Discourses of Teenage Pregnancy and Teenage Motherhood as Portrayed in Philippine News Media (1973-2023)
Article

We examine the evolving discourses of teenage motherhood and teenage pregnancy in Philippine news media using Ruiz’s (2009) three-level qualitative sociological discourse analysis. Drawing from 79 news articles published in the country over a 50-year timeframe (1973 to 2023), we observe three overarching, yet non-mutually exclusive, waves of dominant discourses: (1) the Catholic moral discourse (predominant in early 1970s to late 1980s), which tended to frame teenage pregnancy and motherhood in moral terms; (2) the human capital discourse (predominantly in late 1980s to early 2000s), which appeared to reframe the phenomenon as a health and socioeconomic concern; and (3) the poverty trap discourse (predominantly in early 2000s to early 2020s), which amplified how teenage pregnancies and motherhood render young women vulnerable to cyclical poverty without self-sufficiency. We use the wave metaphor to emphasize continuity and rearticulation rather than replacement as older framings endure even as new institutional vocabularies emerge, and nascent discourses may appear within earlier periods before becoming more pronounced in later ones. Finally, we highlight the importance of critically examining these waves of discourses because they can shape societal attitudes and policies toward teenage pregnancy and teenage motherhood.