What value maternity?

My main "day job" is as a science teacher. From time to time, students comment about how much better I could have done in life if I had worked in industry instead of in the teaching profession. I usually try to point out to them that, though they hadn't really intended it in that way, they have in fact undertaken a valuation of my work (with them) as a teacher, and that the outcome of that valuation has been that my work as a teacher is not considered of a high value. They are, of course, implicitly if not explicitly, valuing my work only on the basis of its relative financial reward. It happened to me again this week.

But I think we also need to be wary of some other instances of inadvertent valuation that take place.
A few weeks ago I saw a poster locally with the strap line, "Condoms are free. Babies are not", against a background image of baby clothes, bedding, etc. Now the underlying message, aimed at young people in an area of London with a high pregnancy rate among young people, that bearing children involves a long term responsibility to those children is quite understandable and it can form a legitimate part of sex and relationships education. Catholics might well not support the use of condoms as the answer, wishing to suggest that sexual restraint and chastity are the ethically more sound alternatives, constituting a more true sense of the idea of "responsible parenthood" as taught by Humanae Vitae. But much more subtle in the strap line is the implicit valuation of children, negatively, in terms of their financial cost to young parents.

This morning a head line to BBC Radio 4 coverage of  summit being held in London to promote the provision of contraceptive services referred to pregnancy as being the biggest cause of death among teenage girls (I can't remember the exact words, and can't readily find them on the BBC Today programme site). The particular reference was to a report from Save the Children: Pregnancy is the biggest killer of teenage girls worldwide and a conference being held in London under the aegis of the Department for International Development: Family planning: UK to host summit with Gates Foundation.  As John Smeaton points out, 

... it is misleading to say that pregnancy or childbirth are in general causes of death. Haemorrhage, sepsis and infection may cause death. In most cases, death and serious injury can be averted by good maternity care, such as trained birth attendants, blood transfusion, antibiotics, etc.

But it is the subtle valuing of pregnancy as if it were a disease, something taken up uncritically by today's news coverage, that I think we should spot and resist.

Teenage pregnancy in the US

The BBC News site is carrying a report on the teenage pregnancy rate in the United States, in the light of Bristol Palin's pregnancy. Extracts from the BBC report, which can be found here:

According to America's leading health agency, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC): "About one-third of girls in the United States get pregnant before age 20."

More than 80% of births in this group "were unintended, meaning they occurred sooner than desired or were not wanted at any time", the CDC said.

Separately, in a report on 2002 data, the CDC said: "Despite the continuous declines, the US teenage pregnancy rate is still among the highest among industrialised nations. The costs of teenage childbearing in the United States are substantial.

"The National Campaign to Prevent Teen Pregnancy recently estimated that $9.1bn in public funding was expended on teenage childbearing in 2004. These costs include public assistance, healthcare, child welfare and other expenses."

Whether the figures being cited here are statistically robust, I have no idea. I suspect that those with a specialist interest in these figures will first of all want to go an look at the statistics to check them out.

But there are some interesting agendas revealed in the extracts.

1. Why should the Centre for Disease Control and Prevention be taking an interest in pregnancy, which, after all, is not a disease?

2. Why is teenage pregancy seen as a bad thing? Ah, the financial cost ... But do we really want to measure the value of people just financially?

3. There is a number sitting between the "one third of girls who become pregnant before age 20" and the "80% of births in this age group that are unintended" .... and that is the number of abortions experienced by girls in this age group. Whew, that missing number looks to be huge ... (but see my comment above about the statistics).

As an aside, these three points could all be examined from the point of view of the relationship between state and civil society. The Centre for Disease Control and Prevention, for example, can be clearly seen as a way in which the state meets its duty to assure the common good of civil society by coordinating activity to control disease. But does it overstep its correct relation to the common good of civil society by undertaking activity that relates to a condition that is not a disease at all?

Here in the UK exactly parallel considerations can be applied to the governments Teenage Pregnancy Strategy.