Question

Adolescent pregnancy is viewed as a high-risk situation because it poses serious health risks for the mother and the baby. Describe various risk factors or precursors to adolescent pregnancy. Research community and state resources devoted in adolescent pregnancy and describe at least two of these resources. Research the teen pregnancy rates for the last 10 years for your state and community. Has this rate increased or decreased? Discuss possible reasons for an increase or decrease. NOTE- ARIZONA MESA COMMUNITY

Answer 1

Adolescent pregnancy is viewed as high risk situation because of various different reasons. The reasons may include various health risks that might affect both the mother as well as the child, the psychological instability, social pressures etc. The risks of adolescent pregnancy includes:

-lack of prenatal care

- high blood pressure

- premature birth

- low birth weight baby

- sexually transmitted diseases

- post partum depression

- feeling alone and isolated etc

These may be the risks that a mother as well as her child may suffer from during teen age pregnancy.

There are various different risk factors or precursor to the teen age pregnancy. They are as follow:

The general risk factors includes:

- drug use

- alcohol use

- decreased self esteem

- lack of education regarding sex as well as the contraceptive methods

- lack of future goals

- decrease or no future oriented

- poor grades or school performance

- a victim of any kind of sexual abuse

- negative attitude on the use of contraceptions

- having sex at a younger age

- confused about having a baby

Also other risk factors include:

Social risk factors:

- peer pressure on having sex

- dating or having relationship with the older people

- dating started from an early age

- poor friendships

- friends who are active in sexual activities

Family risk factors:

- poor supervision of children by the parents

- decreased or limited communication between the parents with their Tenn child.

- negative family coping and interaction

- family with single parent

- conflicts which are left unresolved in the family itself

- history of teenage pregnancy in the family itself.

There are various researches done related to teenage pregnancy as well as various state resources have devoted themselves in adolescent pregnancy.

A study was conducted by National Demographic and Health Survey in 2013 in Philippines. It was found that one among every young Filipino women is either a mother or is pregnant with the first child. It has been increased to about 70% in the last ten years and is causing a serious threat to the development of the country.

The other research was done in the Northeast Ethiopia in the year 2017. It was done in order to assess the prevalence and associated factors of teenage pregnancy in Wogedi, Ethiopia. It was found that the teenage pregnancy was very high in the area due to various risk factors such as parental divorce, age, residence, contraceptive non-use etc. Approximately around 17% females in Ethiopia between the age of 15- 19 years are married and the first intercourse is at the age of 16.6 yrs.

In India out of every 1000 teenage girls around 75 of them give birth to a child. The rate of adolescent pregnancy is increasing every passing year because of the increase in unemployment and lack of education among the people of India. The increase in poverty in the rural part of India increase the risk of child marriage and the risk of pregnancy before the age of 18yrs. Also once the girl gets older the amount of dowry to be paid increases for the parents have to prevent it they marry their daughters off at a very young age. The culture also permits them to get the daughters married before the age of 18 yes which has been followed since very long time and is still followed. In Some of the part of India, a girl is booked as soon as she is born by the family of a boy and is married once she reaches the age of 5-7 yrs, which again is a very high risk of getting teenage pregnancy. Hence, teenage pregnancy is one of the major concerns throughout the world and should be controlled in order to improve the health of the mother as well as the child to be born