Psychoanalytic Rationality: A Critique of the Improper Feminist Approach to Teenage Pregnancy

Abstract

Teenage pregnancy is one of the common problems that is indiscriminately present in all schools. With teenage pregnancy manifesting in all schools, a lot of focus and support regarding this issue is given to female students (girls), while none is given to male students. Literature will be reviewed during this study as a methodological approach. It is an underlying assumption of this research that the spirit of feminism could be blamed as a motivation for this one-sided focus and support. However, this paper argues that in a proper approach to parenting at any level, it makes no sense to support one victim of teenage pregnancy while there are two victims. Since scholars like Scott and Salvi have scratched the surface of this issue of teenage pregnancy, it is worth taking the discussion further because they tackle the issue from a more feminist perspective. Their feminist approach to this issue makes them focus more on the impact it has on females than males. It is the major aim of this paper to focus on the ignored perspective of teenage pregnancy. The psychoanalytic rationality approach adopts an analytic theoretical framework to critically argue that it is not enough to use a narrow feministic approach that envisages only female students as the only victims of teenage pregnancy. Perhaps the bias in analysing and understanding this crucial issue that has affected many lives comes from the fact that only women physically bear the baby in their wombs while men remain with no physical manifestation of pregnancy. As Ntshangase argued that feminism should be properly conceptualised as a rational framework to cater for both existential coordinates known as male and female, this paper argues for a proper feministic approach to be adequately applied to this issue of teenage pregnancy.