This volume takes the reader behind the stereotypes, the inflamed rhetoric, and the flip media sound bites, to show the complex reality and troubling truths of teenage mothers in America today. Luker makes the case that the familiar portrait of teenage mothers we have been shown so often, is the reflection of a public mood rather than a demographic reality and the real problem is not teenage pregnancy or single-parent families, but poverty itself. Luker argues that both liberals and conservatives constructed an epidemic of teenage pregnancy, she challenges the myth of an epidemic and concludes that it is poverty that causes teenage pregnancy and not the reverse.