“Before their Time”

The crisis of teenage pregnancy claimed headlines and sound bites across the latter half of the 1980s in the United States. For example, the New Right portrayed young mothers as immoral social problems who cause family deterioration, a portrait that draws heavily on familial and reproductive ideologies. More critical interpretations presented teenage pregnancy as a moral panic and as a keyword of the U.S. welfare state. Feminist analyses emphasized the gender, race, and social class dimensions of sexual activeness, birth control, abortion, and keeping a baby. Indeed, teenage pregnancy approached an “epidemic of signification.” ¹