MAGA Wants You to Stop Seeing Teenagers As Children
Erasing adolescence and treating (most of) them like adults serves its goals
At 17, I drove to a nearby city with my boyfriend to a Planned Parenthood so I could get on the pill. Months later, when I felt ready, we had sex for the first time. This sounds very grown-up to me now, the planning and waiting. Flipping through old photo albums is all it takes to remind me of my many youthful missteps and the stew of contradictions, impulses, and emotions that is adolescence.
I was a historically fortunate girl, having entered puberty just years after the passage of Roe v. Wade. I was also terrified of getting pregnant, in part due to a nationwide moral panic produced by the very fact that girls like me existed: We were the first generation to come of age with the legal right to our own bodies.
From the late 70s into the 90s, the GOP was obsessed. The mainstream media (so many Afterschool Specials!) and even well-intentioned NGOs gave them a huge assist: A wave of heavy-handed propaganda stoked horror over the specter of pregnant teens, despite a dramatic drop in them from decades earlier. The message to teenagers: Children shouldn’t have children, but if you made one wrong move, this could happen to you — and you were way too young to handle it.
It’s 2026, teen pregnancies are at another historical low, and those fear mongers are running the country—and last week Trump’s HHS cut most of the grants provided by the Teen Pregnancy Prevention Program. You might be forgiven for thinking the GOP, farther to the right under MAGA rule than it was during the 70s-90s panic, would be happy that teen pregnancies are rarer and would hold onto programs proven effective at helping reduce them. But no.
The right’s obsession with pregnant teens was of course never about the number of pregnancies or about the teenagers. It was about female sexuality, about the right to choose and the power that gave girls and women to shape their lives. (Though it was also about casting poverty-reduction programs as family-destroying welfare.) Those motivations endure, except now MAGA wants more teens pregnant.
Anne Lutz Fernandez
Red state laws prohibiting comprehensive sex ed, like one recently passed in Alabama, should be seen in the light of MAGA’s wish to return to a time when teen girls suffered these consequences of sexual activity (consensual or not): being legally forced to carry pregnancies to term and socially pressured into premature, traditional, too often unhappy marriages.
As with many of its efforts, MAGA’s push to get teenagers married with children depends on rhetoric and policies that erase adolescence. A thirteen-year-old is adult enough to give birth and care for and raise her rapist’s baby, says Florida. Meanwhile, puberty starts earlier than it did in the mid-20th century. Erasing adolescence is a slippery slope, so even a ten-year-old is not a child, says Ohio.
Anne Lutz Fernandez
MAGA avoids pesky objective definitions when deciding whether someone is adult or child, and the decision usually depends on what is most politically useful at the moment. So we saw this past winter, when fear rose in the ranks about Trump’s damning presence in the Epstein files, that suddenly some of trafficked children MAGA had been so keen to protect were reclassified as not actually children at all.
Zane Heinlein
Erasing teenagers serves other MAGA ambitions, especially its carceral ones. One legacy of slavery in the US is the adultification of Black children, a process which continues to justify their harsh treatment in schools and in the justice system across states red and blue. For MAGA, though, this is a mission. Its media outlets and policy-making groups such as The Heritage Foundation keep beating the drum loudly for the treatment of teens “in cities” as adults by police and prosecutors.
Indeed, Trump’s political rise can be traced back to his leadership of the “rhetorical lynch mob” that helped lead to the wrongful convictions of the Exonerated Five, Black and Latino teenagers falsely accused and convicted of a 1989 rape and assault in Central Park after Trump publicly called for their execution. Decades later, inventing reasons for his military occupation of Washington, DC, he ranted about local teenagers as vicious sources of rampant crime and called for children as young as 14 to be tried as adults so the system could “lock them up for a long time.”
ICE has incarcerated kids of every age, obliterating the concept of childhood when it comes to immigrants. According to the Marshall Project, the number in ICE prisons is ten times what it was under the Biden Administration. Across the country, teenagers are being left to care for their siblings when their parents are taken by ICE. They are forced to make difficult adult decisions about their todays and tomorrows, as this conversation with 13-year-old Cynthia reported in Mother Jones reveals:
“What are you gonna say if they ask you: ‘If your mom gets deported, what are you gonna do?’”
“I’m not sure yet,” Cynthia says, taking a bite of waffle. “Because I’m not ready for a new life in a whole different country.”
Her siblings weigh the question, too—whether they’d choose to stay or go, to finish school here or be with their parents abroad. They lean toward different answers, which is scary to consider.
Children of immigrants, children of color, and those from low-income households are especially vulnerable to vigorous MAGA-led efforts to roll back child labor protections. A number of states have passed and proposed laws allowing teens to engage in more hazardous jobs and work long hours, the kind and quantity of work that should be reserved for adults, while at the same time allowing them to be paid less than minimum wage — because teenagers must become children again on payday. Lord knows children outside the US don’t count, so the administration cut 69 global programs that fought child labor abuses and human trafficking.
MAGA grants that some teenagers get to be teenagers. You might recall Kyle Rittenhouse, who was 17 when he crossed state lines with an illegal gun and killed two people. MAGA embraced this teen who deserved their protection, emphasizing his youth. Even some adults are considered children when it suits purposes. Trump has referred to his middle-aged son Don Jr. as “a good boy” and his youngest son Barron at age 20 his mother’s “little boy.”
These aren’t simple hypocrisies. Many are dangerous efforts to exploit vulnerable teenagers as sexual objects or as cheap labor, to deal with them cruelly and inequitably, and to deny them the rights the international community recognizes they are due as children — to safety, security, privacy, education, and more.
The understanding of teenagers as children approaching adulthood rather than as adults is a relatively new one. In the early 1900s, educator and psychologist G. Stanley Hall coined the term adolescence, observing that humans in the years following puberty experience heightened emotions and a tendency to conflict and risk-taking, distinguishing them from adults.
Science now tells us the brain continues developing well after 18, suggesting that the period we call adolescence might be expanded. At a minimum, it should inform our understanding that those under 18 need protection from the ideologues, predators, and profiteers who benefit from erasing their childhood.
