Team effort needed to prevent teen pregnancies.
By: Judy Shepps-Battle
We are a nation with a disproportionate percentage of children begetting children.
Nearly 1 million American teenagers become pregnant each year and more than half go on to give birth. A little more than a third elects abortion and approximately 14 percent have either a stillborn child or miscarriage.
As a culture, we often romanticize teenage pregnancy and portray it in the media as a loss of innocence by two adolescents. In actuality, the baby’s father is older than 20 years of age in most cases. The teenager is most often the mother, and she is the one who bears the physical risks and emotional scars of an unplanned pregnancy.
It is an all-around unfortunate situation.
Adolescence should be a time of exploration, of trying on new roles. Instead, many teen mothers are forced to shoulder full-time responsibility for a newborn to the necessary exclusion of important developmental tasks. Even if the teen decides to abort the pregnancy, life-long trauma may remain.
Ultimately, the victim may be the infant.
The likelihood of a teen having a low birth weight baby is double the rate for adults, and the neonatal death rate is three times higher for babies born to adolescents.
School sex-education classes address the basics of conception and contraception. But what of the teens who forget these important lessons and find themselves pregnant?
Task of pregnancy prevention
Traditionally, the task of teaching about pregnancy prevention has fallen upon parents, schools, religious institutions and other social agencies. These groups have urged that sexual activity be delayed, that abstaining become the norm, and that contraceptives be used during non-abstinence.
Statistics indicate that this approach has had limited success.
According to the journal of the American Academy of Pediatrics, approximately 56 percent of females and 73 percent of males report having engaged in sexual intercourse before age 18. Half of pregnancies occur within the first six months of sexual activity.
Drugs and denial
One reason for this alarming rate is the use of alcohol and other drugs at parties and other social events. These substances reduce normal inhibitions and increase risk-taking activities, such as engaging in unprotected sex.
Another reason has to do with the magical or bullet-proof thinking that characterizes the teen years. "I won’t get pregnant" is often the unspoken belief of adolescents who are active sexually.
Even after conception, some teen moms go into a state of denial that they are pregnant and miss vital care for themselves and their babies. We are tragically familiar with cases of teens abandoning their newborns because they wouldn’t allow themselves to believe they were pregnant.
Is there another societal resource that can assist in pregnancy prevention and post-natal care? The AAP suggests that physicians are an untapped resource.
I agree.
The pediatrician’s role
The AAP suggests that pediatricians step up and not only promote abstinence and/or appropriate use of contraception, but take a proactive stance in providing resources for the mother as well as the baby’s biological father.
The AAP notes that teen mothers may need to spend more time in the hospital after delivery than adult mothers. They recommend hospitalization until the adolescent is capable of caring for her child and has resources available for necessary assistance.
The organization also recommends that programs involving the fathers of babies born to adolescent mothers be increased.
If a pediatrician is to gain adolescent patient trust, however, the length of office visits will increase. The doctor will have to stand up to insurance companies who insist on brief hospital stays for delivery. Advocating for social programs is also time taken from revenue-producing activities.
Given the nature of managed care, these very radical suggestions by the AAP should be applauded and supported.
The first line of support
The participation of pediatricians will be a welcome addition to school pregnancy-prevention efforts. But the first line of support is always at home.
We, as parents, need to talk to our children about sex and sexual activity early in life and often during the adolescent years. Such conversations should go beyond talking about the birds and the bees to the nature of emotional intimacy in relationships and the reality that unwanted pregnancy does occur.
Most important is that parents establish and maintain an open line of communication in case an unwanted pregnancy should occur. Whatever the decision to continue pregnancy or terminate our kids need and deserve practical guidance and emotional support.
Parents, pediatricians and schools working as a team can be a powerful force in helping our kids navigate the important teen years in a healthy, safe and responsible way.
Judy Shepps Battle is a South Brunswick resident, addictions specialist, consultant and freelance writer. She can be reached by e-mail at [email protected]. Additional information on this and other topics can be found at her Web site at www.writeaction.com.