Adolescent Pregnancy

Adolescent Pregnancy

Pregnancy can propel a female from the status of woman to mother in an instant. It is a difficult step in any person's life. It can be hard mentally, physically, emotionally, and especially, financially. While these changes are noteworthy for an adult woman confronting pregnancy, the effects are frequently magnified when the expecting mother is an adolescent. For a pregnant teen, there tends to be limited opportunities for their education or employment, an increased amount of parental dependency, and far more health risks than normal. Although these problems are somewhat obvious, there are a few teens who believe a baby would fix their lives, so they purposely try to become pregnant. While an unintended pregnancy can be understood by most people, a teenager intentionally becoming pregnant is flabbergasting to most, and it usually hints at major problems in the teenage girl's life.

Up until the modern era, teenage pregnancies were somewhat normal. When a girl was at the age of sexual maturity, she was married off and began doing what she was biologically intended for, by giving birth to the next generation. In many underdeveloped countries, this is still considered the norm. With higher child mortality rates, women in these countries usually procreate as much as possible in order to have a chance at more children surviving. Each surviving child is practically a blessing. In developed countries, it is almost the exact opposite. The networks of help teen mothers should have, composed of grandparents, large, extended families, intimate neighborhoods, and working fathers, are seldom in existence. In modern times, pregnant teenagers are less of a blessing and more of a curse. Society is now seeing more of the problems that come along with the children of teen mothers such as health problems, behavioral problems, absent mothers due to work and education, and the welfare and social costs to the nation. One of the more alarming tendencies with teenage pregnancies is probably the decline of marriage. In the 1960s the percentage for unmarried teen births was only fifteen percent. A mere fifty years later, is has gone up to eighty percent. Teens account for almost a quarter of out-of-wedlock births (Obama 334). "These girls typically lack the maturity, the skills, and the assistance that are necessary for good parenting" (Popenoe). Unlike young women in the 1950s or 60s, girls nowadays are not being educated on how to care for children or raise a family. Women in developed nations are now expected to have higher education, the know how to raise a family, and a financially stable job. Most of these expectations are simply unrealistic.

Americans tend to take great pride in their leadership among nations. This favorable characteristic becomes somewhat embarrassing, however, when the United States claims the title for the highest teenage pregnancy rate in the western industrialized world, though "the age of initiation and rates of sexual activity in these countries are comparable" (Hayes 1). The United States, Sweden, and Great Britain have a relatively close sexual activity rate (Emans 845), so why the United States has such a high pregnancy rate is bewildering. According to the U.S. Department of Health, another teenage girl in the United States will become pregnant every twenty-six seconds, an adolescent will give birth every fifty-six seconds, and fifty-seven children will be born to a teenage mother every hour. In the United States, thirty-four percent of young women become pregnant at least once before they reach the age of twenty, which is just less than one million a year. This is twice the rate found in the next highest nation, Great Britain, and nearly ten times the rates found in Japan and the Netherlands. More than eighty percent of these pregnancies are unintended and unintentional. Between the years 1991 and 2005, the teenage pregnancy rate plunged an astonishing thirty-four percent; although the teenage pregnancy rate had been steadily declining, it rose a significant three percent in 2005, interrupting the fourteen year decline, and continues to rise yearly (Stein).

In 2008, at Gloucester High School in Gloucester, Massachusetts, a group of girls evidently thought it would be cool to get pregnant. Seventeen girls, none older than sixteen years old, became impregnated before the end of the school year. Most of the girls were just barely in their sophomore year of high school. Although completely baffled at first, some school officials assumed the spike in pregnancies was no accident. They had come to believe over half of the pregnant teenage girls had made some kind of informal pact for the girls to all become pregnant at the same time. It started with a small group of expecting teenage mothers deciding to finish out their high school careers and raise their children