tress induced by life events destabilized teenaged girls, thereby creating a system imbalance that contributed to the development of behaviors culminating in pregnancy.
Tennyson (1991, pp. 75-79) found that teenaged girls tended to offer one of three explanations for an unplanned pregnancy. The first of these three reasons is that the adolescent reports that she simply was not thinking about pregnancy at the time of intercourse. These teenagers perceive pregnancy as something that "just happened" to them. The second of the three reasons is the blaming of someone other than themselves for the pregnancy. These teenagers have an external locus of control, and blame their sexual partners for the pregnancy. The third of the three reasons is a claim that the pregnancy is a mistake. For these teenagers, a mistake is something that is perceived as being inevitable. Tennyson (1991, p. 81) found that teenaged girls possessed the knowledge required to enable them to prevent pregnancy, and concluded that the unthinking excuse played a major role in behavior
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