What do we know about teen parents? Take a moment to make a mental list (or, if you’re motivated to get out a pen and paper, I won’t stop you) of all the facts and statistics you’ve heard.

In case you’re coming up short, I’ll give you a few:

• Most teen parents drop out of high school.
• Only 2% of teen parents will graduate from college by age 30.
• Many teen parents will end up on welfare, costing tax payers billions of dollars nationwide.
• The children of teen parents are more likely to fail a grade in school. Their sons are more likely to go to jail. Their daughters are more likely to become teen mothers themselves.
• The relationships of teen parents almost always fail, leaving teen mothers to be single parents.

You can read more here or here or here or watch any episode of 16 and Pregnant that features Dr. Drew. He’ll usually cover most of these points before the hour is up – while interviewing young people who are actually parenting.

Beyond these “facts”, we hear plenty of other messages on what The Candie’s Foundation calls “the devastating consequences of teen pregnancy;” their print ads tell teens they won’t move out of their parents house if they have a teen pregnancy; they’ll be spending $10,000 a year on their baby; they’ll have to breastfeed every two hours or come up with money for formula. The Candie’s Foundation isn’t the only organization putting out these types of messages – most teen pregnancy prevention, sex education, or public health organizations presume that their audience will immediately understand that teen pregnancy is harmful to young people, their children, and their communities as a whole.

Even the National Campaign to Prevent Teen Pregnancy says that teen pregnancy is:

...risky for all of those involved. Compared to women who delay childbearing, teen mothers are more likely to end up on welfare. The children of teen mothers are at significantly increased risk of low birthweight and prematurity, mental retardation, poverty, growing up without a father, welfare dependency, poor school performance, insufficient health care, inadequate parenting, and abuse and neglect. (From Halfway There: A Prescription for Continued Success in Preventing Teen Pregnancy)

And if the National Campaign to Prevent Teen Pregnancy says it’s a huge problem, they must be right… right?

Well… not really. You might have heard the saying that "there are three types of lies: lies, damned lies, and statistics." When it comes to teen parents, the statistics’ metaphorical pants are definitely on fire. First, we have to recognize that the young women who become teen mothers are different from some other young women. Not radically different, not different in a way that means we can marginalize or demonize them, but different in that: a) they chose to have sexual relationships as a teenager (most of them – some pregnancies are the result of sexual abuses or assaults; b) they probably didn’t use birth control when they were having sex (maybe they didn’t learn about it, maybe they couldn’t access it, maybe they couldn’t afford it, maybe they wanted to get pregnant, or maybe they did use it and it failed, as all methods can); c) they chose not to have an abortion (again, presuming they made this choice themselves, and had affordable access to safe abortion if they had wanted one).

Of all the teenaged women in the country, which young women are most likely to meet all of these criteria? Demographically, we know that it’s women and girls who grew up in low-income communities that have the highest likelihood of becoming young mothers.

Why is this? As I said earlier, it takes money to avoid parenthood if you’ve decided to have sex: you have to be able to afford birth control (and/or abortion), and sometimes that can be really expensive. It also helps if you went to a good school with a comprehensive sex education program, and we know that schools in low-income communities rarely have the resources needed to give students the educations they deserve. (Surprisingly, not all teens know they can get a ton of free sex education here at Scarleteen – provided they can afford or access a computer.)

But there’s also something else, and that's the extent to which young people have big plans for themselves that will conflict with parenthood. Are you planning on going to college? For some young people, the answer is an immediate "Yes!" because their parents went to college, their older siblings went to college, all their friends are going, and between their family and financial aid, they will be able to afford a post-secondary education that will help them pursue their dreams and find a decent job. However, for some young people, the answer is "I don’t know" or an ambivalent shrug, or even a straightforward "no." Maybe no one in their family has gone to college, maybe their school doesn’t have a college counselor that can talk to them about the application process and financial aid, maybe they just know they can’t afford it or what it might be able to offer them. They see their parents working jobs that don’t require a college degree. They expect to have a mid- to low-paying job, because that’s the type of job everyone around them has.

Now imagine there are two 16 year-olds, one who knows she’s going to college – she’s got a whole plan mapped out, and she didn’t even have to map it out all by herself. That’s just what she expects because that’s what everyone she knows does, and that’s what her parents expect of her. Then there’s the other one, who doesn’t expect to go to college, but she does expect to work hard at a job so she can contribute some money to her parents. That’s just what she expects because that’s what everyone she knows does, and that’s what her parents expect of her.

Both young women want to be mothers one day. Both are having sex with a boyfriend.

The first young woman has that college plan, though – and having a baby would really get in the way. It’s really hard to go to college with a new baby, and she knows that. Plus, she doesn’t know anyone who had a baby in high school. Her parents would be mortified if she got pregnant. Having a baby now would change the trajectory of her life. It’s an unacceptable risk. One night, when her boyfriend’s condom breaks, she goes to the pharmacy and buys emergency contraception. She decides if she’s pregnant, she will have an abortion. She talks to her doctor about going on the birth control pill so that she won’t have to worry should the condom break in the future.

The second young woman has a different plan. She’s going to graduate high school and get a job in the preschool where she now works part-time, and maybe eventually become a teacher there. It’s an hourly wage job, and she knows most of the women who work there already have children. Her cousin was a teen mom, and her mother had her older brother when she was 17 years old. She knows teen moms work hard and pinch pennies, but she’s going to be doing that anyway. If she has a baby now, she can count on her parents’ begrudging acceptance, and she knows that her mother would help with babysitting. She doesn’t want to live with her parents forever, but she’s not planning on moving out when she turns 18, anyway. One night, when her boyfriend’s condom breaks, she decides to wait and see. She doesn’t know much about emergency contraception, and she doesn’t have $60 to spend on it anyway. She doesn’t think much about abortion – she doesn’t think she’d be comfortable with the idea, but since she doesn’t know if she’s pregnant yet, she won’t stress about that at the moment. It’s a risk she’s willing to take: she definitely wants to be a mother someday, and if she is pregnant now, she knows she’ll find a way to deal with it.

Not-so-surprise ending: A few weeks later, the first young woman breathes a sigh of relief when her period arrives on time. The second young woman takes a test, and the plus sign appears. She’s pregnant.

Now, don’t over generalize: if you’re having vaginal intercourse, there’s a chance you’ll get pregnant, even if your dad has a vault the size of Bill Gates’. And, of course young women in low-income communities have hopes and dreams for their future. But the material privilege that a person has, the likelihood that they feel they’ll be able to achieve their goals, and the examples provided by people in their community – each of these things contributes to the decisions that they’ll make, the risks that they’ll take, and the different paths they’ll choose when faced with the same dilemma. We can conclude one thing very clearly and concretely: low-income women are more likely to become young mothers than middle and upper-income women.

What does this have to do with all those statistics we hear about teen pregnancy? It means that when we compare teen mothers to all other mothers and say, "Hey! Look how badly they’re doing!" we’re not really being fair. A woman who grew up in poverty in the United States is likely to live in poverty as an adult, too (despite what we hear about The American Dream) – and poverty itself is a huge risk factor for many adverse outcomes, including the outcomes listed in those statistics at the top of this page. When we compare teen mothers to older mothers, we’re also almost always comparing poor or poorer mothers to mothers with more resources, and that’s a problem. So, let’s look at some better comparisons:

• When we compare sisters (one who was a teen parent, one who was not), there is no association between poor infant and child outcomes based on maternal age. 1,2,5,8
• In low income communities where teen motherhood is common, young maternal age is a protective factor against low birthweight and infant mortality – the children of teen moms do better! 3,4,9,10
• When comparing women who became teen moms and women who had miscarriages as teen, there was no effect on future martial status, future hourly wages, and teen moms were less likely to live in poverty. 7
• Once young mothers are over the age of 22, they are less likely to receive public assistance than peers who were not teen parents – teen parents do not necessarily increase the burden on taxpayers. 6,7
• While young mothers are slightly less like to earn a high school diploma, they are more likely to complete a GED than peers who don’t complete high school, and they seem to work more hours in early adulthood to compensate. 7

None of this means that being a teen parent isn’t really, truly, incredibly hard. But hey – all parenting is a challenging. Newborns need to be fed in the middle night no matter how old their mothers are. Toddlers need to be constantly chased around just as much if their mom is 37 or if their mom 19. Some teenagers might not be up to the task – some adults in their thirties or forties aren't either. Let’s not ridicule, stereotype or misrepresent young parents as a justification for preventing teen pregnancy!

So now you’re probably scratching your head and asking: why, then, should we prevent teen pregnancy? For that, I invite you to stay tuned.

Gretchen Sisson is the author of Finding a Way to Offer Something More: Reframing Teen Pregnancy Prevention. You can follow her on Twitter @gesisson.

1. Furstenberg, F., Brooks-Gunn, J., & Morgan, S. P. (1987). Adolescent mothers in later life. New York: Cambridge University Press.
2. Geronimus, A. (2003). Damned if you do: culture, identity, privilege, and teenage childbearing in the United States. Social Science and Medicine, 57, 881–893.
3. Geronimus, A. (2001). Understanding and eliminating racial inequalities in women’s health in the United States: the role of the weathering conceptual framework. Journal of the American Medical Women’s Association, 56(4), 1–5.
4. Geronimus, A. (1996). Black/White differences in the relationship of maternal age to birthweight: a population-based test of the weathering hypothesis. Social Science and Medicine, 42(4), 589– 597.
5. Geronimus, A., & Korenman, S. (1993). Maternal youth or family background? On the health disadvantages of infants with teenage mothers. American Journal of Epidemiology, 137(2), 213–225.
6. Hoffman, S. (2008). Updated estimates of the consequences of teen childbearing for mothers. In S. Hoffman & R. Maynard (Eds.), Kids having kids: economic costs and social consequences of teen pregnancy (2nd ed.). Washington: Urban Institute Press.
7. Hotz, V. J., Williams Elroy, S., & Sanders, S. (2005). Teenage childbearing and its life cycle consequences: exploiting a natural experiment. The Journal of Human Resources, 40(3), 683–715.
8. McCarthy, J., & Hardy, J. (1993). Age at first birth and birth outcomes. Journal of Research on Adolescence, 3, 373–392.
9. Rauh, V., Andrews, H., & Garfinkel, R. (2001). The contribution of maternal age to racial disparities in birthweight: a multilevel perspective. American Journal of Public Health, 91, 1815–1824.
10. Rich-Edwards, J., Buka, S., Brennan, S., & Earls, F. (2003). Diverging associations of maternal age with low birthweight for Black and White mothers. International Journal of Epidemiology, 32, 83–90.

I cannot stand this show. No sense in being shy about it, because this is a bias I cannot hide, as will be apparent in nanoseconds.

If I had anything even remotely decent or interesting to say about it, I would have blogged it before now. But every single blog post I have even started to think about writing in the past about it had the same title every single time, one composed entirely of profanity except for the articles of speech linking all my four-letter words together.

Summaries and commentaries that read like these do not balanced critical commentary make:

• "Parade of nonstop clichéd stereotypes! Night of one thousand -isms! All stereotypes encouraged and welcomed to march proudly on Monday! Heart-of-gold hookers! Sexually compulsive foster children and abuse survivors! Slutty latinas! Dry, unemotional Asians! Lady who doesn't know who the baby daddy is! Hypocritical evangelical girl! Hair-pluggin', affair-havin' mid-life crisis guy! Badly-behaved developmentally disabled person! Asexual gay gu--- uh, whoah! No chaps or flags! We talked about this. And NO LESBIANS."

• "Look how charming and fun the grownups can make their dysfunctional relationships look! So cute! I want one!"

• "All your friends are assholes! Only grownups are decent people withe more than two brain cells to rub together! Well, only two more than your friends, but still, all your friends are assholes."

• "Go on, have sex, gal-on-this-show! Then you get to pick your prize! You can have a baby, become bitter, jaded and mean, lose a parent to a plane crash or maybe you'll win more than one! Yay! But wait! Guys, we have prizes for you, too! If you have sex, you get to be billed as a weak, horndog slimeball for the rest of this show (unless you redeem yourself through parenting), be the funny, cuckolded comic relief, or even both!"

• Next week's guest star to remind us teen parenting is real and that this happens in Real Life: Bristol Palin! The guest star of never: that woman who gets paid minimum wage to sweep up after us, doesn't get childcare benefits and is lacking a high-profile parent so she, too, can make more in an hour than most teen mothers make in two years without any experience or skills...what's her name, again?

• "A gay guy: how keen! Now the girls finally have a male person they can trust!"

• "Well, if nothing else, at least the Asian kids still get to be smart."

Alas, that's the only kind of commentary I usually have. So, I have kept it from the page, saving it for rant sessions I have alone in my office, where I can yell as loudly as I like without worry of traumatizing anyone. Except my pug. She sometimes looks scared. But mostly confused, which is how she usually looks whether I'm yelling or not.

I hate to watch it at all, but this is the kind of thing I should try to keep up with. None of our users have really talked about it -- potentially because they're holding in the same potty-mouthed critiques I am myself -- but because of it's subject matter, I should know the scoop. Shows or films like these also almost always result in questions from users pertaining to the misinformation in them about sexual response, bodies, birth control, safer sex or pregnancy, so it helps to be warned in advance. Would that I'd known that when American Pie came out. It would have saved me many nights of scratching my head while pointlessly asking the office wall, "Where are they getting this stuff?"

The only scoop I usually get while watching this show is a pooper-scooper, mind, but now and then it's not always just torture. Sometimes it's bad enough that it's funny-bad like MST3K, or instead of just hurling bitter invective, I first laugh, then huff, then spit, then sigh, and THEN hurl bitter invective while also channeling the spirit of Dorothy Parker, which I don't have to do alone because everyone seems to find it very entertaining.

But. It's not a big but, but it's not a teeny one either.

But.

The last episode ("She Went That A'way") showed something I found very truthful and real about abortion and support with abortion and reproductive choices. The character choosing to have an abortion (which you knew was never going to happen: if you become pregnant on this show, you will be having babies, missy) already had excellent support from her mother, whose talk with her daughter was pretty darn righteous itself.

What I find myself quite surprised to be giving a high-five to is an ad-hoc counseling session that occurs in the lobby of the clinic between the character there for a termination and the mother of her ex-boyfriend. What made that such a good representation of support and counseling with abortion is that almost nothing said in it was prescriptive (that bit about "some choices" that you can't undo that seemed to be about abortion was prescriptive, since you can't undo a birth, either). What was said could have empowered and supported any choice well, not just the one the character made to remain pregnant. It was a loving, sage and compassionate talk.

That exact kind conversation can, for the record -- and often does -- result in a woman choosing to have an abortion (especially when she comes into the clinic already very sure about terminating) and feeling good about it. Just so's you know, because you're sure as hell not going to see it in this show.

Back to my props: not only was the counsel and support, and the way it was given, excellent, it also didn't come from a clinic counselor. Instead, it came from a connection made in the waiting room with someone who was not clinic staff.

Counseling and other staff from clinics certainly can and do provide great options and general counseling and support: it's something I have done and do myself. I'm not saying counsel or support is automatically better when not coming from clinic staff. The point is that sometimes in clinics what goes on in the waiting room, either with patients and other patients, or with patients and other people's support people, can be pretty radical. Some powerful, intense connections can happen between women in abortion clinics. Women who don't even know each other can wind up being supportive of each other in an instant and with great strength. It's something we see and love working in clinics, and that some of us have experienced ourselves as patients in clinics, but rarely, if ever, is shown in media. So, a good and real waiting room scene -- which is so much more than I can say for Juno -- and a really good supportive talk around choice? Both in a place I least expected to find them.

Of course, there is something else that's real about Secret Life as a whole.

At first I was going to say that what's real in it is that it's an excellent presentation of the way many adults conceptualize, imagine and treat teens and teen sexuality.

But I think it's actually one step beyond: I think it presents not only the way many adults think about and treat teens and teen sexuality, but also purposefully puts that conceptualization in such a light so it looks like The Very Right, Wise Grownup Way of Thinking. Well, to anyone watching at home who isn't who isn't laughing or swearing at it, anyway. Young people didn't write this. Older adults are writing this, about young people and without, no doubt very intentionally, the perspectives of young people like they're writing about.

This is one of the reasons why this show makes me want to gouge my own eyes out, and why I find a film like Thirteen (youth-written) or a show like the UK's Skins, written about young people but also BY young people (they have a mixed-age writing team), to be such a horses of a different color. Certainly both of those are representing slightly different populations, but not really. The difference between Skins and Thirteen and Secret Life aren't about the differences in the teenagers being portrayed, but about how the teenage portrayals in them are so different. Both have their own flaws or character issues, but I'll take flaws or shortcomings coming from young people in how they see and conceptualize themselves and their peers any day over flaws and failing of older adults trying to send teens moral messaging who should remember how crappy it was when adults presented you in certain ways to further their own morality fables. Apparently Brenda Hampton, the creator of Secret Life (as well as of the socially and politically conservative 7th Heaven), allows her young actors to give input on conversational lines, but that's it. It shows.

What I watched today does not redeem the show in my eyes. The Mad Max trilogy cannot redeem Mel Gibson, and a couple brief bright spots cannot light the deep, black hole that this show and the cloying, obvious propaganda it is. Even the way the whole episode played out was predictable, with an anticipated over-simplicity on their part, an anticipated annoyance on mine and one more baby en route. What followed after the good stuff almost undid the good stuff all by itself.

But not quite. When anyone in media does a decent job with or around abortion, and I happen to see it, I'd feel remiss not giving a nod of respect and thanks. I appreciate it, quite a lot. And when a writer or director's agenda is pretty darn crystal, and what they wrote is real, not myopic, and potentially even challenges that agenda, I appreciate it a little more, even if I choke a little saying so. And so does my little dog, who is happily snoring away, enjoying a night blissfully free of the usual tirade I'd be on about this show by now.

It's often a bit of a bummer to do extended interviews for press pieces, because a lot of the time -- including just because of length constraints put on the reporter at hand, which are often very strict -- I find I feel like the most interesting stuff said, or some important context, winds up on the cutting room floor.