Teenage Mothers Should Get Married

Despite nearly 40 years of consistent efforts by government, schools, social services and the medical community, the United States still faces insupportable levels of teen childbearing. Our teen birth rate is nine times higher than the Netherlands’, four times higher than Sweden’s and 65% higher than Britain’s. What is to be done about it? A new report issued by the Institute for American Values, a New York-based family and social policy research organization, suggests that the worst social effects of teen childbearing could largely disappear--if only we rethink our approach to the problem.

Maggie Gallagher, an affiliate scholar of the institute, has produced a comprehensive review and critique of the social science research on teen pregnancy, titled “The Age of Unwed Motherhood.”

In an unusual and provocative take on the subject, Gallagher suggests that the real problem with teen childbearing today is that teenage mothers are not marrying the fathers of their children.

Gallagher’s assertion gives us pause for thought.

Levels of teen childbearing are actually no higher today than they were in the early 1970s. The principal difference between the early 1970s and today is that more and more childbearing teens decline to legitimize their pregnancies and births. Since that time, the percentage of teenage girls conceiving out of wedlock who married the fathers of their children fell from 47% to 16%.

Indeed, what many refer to as the teen pregnancy “crisis” is less a crisis of pregnancy than an epidemic of young, unwed motherhood.

This epidemic, unfortunately, has been aggravated by educators and pregnancy counselors who discourage even 18- and 19-year-olds who decide to carry their pregnancies to term from marrying.

Apparently, we adults are sending ambivalent messages about the importance of marriage to the well-being of children. Not only are we often unwilling to express social disapproval of teen sex and unwed motherhood; in the errant belief that teenage marriages are bound to fail, we are all too silent on the advantages marriage may bring to teen mothers.

Teen marriages are more vulnerable to divorce than marriages of women in their mid-20s. But about half of the marriages of 18- and 19-year-olds succeed. And teen marriages involving children actually have a better chance at success than marriages that do not involve children.

Tellingly, when teen mothers do not marry the fathers of their children, they are more likely in their 20s to be poor and welfare-dependent, and they are less likely, ultimately, to marry at all.

Research indicates that it is primarily early motherhood, not marriage, that derails the educational and work attainment of young women. However dark the prospects of the most hasty teen marriage, that marriage is often the only chance a teenage mother will get to give her child the love and material benefits of a committed father.

Gallagher contends that the somewhat superficial prejudice of educators, social service professionals and counselors against early marriage has profoundly affected the teenage mind-set.

In interviews with young unwed mothers, she often heard the refrain: “I’d like to marry eventually, but I’m still too young.” Old enough to assume the heavy responsibilities of motherhood, but too young to marry?

It appears we must address profound deficiencies in the way we talk to young people about marriage and the family. Increasingly, our youth seem to be picking up the message that while marriage may demand maturity, parenting does not; and that marriage and children are totally separate and unrelated spheres of life.

Can childbearing and child-rearing really have nothing to do with any relationship between a man and a woman that might lead them to formally unite their lives?

Granted, many teenage girls who bear children have been impregnated by men whose prospects as both husbands and fathers are less than desirable. Yet we must do what we can, when appropriate, to get older teenagers who are determined to keep their babies to consider the option of marriage. And we must take steps to support teenage marriages with at least some of the community resources we now devote exclusively to single teen mothers.

The “M” word, marriage, is not a word without dignity and worth. It is a word that for children of teenagers might mean the difference between lives of emotional and economic scarcity and lives of relative security.