Positively pregnant: Teenage women's experiences of negotiating pregnancy with their families

abstract

Research on teenage pregnancy and motherhood inevitably also involves a focus on teenagers’ sexuality, intimate interpersonal relationships and reproductive choices. In South Africa, as in the global context, teenage fertility is mostly problematised - assumed to be a social and health concern. South African research shows that teenage pregnancy and parenting cannot be understood outside the complex realms of culture, class and historically racialised differences. In the local context, teenage pregnancy has in the main been approached as inherently problematic, with pregnant girls positioned as vulnerable victims or misguided, ‘bad’ girls. The negative, pathologising and judgemental response of communities, families, schools and even peers to pregnant and parenting learners at school has been increasingly documented, as has the tendency of researchers and professionals to reproduce and legitimise such discourses. Conducted within a feminist framework and adopting a social constructionist theoretical base, this article is based on a qualitative study of a group of teenage parents at schools in Khayelitsha, Cape Town, and their narratives of their experiences of becoming pregnant. In particular, how this group of young women negotiated the experience of becoming pregnant and the pregnancy and impending parenthood with their family is explored. Findings revealed that experiences of being pregnant and becoming parents are mostly framed within relationships of control, regulation and power, especially in relation to parental authority. Ways in which this group of young women resisted being constructed negatively and punitively and displayed agentic and strategic creativity in negotiating acceptance and support for their pregnancy within their families are highlighted.

Keywords:

• teenage sexuality
• pregnancy
• disclosure
• agency
• qualitative study

Acknowledgement

I would like to thank Codesria Small Grants for Thesis Writing for assisting me with funds for the write up of the thesis, from which data for this article were extracted. I would like to also thank Prof Tamara Shefer for guidance in writing the article.

Notes

1. Revisionist scholars tend to endow teenage motherhood with agency instead of problematizing it. See Macleod 1999, Mkhwanazi 2006 for an explication of this literature.