als' proper places and status in a culture. Disturbances in cultural life, such as premature motherhood, sometimes result in premature status transitions, placing people into positions for which they are unprepared or unable to assume because society is constructed to support those who follow the normative schedule of life. Arthur Campbell in, "The Role of Family Planning in the Reduction of Poverty" expresses this idea in the following way: The girl who has an illegitimate child at the age of 16 suddenly has 90 percent of her life's script written for her. Her life choices are few, and most of them are bad. Had she been able to delay the first child, her prospects might have been quite different (Campbell pg30).
             In her essay, "Feminism and the Family: Two Decades of Thought," Barrie Thorne explores the idea of normative scheduling, the concept of motherhood, and the consequences of entering this status through what she terms ideological constructs. Through this system one is introduced to fixed characteristics that he/she must prescribe to in order to be accepted into any given institution or community.
             Thorne would say teen motherhood does not support society's ideology of the family; rather it challenges it. Although early motherhood does not support the system, teen mothers are still mothers and therefore subject to suffer the ramifications of being a mother in our society. According to Thorne, "the ideology of the family, more specifically motherhood, has reinforced the economic exploitation of all women"(Thorne pg6). Thus teen mothers are thrust, early, into an institution of oppression built on a concept of exploitation and degradation, motherhood. As a result, motherhood is no longer looked upon as a private experience but rather as a public deviance to cultural law and takes on the persona of a public problem with negative results for the new mother. Research suggests that early childbearing has negative consequenc...