I’ve always noticed that when discussing teen pregnancy we almost always hear about the girl being careless and how teenage girls have babies in order to feel loved.  What we don’t hear about is the responsibility and motivations of the boyfriends of these girls.  I think viewing an unwanted pregnancy as part of a cycle of abuse is long overdue and is an area of teenage pregnancy that needs further investigation and attention.

We often depend on anecdotes to make or break our cases, a practice that is over-rated.  Anecdotes are just that and not valid for determining cause and effect, but anecdotes sometimes give us insight we might not otherwise have had.  I have a personal friend who found herself with an unwanted pregnancy after the boyfriend talked her into quitting the pill (for her health, of course) and who “forgot” to use a condom after a New Year’s celebration that included a lot of drinking, especially on the girl’s part.  When he was told by my friend that she was pregnant his reply was “now you’re stuck with me.”  She couldn’t help but feel that she was set up and she may very well have been.

Pregnancy has long been used as a means of controlling women.  Girls are told to not have pre-marital sex lest they find themselves pregnant. Before the pill many women had baby after baby effectively controlling the women’s choices in life.  Even women who want to have lots of children should have some say so in the when of a pregnancy.

Now, instead of analyzing a teenage girl’s pregnancy in the vein of why she wanted to get pregnant, it is imperative that we analyze the reasons behind the pregnancy in light of the father’s motivations.  Do these men and boys risk the pregnancy, sometimes even ensuring a pregnancy by refusing to use condoms are destroying the girls’ birth control, in order to control the girls, to prove their manhood, or just out of indifference to the plight of  the girl with the unwanted pregnancy?

I can’t help but think of the fictional piece The Handmaid’s Tale, a novel that explores a world where this is a class of women used specifically for reproduction. Upon birth the baby was turned over to the ruling class wife of the father of the child.  While fictional and far fetched the novel gives us some insight into the trap that fertility can be for a woman.

Whether the idea of pregnancy as a form of abuse and control is completely valid or not we need to put aside simplistic answers to a complicated problem……the problem of unwanted teen pregnancies.

Intimate partner violence doesn’t always show up in police photos as swollen bruises. Instead, the evidence might be the victim’s pregnant belly.

Janey (not her real name) was 19 when she fell “head over heels” for a guy six years her senior.He moved in just weeks after their first date, which was before she learned about the cheating. When she confronted him, repeatedly, he raped her, repeatedly. When she told him to move out, he threatened her with more violence. Meanwhile, condoms: not happening. Hormonal birth control like the Pill, she says, made her sick.

“The first time I got pregnant against my will, I had the baby,” she says. Along with several STDs. (He’d been her only partner.) After a stint in jail for violating an ex’s order of protection, he was back, promising never to hurt her, gushing about family happiness.

The — yes — second pregnancy occurred when she’d run out of money for emergency contraception, having purchased it more than 10 times before from her college nurse. He refused to help her pay for an abortion. “He thought another baby would keep me in his life forever,” Janey says.

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Jill A. Murray, Ph.D., a leading author and expert on teen dating violence, does counseling in high school teen-mother programs. Of one recent group, she says, “every single one of the girls was in an abusive relationship, of which the pregnancy or the child was a product.”

The problem is so widespread, in fact, that public-health advocates are working to cast teen pregnancy in a whole new light: not as a measure of “promiscuity,” or a failure of cluefulness, but rather as a canary in the coal mine of partner violence.

“We have to treat pregnancy itself as a warning sign,” says Murray. “I always tell other counselors that I’m training, ‘When you see a pregnant teen girl, always, always assess for an abusive relationship, because 99 percent of the time, that will be the case.’ ”

Of course, not all teenage girls are 100 percent averse to getting pregnant. But that doesn’t mean they’re in healthy relationships.

“Teen pregnancy is likely emerging out of unhealthy relationships,” says Miller. “That’s not the only mechanism for teen pregnancy, but it is an important one that we’ve managed to miss for a very long time.”

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