Linking Self-Esteem and Teen Pregnancy

Several analyses of the determinants of pregnancy or of deviant behavior would lead us to expect a higher incidence of pregnancy among adolescents with low self-esteem. The first is Kaplan's (1975), linking self-esteem and deviant behavior. A second is Luker's (1975) cost/benefit analysis of contraception and pregnancy, and a third is a variant of Luker's thesis that emphasizes the biological basis of adolescent pregnancy.

Becoming pregnant as an unmarried adolescent is deviant because only a small minority of adolescents do so and because it is not approved by the society at large. Thus, an individual who is motivated to deviate from normative patterns because of their negative connotation may become pregnant as a way of bolstering self-esteem. The adolescent may expect motherhood to improve her status: as a mother, she will have an important task to perform. She may also expect the baby to love

her and the baby's father to feel bound to her. Alternatively, pregnancy could be simply an unconsidered outcome of sexual intercourse, which may be viewed as self-enhancing because it signals a movement away from childhood, because it is associated with the feeling of being loved, and because it may validate the adolescent as an attractive person. In either case, we would anticipate that adolescents with low self-esteem would be more likely to become pregnant.

An alternative view is that adolescent pregnancy becomes more common when the costs of pregnancy are low, especially if the costs of contraception are high (Luker 1975). An adolescent with low self-esteem may be unconcerned about avoiding pregnancy, simply because there is little to lose if she becomes pregnant. If she is not doing well in school and does not expect to get a job that is either interesting or lucrative, early pregnancy and parenthood will not interfere with any important individual goals and will carry little personal "cost." We would predict that this individual is more likely to become pregnant than an adolescent with high self-esteem. In addition, as Luker points out, just as there are costs to a pregnancy, there are costs to prevention, which requires either sexual abstinence or effective contraception. The higher the potential cost of these actions, the greater the cost associated with pregnancy will have to be to ensure that the adolescent successfully avoids becoming pregnant. If this perspective is accurate, it may be essential to include the cost of prevention in our model of self-esteem and teen pregnancy.

Still another view is that early sexuality should be viewed as "expected behavior," because sexual activity has always closely followed sexual maturity, not only in other animal species but also in most human societies prior to the twentieth century (Lancaster 1986). If we assume that the biological changes accompanying sexual maturity prime the individual to engage in sexual behavior, it is the inhibition of this behavior rather than its expression that needs to be accounted for. One plausible explanation is that inhibition will occur to the extent that engaging in early sexual intercourse has negative consequences for the individual. In American society, many of those consequences have diminished in the past thirty years. It is possible not only to prevent conception but also to abort an unwanted pregnancy after conception. Nor does an adolescent pregnancy carry the same stigma as in the past, although this clearly varies among social groups. Pregnant adolescents were once sent away to "homes for unwed mothers"; now they remain at home and attend special school programs. Consequently, teenage

pregnancy and parenthood today, much more so than in the past, are individual decisions affected by perceived costs to the individual. If those costs are few, then pregnancy and parenthood will be more likely than if the costs are many and high.

Each of these perspectives would lead to similar predictions concerning self-esteem and pregnancy. Low self-esteem, we believe, would be associated with a greater risk of adolescent pregnancy.