Sexuality, youth pregnancy and parenthood are nowadays issues of great complexity to education, in a debate that takes place concerning freedom and rights. This paper focuses three biographical narratives of girls, who are sixteen, seventeen and nineteen years old, living in a Social Affair Office institution due to youth pregnancy and maternity. Their narratives reveal their subjectivities and paths lived before and during the life in the institution on the North of Portugal. This institution, for teenage pregnant girls and young mothers, presents educational projects that intend to bring new competencies for them.

The work presented here is part of a research project called “Sexualities, Youth and Teenage Pregnancy in North-Western Portugal”, financed by FCT (the Portuguese Foundation for Science). The local-global perspectives on sexualities, pregnancy and young parenthood are central concerns here, allowing to link biographies and educational different social and institutional places, in the actual context of European pendular migration, with new “communities of interpretation” (Kehily & Nayak, 2009). One of the main challenges is to build an educational knowledge about protected subjects, highlighting the ways in which young people are being educated. How they experience this educational institution where they live in? How do these girls understand the support given in this institution? It is necessary an examination about social services,placed in the articulation and tension between the educational, the therapeutic and the punitive, bringing to this analysis Iris Young`s (1997) discussion on ways of dealing with drug addict mothers, arguing that therapeutic programmes still retain a punitive trend.

The central issues here gain other meanings in the new changes of the balance between public life and gender relations in the framework of enlarged citizenship, beyond the common meanings in public debates (Lees, 2000). In the case of youth pregnancy, it should go beyond the debate about the high incidence of teenage pregnancy in Portugal. Actually, this high rate coincides with a decrease in birth rates and an increase in the age at which women have their first child. In this context, teenage pregnancy signifies a break with a range of normalised expectations about young women life paths and appropriate fecundity (Walkerdine et al, 2001). This contributes to the view of teenage pregnancy as a social problem to be fought. Certainly this is an issue that involves multiple messages and concepts, including the perception of maternity as a positive factor for integrating young women, in specific communities. Furthermore, teenage pregnancy and parenthood has been interpreted as the result of problematic young women behaviour, relieving men of responsibilities. Also sexuality has been frequently been circumscribed to reproduction, family and normative heterosexuality. Since the 1990s, the debates about sexuality and intimacy increase (Giddens, 1996). From the debates on rights, gender and power has emerged the concept of sexual citizenship (Richardson & Turner, 2001). Other educational researches consider these new perspectives with implications to European knowledge and practices (Arnot, et al. 1999, Redgrave, 2009; Fonseca, 2009).

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