Teenage motherhood : dilemma or delight? : a study of the life world of adolescent mothers in Buenos Aires

This thesis is based on six weeks of fieldwork in Buenos Aires, Argentina in the autumn 2009. It investigates the lived experiences of a group of teenage mothers who have grown up in institutions. Although biomedical literature states that pregnancy is risky in medical terms only at the very start of the teenage years, adolescent pregnancy is as a norm depicted as a public health problem, or even a ‘social epidemic’, by policymakers, public officials, the press and the public at large. Commonly, teenage pregnancy is understood as a cause of poverty, rather than the consequence of it. This perception is not necessarily in accordance with the opinions of the mothers themselves. While appreciating that every case is individual and that the circumstances under which my informants became pregnant is not subject for generalisations, the objective of this thesis is to explore the informants' experience of motherhood from the moment of conceiving to the present in an effort to understand their views on teenage pregnancy. The theoretical framework of Amartya Sen, Martha Nussbaum, Erving Goffman and Howard Becker will be used to analyse the girls' perceptions of their own capabilities and notion of stigma. The study will be contextualised by drawing an overview of the legislative framework for pregnancies and abortions in Argentina and the available support system