This book shows the importance of understanding how gender influences views on teen pregnancy amongst working and lower middle class Mexican adolescents.
It demonstrates how teenagers negotiate dominant gendered discourses related to sexuality, contraception and parenthood, considering if and when discourses of gender, sexuality, femininity and masculinity may be shifting and how.
Overall, most teenage boys in this study still refer to their active sexual practices and their role as provider in the family to define their reproductive identities, while young women seem to comply with dominant moral expectations of sexually passive femininity, defined mainly through motherhood. However, the findings also highlight how resistance to dominant gender discourses can take place, particularly with recognition of teenage girls as sexual beings with needs and desires.
Although the findings generated by this study are from 1994-1997, they remain relevant, given that in 2017, one in five pregnancies in Mexico was from a teenage mother.