ABSTRACT
Chapter 5 concludes with a consideration of dropouts – or ‘throw-outs’ (Luker 1996), which more adequately identifies the process at play which leads to girls leaving school. That being the case, the consequence is that the cost of a pregnancy is, symbolically and practically, transferred on to families. In this chapter, I consider families as key socialising institutions offering another context for the interpretation of in-school pregnancy. This chapter revolves around the opposition between tradition and modernity, which is used to understand how communities respond to in-school pregnancies. I consider the regulation of pregnancy by following girls as they break their news to their families, through to the arrangements put in place to deal with the pregnancy first, and with the new-born afterwards. My claim is that families are by no means monolithic institutions that uniformly embrace a traditional framework. On the other hand, they are heterogeneous groups of individuals that respond to various contingencies.
