Challenging Discourses of Teenage Pregnancy: South Africa in Global Perspective

ABSTRACT There is a diverse scholarship on teenage pregnancy, yet pervasive social discourses ubiquitously problematize young pregnant women as irresponsible. In many contexts this occurs despite progressive policy. These narratives compromise the development outcomes of young women. The genesis of the dominant discourse of teenage pregnancy is scholarship that focuses on what predisposes young women to early, unintended pregnancy. Biomedical and public health literature play a powerful role in this. An alternative scholarship shifts away from a population level focus on teenage pregnancy to explore the lived experiences of young pregnant women in diverse contexts. These scholars foreground different methodological and theoretical assumptions and challenge dominant discourses of teenage pregnancy. There are areas of intersection and consensus across disciplinary boundaries, but fundamentally they offer different narratives of teenage pregnancy and challenge the dominant discourse. In this review, I draw on literature from South Africa to explore how global scholarship, particularly from the United States of America, has influenced local discourses of teenage pregnancy. I attend to how research on teenage pregnancy is conceptualized, how data generates discourse, and conversely, how discourse determines research across diverse contexts. This in turn shapes policy and the lived experiences of young pregnant women.