Open Collections

Brophy, Olivia Catherine McKibbin

University of British Columbia

Youth pregnancy in the United States is generally seen as an experience that is detrimental to the life chances of young parents and their children. In the United States, youth pregnancy is typically positioned as a drain on government resources and thus as a threat to collective social wellbeing. By exploring the motivations and circumstances through which youth pregnancy support professionals come to do and make sense of their work, this thesis argues that questioning stigmatizing narratives of youth pregnancy is a necessary first step toward embracing nuanced frameworks that recognize the lived realities of pregnant young people in Oregon’s Willamette Valley. To do this, I sought to answer the following research questions: How and why do adults engaged in support services for pregnant youth become involved in their respective fields? Do adult support providers enact, question, or dispute narratives that stigmatize youth pregnancy? How do the negative framing and stigma that surround youth pregnancy experiences impact adult support providers? In responding to these questions, my interlocutors demonstrate the possibilities for thinking about youth pregnancy in ways that challenge dominant, stigmatizing models. Over five months of ethnographic fieldwork, I elicited life histories, conducted semi-structured interviews, and engaged in participant observation with five support providers to understand their engagement with hegemonic, stigmatizing narratives of youth pregnancy. My fieldwork shows that my interlocutors actively sought to support the youth they work with and to change the narrative surrounding youth pregnancy in unique ways. Understanding the perspectives and roles of the varied support systems young people draw upon provides important insight for those seeking to address the actual human impact of restrictive reproductive health policies in the United States.

Text

2025-04-18

Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International

http://hdl.handle.net/2429/90698

Anthropology

University of British Columbia

UBCV

http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0/