Promises I Can Keep: Why Poor Women Put Motherhood Before Marriage

Relationships may become strained once a young couple conceives, as with Mahkiya Washington and her long-term boyfriend, Mike. Mike continued to party while Mahkiya spent time at home. He also faced new financial demands that his minimum-wage job struggled to meet. The pregnancy permanently changed their relationship, and Mahkiya notes that “[s]he [couldn’t] fathom why the boyfriend who adored her could begin to treat her with such contempt” (53).

Mike is not an anomaly, for evidence shows that many fathers-to-be respond in similar ways, “attempting to deny the new reality” (53). The fact that these young men do not have to adjust their lives to the new physical reality of pregnancy helps explain this behavior: Society does not place the same expectations on fathers-to-be as pregnant women, whose condition is visible and requires sacrifices to maintain the fetus’s health. The fathers’ friends, by contrast, often prompt them to live it up before the baby arrives.

Fathers-to-be more frequently respond with “shock and trepidation” when their partners conceive, even if the couple wants children together. Mike, for instance, responded to the news of Mahkiya’s pregnancy by denying he was the father and encouraging her to terminate the pregnancy. Others respond by abandoning their pregnant girlfriends or resorting to physical violence as they deny paternity.