Lively Women

May 2 Is National Teen Pregnancy Prevention Day

by Kristen King on May 2nd, 2007

The month of May is overflowing with national health observances, and here at Lively Women, we’re going to talk about them!  After all, how can you be lively if you’re not healthy?

Despite educational efforts in schools and communities around the country, teen pregnancy is still a major health problem in the United States, and it affects both boys and girls.  (After all, she doesn’t get pregnant on her own!)  Although teen pregnancy rates in America are dropping, the US and the UK still have the highest rates of teen pregnancy in the world, according to a 2002 article in the BMJ:

The United States has topped a table of teenage pregnancy rates put together by Unicef’s Innocenti Research Centre in Italy, which looked at births among teenagers in 28 of the world’s wealthiest nations.

Altogether, 52 out of every 1000 girls aged between 15 and 19 in the United States gave birth, while the United Kingdom topped the list in Europe—and came second overall—with just over 30 births in 1000 teenagers. At the other end of the scale Korea, Japan, Switzerland, the Netherlands, and Sweden had a rate of less than seven births per 1000 teenagers.

The researchers estimated that in the next 12 months at least 1.25 million teenagers in the world’s wealthiest countries will become pregnant and three quarters of a million will become mothers. And, according to specially commissioned research from the University of Essex, teenagers who keep their baby are twice as likely to end up living in poverty than those who delay motherhood.

Teens are not only emotionally and socially unprepared for the demands of parenthood, but teen girls are also physically unprepared for pregnancy, which puts their babies at a serious disadvantage healthwise.  In fact, another BMJ article, from 2001, reported,

A report on teenage parenting issues from an Irish parliamentary committee has said that the death rate for babies and very young children of teenage mothers is 60% higher than that for children of older women.

The Guide to Pregnancy Complications by Dr. Elizabeth Eden at HowStuffWorks states that babies born to teen mothers typically have low birth weight and are predisposed to wide variety of illnesses and disorders.  These problems result from a combination of factors, including the fact that teens’ bodies are still developing, that they often have poor nutrition, and that they frequently receive inadequate prenatal care or none at all.

Talk with the teens in your life about preventing unwanted pregnancies, and don’t be bashful.  The more honestly and more often you discuss sex and your family’s values with your teens, the better equipped they’ll be to make decisions.

Learn more from the National Campaign to Prevent Teen Pregnancy.

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POSTED IN: Birth control, Body, Health, Parenting, Pregnancy, Prevention, Real life, Sex