When pregnancy occurs in adolescence, it is most often attributed to an « accident », and the medical-social response is to provide better information about contraception. But when we look closer, we often see a logic other than that of accident: adolescent girls who express, when they are permitted to speak, a desire for pregnancy or for a child. Why is an adolescent girl sometimes invaded by this desire, to the point of not being able to put if off even for a short time, and why is she ready to sacrifice a part of her adolescence to it ?
Pregnancy appears as an imperious demand for an immediate response to the questions that every adolescent girl ask herself about her potential fertility, or as the instant search to fill up an old lack : to have a baby in one’s arms.
Viewing a teenage pregnancy merely as the result of accident or of destiny singularly reduces the meaning of such an event. In particular, it is a misunderstanding of the adolescent’s suffering, of how difficult it is for the young girl to take care of herself, to take care of her body, to handle the psychical tensions inherent to sexuality, and to tolerate waiting.