City Journal: Why the “Gloucester Girls” did it
Kay S. Hymowitz has this essay at the City Journal:
The dominant narrative may have had some truth to it in the pre–Madonna/Paris Hilton era. But it ignores several key changes in contemporary teenaged life—changes that the Gloucester posse has graciously illustrated for us. First, many young women who become pregnant these days either want to have a baby (as in Gloucester) or are, at the very least, open to the idea. In order for birth control to work, you have to use it religiously, and the only way you use it religiously is if you really, really don’t want to get pregnant. Yet researchers like Kathryn Edin and Maria Kefelas in Promises I Can Keep find that’s not the case for many low-income mothers. They describe young women who speak longingly about the “joys of motherhood” and who find the middle-class penchant for putting off motherhood until the later twenties incomprehensible. As rates of out-of-wedlock pregnancy have increased recently among women with a high school diploma and even those with a year or two of college, the same thinking seems to have spread to working-class communities like Gloucester.