On becoming a teen mom: life before pregnancy, presents a unique perspective on the subject of teen motherhood in America. Erdmans and Black take one of the most important issues in society today, one that has been used both socially and politically to bolster numerous agendas and legislation, and approach it from a fairly novel direc-tion. The authors choose to focus not on the culpability of the mothers for their pregnancies and lifestyles but on the familial, social, educational, and economic environments that these girls lived in both before and after becoming pregnant. Thus, they seek to understand the reasoning
behind the decisions these young mothers make by con-sidering the motivations and pressures they were facing at the time of their pregnancy decisions and those that they may continue to face in their daily lives. The methodology for achieving this understanding is presented in the book’s introduction and involves presenting the life stories of several of the teen mothers in conjunction with other data collected from the study to support the various arguments that the authors present.