27 Mar, 2011
The Hard Facts Concerning Teen Pregnancy
Research conducted in the year 2007 by the Centers for Disease Control concluded that there is a three per cent increase in teen pregnancies from 2005. It is also a known fact that very few of these teen mothers had planned on becoming parents. In the United States alone, close to a million teens get pregnant. These rates are much higher than those found in any other first world country. In relation to Japan and Netherlands, this is eight times high and two times higher than Canada or England.
Which are the factors affecting teen pregnancy? The American culture glorifies sex and puts little emphasis on the side effects and the accountability that is required of it. Sex is found in about all of the adverts as seen on television from food commercials, car commercials, mobile phone commercial, and any other commercial you can think of. This makes kids to be aware of sex from a very early age of growth and when they feel that they are older in their teens, they start using all the information they saw or heard and start practicing sex and end up getting pregnant.
Other factors that may influence a teen’s chance of getting pregnant would be if the teen comes from a background of poverty and has failed to get a good schooling which gives her hope for the future, then she will not have the strong will to focus on bettering herself. It is easier for such a girl to be waylaid by peers with loose morals. The same poverty does not allow her to get the birth controls she will require in order to avoid getting pregnant. For girls who do not perform well in class, getting pregnant in their teens is possible because of a number of reasons. If they do not occupy their minds with excelling in class, they may end up spending time doing things that will lead to sex.
Despite all this, it is a fact that a majority of our teens will start engaging in sex during these years. This will lead to early fatherhood or motherhood. When dealing with teenagers, we need to direct our efforts at educating them on the importance of abstaining from sex till when they are psychologically, physically, emotionally and financially ready to handle the consequences.
Besides that, those who have already engaged in sex should know about preventing pregnancy, for those who are already pregnant, they will need to be informed on how to become responsible parents as well as how to prevent more pregnancies. Another very important thing to note is that teen pregnancies are not just a problem for the girls. Boys too, who share the same responsibility, should know the importance of abstaining, preventing pregnancy and taking up the responsibility of a father.
For the best abstinence education curriculum check out abstinenceandmarriage.com, the top supplier of sexual abstinence education. They have a full line of age-specific abstinence curriculum that is extremely effective in churches, schools, organizations and in homes, and studies have shown it greatly changes teens attitudes towards sex and abstinence.
