Olhando para trás: fecundidade na adolescência entre mulheres de duas coortes de 29 a 33 anos no Brasil

Abstract

Teenage pregnancy is a common phenomenon in Brazil. In fact, the fact that Brazilian women get pregnant right at the beginning of their reproductive life was not something surprising in past decades. However, although teenage pregnancy is not characterized as a recent phenomenon in the Brazilian scenario, only in recent decades is it possible to observe a greater insertion of the theme in academic discussions and productions, as well as in the agenda of social policies in the country. In general, discourses on teenage pregnancy take on an alarmist and moralistic tone, associating the event with poverty, social marginality and family breakdown. Additionally, in addition to linking teenage pregnancy to a series of social, medical and psychological risks, they relate it to situations of immaturity, instability and crises incompatible with the new social roles demanded by the event, that is, of fathers and mothers. Although disagreements about the consequences of teenage pregnancy and motherhood mark the literature on the subject, little has been done to explore the effects of this phenomenon by investigating the reality of women who had a child while they were still teenagers. In this sense, the objective of this work is to analyze changes and permanence in socioeconomic and demographic characteristics of women, belonging to two different birth cohorts, who had their first child before 20 years of age. The characteristics of these women will be compared with those of women of the same generation, but who did not have a child before reaching the age of 20. Is it possible to observe differences between those who had a child in adolescence and those who did not? If yes, what are the differences? To carry out this study, birth histories reconstructed from data from the Demographic Censuses of Brazil in 1980 and 2010 will be used. alive; the comparison groups are composed of: a) women who had their first child between 15 and 19 years old and; b) women who had their first child between 20 and 29 years old. The strategy of analyzing reproductive histories based on the 1980 and 2010 censuses makes it possible to observe different periods of the demographic transition. The expectation is that the women who were adolescent mothers in the first analyzed period will have different characteristics from those of the second period.