Adolescent Pregnancy
The multiple elements that are attached to pregnancy make the reproductive issues key to examine when it comes to the adolescents’ population. There exist various predispositions that place the adolescences on the top list for teen pregnancy. There are individual factors such as lack of knowledge about sex, lack of ambition and goals for future, use of drugs, poor school performance, early age of sex and being victims of sexual abuse (Mueller et al., 2017). At the same time, there also exists social risks such as peer pressure to engage in sex, having a friend who is sexually active, impaired peer relationship as well as dating at early ages. Other risk factors can be associated with the family of the adolescent such as inadequate parental supervision, negative family interactions, history of teen pregnancy in the family as well as single-parent families.
There exist nine-state and community-based organizations as well as five national organizations that have been in place to handle the issue of pregnancy among the adolescents. For the national initiatives, there existed Advocates for Youth, which works to empower the rural women and girls thus assisting them in averting the gender inequalities that eye are exposed to. In the long haul, it impacts to reduce the incidences of teen pregnancy due to the empowerment. Among the state partners, there existed Access Matters which revolves around reaching the adolescents concerning health education and getting them exposed concerning reproductive health. The rate of adolescent pregnancy declined to 66% in Pennsylvania between 1991 and 2016. At the same time, 77% of all the teen pregnancies in 2015 were older ones between the age 18 and 19 years (Mueller et al., 2017). The possible cause of the reduction is the reaching of various initiatives to the adolescents to educate them on reproductive health which is vital in the prevention of the unwanted and teen pregnancies.
References
Mueller, T., Tevendale, H. D., Fuller, T. R., House, L. D., Romero, L. M., Brittain, A., &
Varanasi, B. (2017). Teen pregnancy prevention: Implementation of a multicomponent,
community-wide approach. Journal of Adolescent Health, 60(3), S9-S17.
