of
The New Republic,
began a book review in that magazine with the words “I was a teenage mother.” Considering that she would go on to condemn the book under consideration (Kristin Luker’s
Dubious Conceptions)
for being too accepting of teen moms, this was a provocative confession on Elshtain’s part. Yet Elshtain quickly clarified that she, like most other teen mothers of the 1950s, was
married
when she had her child. The “prevalent concern” of the American public today, Elshtain declared, is “the growing rate of out-of-wedlock births, with all their attendant difficulties.” The real problem, Elshtain argued, is “illegitimacy.”
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