From a smug, middle-class perspective, these photographs of teenage parents with their babies seem both tragic and absurd. These children having children may be biologically men and women, but emotionally they are adolescents. These 14-year-old mothers should be holding dolls or cuddly toys, not real infants. They're barely old enough to be wearing make-up, for goodness' sake.
The young mothers' faces are blank yet knowing, vulnerable but proud. They invite our pity - why would a young teenager want to limit her future, cut off her possibilities and entrap herself in poverty and the drudgery of caring for an infant? How could it be anything but tragic?
In the late 1980s and early 1990s, Robert Coles, a child psychiatrist and Pulitzer-prize-winning author, set out with an interview team comprising his three university-educated sons (one a medical student) to discover why adolescents would want to become parents before they had even finished growing themselves. The Coles men, with their intellectual, privileged background and middle-class moral and ethical baggage, are the last people you would expect to succeed in getting young teenage parents, many of them from deprived backgrounds, to talk.
Yet reading Coles's analysis of teenage pregnancy, The Youngest Parents, it rapidly emerges that through their persistence, patience and genuine eagerness to understand, Coles and his sons accomplished something extraordinary. They had expected to hear these young parents admit that their parenthood had been a mistake, the result of ignorance or just bad luck. What they heard was something very different: these were teenage women who had long yearned to become mothers, sometimes from as young as nine or 10, and deliberately set out to become pregnant in an attempt at redemption.
The tragedies of 16-year-old Beth's life were all on her clinic chart - sexual abuse at the hands of her half-sister's father, her mother's alcohol and drug problem, her "poor adjustment" in school, her withdrawn, sulky, irritable nature, the repeated bouts of illness.
"She is depressed," the school nurse noted when Beth was nine years old. She was a "poor student" who seemed "locked up" and "indifferent to what the class is doing". By the age of 13, Beth was a "looker" who drew the attention of boys - or so she told the doctor when she learned she was pregnant. Did she want an abortion?, the clinic doctor asked. No. An entry in Beth's chart said: "Patient wants to carry the foetus to term. Says it's all she's got."
Beth told a group of teenage parents as they sat talking with Coles that she hoped her child would have a different life. "I have a boy, and I'll tell you what my purpose in life is: to bring up this boy, so he'll be different than the men I've known. That's my purpose. I told his daddy - she looks right into his eyes, he averts his eyes - that he can help me, if he wants, and if he doesn't, then that's all right, too."
Beth's boyfriend, Raymond, who was sitting beside her, when she said this, answered that whatever Beth wanted was okay with him. His mother had blamed him for not using condoms, but Raymond had heard Beth say "a hundred times" that she was glad she had the baby.
Beth agreed with Raymond and said: "I thank God for the baby, every morning when I look at him, because he's all I've got and he's a good baby. With him, I can try to do things right, so he'll be different from others: he can grow up to be somebody, and not be hurting people, doing them in. You raise a child and you have a second chance, you know."
While Beth had a son, many of the teenage mothers Coles interviewed expressly wished for daughters, as if they were hoping to see themselves reborn with all their possibilities intact. Donna, a teenager with a baby daughter, told Coles: "I wonder how she'll be when she gets older, how her life will turn out, but I also wonder how mine will turn out, being her mother." Coles writes that Donna's comment "makes clear a conviction that a pregnancy allowed to continue has to do, eventually, not only with a future person's life, but with a future mother's life. No big intellectual triumph there, but a statement too commonly ignored by some of us who concentrated on the subject of `teenage pregnancy', while forgetting those who are living particular lives: individuals hard-pressed, caught in this or that undertow, even, but also trying mightily, on occasion, to find a `second chance', a new beginning of sorts for themselves.".
As doctors, teachers, parents and policy-makers in the US and in this country grapple with the "problems" of teen pregnancy and single motherhood they often boil it down to an argument over sex education. But they may be overlooking the fact that for women like Donna and Beth, becoming a mother is about more than unprotected sexual intercourse. For them, sex is not about a relationship with a man, it's about the promise of a relationship with an idealised child. Pregnancy is both an existential choice, and a positive career option. Coles confronted such women with the awkward question of social welfare and whether they were motivated by the knowledge that becoming mothers would bring them financial independence. He concludes that these women would have had their babies even without welfare and that their families would have supported them.
Many of these young mothers expect nothing but impregnation from the men in their lives. Coles discovered in one black ghetto that a young man who hadn't fathered a child by his 20th birthday was taunted as a "virgin". One teenage father in The Youngest Parents told Coles: " `Girls you're going out with, they don't really respect you, they just don't.' Why? `They have something in mind for themselves, that's what: to get themselves pregnant, it's all they want from us, the juice. . . . Every time I sleep with one of them, I notice: when it's over, they want you out - out of them, and out of their bed, and out of their house and, I'll tell you, out of their lives'."
There were devoted fathers, too, who tried - against the odds - to stand by their children but Coles found again and again that they were doomed, by women's poor expectations of them, to failure. One of the photographers who sought out images to accompany Coles's text is John Moses, who is also a paediatrician. He writes that he had expected to capture "the tragedy, the social dysfunction of it all". Instead he observed "some teenage parents to be more capable and devoted to their children than I had anticipated." Not surprisingly, he also had a chance to reflect on his own life: "Why was I, a `secure', `responsible' adult `professional' rather wary of parenthood?"
Indeed, that is the question we need to answer. Why, if sexual activity and procreation comes naturally to teenagers, are we so reluctant to accept this? Until we address their overwhelming need for parenthood as a way of giving their lives meaning, the trend towards children having children will undoubtedly continue and probably increase. Handing out condoms to these child parents will make no difference as long as they have no intention of using them.
The Youngest Parents: Teenage Pregnancy As It Shapes Lives by Robert Coles; photographs by Jocelyn Lee and John Moses, will be published on Wednesday by the Centre for Documentary Studies in association with W.W. Norton and Co. Price £19.95 in the UK.