Being and becoming a body: moral implications of teenage pregnancy in a shantytown in Porto Alegre, Brazil.

Most literature concerning unintended pregnancy in Brazil highlights a link between 'adolescent pregnancy', poverty, marginality and gender inequality. Young women are seen to suffer disadvantages in the course of their lives due to unplanned pregnancies at an early age. This paper questions this picture, emphasising the ways in which adolescent pregnancy is socially constructed and wrongly portrayed as being the main difficulty facing young women in marginalised communities. Instead, it suggests that anthropological and public health debates should focus on how terms such as adolescence and pregnancy are understood and defined by the populations in question.