Teenage pregnancy

PLAN

1. Anxious statistics of teenage pregnancy.

2. Pregnancy from the physiological point of view.

3. Teenage motherhood in America.

4. Sociologist Frank Furstenberg’s teenage theory.

Last year in the UK 36,540 unmarried teenage girls between the ages of 15 and 19 had à baby.

In the USA nearly one million teenage American girls become pregnant each year.

Britain has the highest rate of teen pregnancy in Europe.

The teenage pregnancy rate in Britain is twice that of Germany and four times that of France.

4 out of 10 teenage girls in the world become pregnant before they are 20.

Why do so many teens end up in this situation? They must know the risks.

Teens in the USA in particular are constantly warned of the risks of getting pregnant. Sex education starts as early as 3rd grade, messages to say no to sex appear on TV, stories of young girls getting pregnant are constantly in teen magazines. However,the truth is most teens believe it won’t happen to them.

Don’t teens realise that if they get pregnant they might ruin their plans?

In general teens who are the most ambitious are more careful. Teens who lack self-esteem, or have fewer definite plans are less cautious. Some girls are either too embarrassed to buy birth control items or believe that they will just ‘say no’ to sex. President George W Bush wants to get rid of safe-sex classes in order to teach abstinence.

What is life like for teen mothers?

Most teen girls are delighted when they first realise they are pregnant-they are given gifts and look forward to having à baby. However the reality is often à terrible shock even when the girl’s parents help. Most can’t cope with looking after à baby and schoolwork and drop out of school. In most cases the teen mother needs à job to pay for the baby, she has to find somewhere to look after the baby while is workihg or studying. Due to these problems, most teen mothers do not find good jobs.

What is life like for their children?

Life can be very hard. Many grow up in poverty or are neglected because the mother is too young to care for them properly. In the majority of cases the children do not do well at school because their mother has no time to encourage them or because she did not have a chance to do well in school, she cannot help them with schoolwork.

What about the children’s dads?

In most cases the father does not help financially or emotionally. If he is young too he can’t help very much because he has the same problems as the mother. In the past, the couple would get married but evidence showed because the couple were so young, it didn’t work.

What help is evailable for teen parents and their kids?

Teen mothers are given some welfare money to help them survive. Around the USA and parts of Britain, there are some schools that have à special childcare centre for the teen mothers. The centre looks after the babies while their mothers are in class. They also teach the mother how to make sure the baby stays healthy. Although these centres are helpful, they have been criticised for how much they cost the state.

How can the number of teen pregnancies be reduced?

Some say teens should be taught to abstain from sex until they are married, others say we should give them more information. Some schools use ‘Think-It-Over Dolls’. These are dolls that cry during the night and must be picked up. They also need to be ‘fed’. The dolls record it if you hit them or drop them. Teens are given the dolls to look after for à weekend.

Pregnancy is the period during which à woman carries à baby within her body before giving birth. Pregnancy begins with conception-that is, the fertilization of an egg by à sperm. The fertilized egg is called à zygote.

Pregnancy, also called gestation, lasts about nine months for most women. The femaleof almost all other species of mammals also have à period of pregnancy.

The period varies in length among different animals.

The baby during pregnancy.The developing zygote is called an embryo during the first two months of pregnancy, and à fetus thereafter. During the second week after conception, the membranes that surround the embryo become attached to the lining of the uterus. À structure called the placenta forms in the uterus. The placenta enables the embryo to live within the mother’s body. Food and oxygen pass from the mother’s bloodstream to the embryo or fetus by means of the placenta.

After two months, the fetus is about two 1 inch ( 2.5 centimetres) long and can move its head, mouth, arms, and legs.

The fetus has recognizable human features after three month. The mother may first feel the fetus moving during the fifth month. The fetal heartbeat can also be heard at that time. After six month, the fetus measures about 14 inches (36 centimeters) long and weighs about 30 ounches(850 grams).Most of its organs are functioning.In the last three months of pregnancy, the mother’s bloodstream provides immune substances that help protect the baby from various diseases after birth.

How pregnancy affects women. Pregnancy causes physical changes in women. Menstruation stops and does not resume until after à women has given birth. During the first three month of pregnancy, the mother may suffer morning sickness (nausea and vomiting). Pregnant women gain an average of 20 to 25 pounds (9 to 11 kilograms). The fetus at birth accounts for about 6.5 to 8 pounds (2.9 to 3.6 kilograms) of this weight, the placenta about 1 to 1.5 pounds (0,5 to 0,7 kilogram), the brests about 1 pound (0.5 kilogram), and the rest being mainly fat and water.

The mothers breasts change in many ways during pregnancy. For example, the nipples become larger and the area around them turns darker. Breasts also increase in size so that they can provide adequate supply of milk. These and other changes make it possible for the mother to nurse the baby after it is born.

Women should have regular medical care during pregnancy. For example, à physician can advise à woman about whether she should follow à certain diet. To prevent damage to the embryo, doctors advise pregnant women not to smoke, drink alcoholic beverages, or take certain medications. Such drugs as heroin and cocaine are especially dangerous for à mother and her developing baby. In addition, women who are 35 years of age or older and those who have certain genetic disorders in their family histories may be advised to seek genetic counseling. One of the most serious conditions that may occur in the later months of gestation is toxemia of pregnancy. Its symptoms include headache, sudden and excessive weight gain, and swelling of the face annd hands. À women with these symptoms should see à physician.

Miscarriage, also called spontaneous abortion , is the unintentional early ending of pregnancy by à natural cause . Physical problems may occur in the women’s body that cause the fetus to die and be expelled from the uterus. Defects in the egg or sperm are another chief cause of miscarriage.Medical treatment before and during pregnancy can prevent many miscarriages from occuring.

Every year ,more than one million American teenage girls become pregnant; 80 percent are not married when they become pregnant; and nearly 30,000 are under age fifteen. More than 50 percent of the babies born to teenage mothers in the United States today are born out of wedlock. Although rates are higher for black teenagers than for white teenagers, U.S. teenagers are twice as likely to become pregnant as Canadian teenagers and four times as likely as Swedish teenagers. There are excessive costs associated with these teen pregnancies: costs to the girls or women themselves, costs to their offspring, and costs to the society at large.

Teenage pregnancy and motherhood are not à “black problem,” as many people suppose. The pregnancy rate for black teenagers is higher than that for white teenagers, but most of this difference is related to socioeconomic factors. Black teenagers who come from disrupted families, whose parents did not complete high school, and who live in inner-city ghettos are three times more likely to give birth than are black or white teenagers in better social circumstances. While black teenage pregnancy has declined over the last decade, white teenage pregnancy has increased. The birthrate for white American teenagers is 40 percent higher than that for teenagers in most other industrialized nations. Teenage motherhood is an all-American problem.

Culturally and socially, unwed teenage mothers are “out of step”. According to contemporary timetables, the most appropriate time for à women to have her first child is between ages twenty-two and thirty-two. Moreover the transition from adolescence to adulthood ideally occurs in stages: finish school, get à job, get married, and, only then, have à baby. This sequence allows young people to adjust to new roles one at à time. Teenagers who skip these preliminary steps and become mothers first are much less likely to finish school, to work at à job paying more than the minimum wage, or to establish à stable marriage, even at later points in their lives than are other young women.

Why do so many American teenagers become pregnant? Most experts agree that the reason is socialization­­-or rather à failure in socialization. In Western Europe, adults are more accepting of teenage sexuality. Adolescents are required to take comprehensive sex education courses and are given easy access to free contraceptives. In this country, most parents are reluctant to discuss sexuality and family planning with their adolescents. The average health class devotes ten hours or less to reproduction. If contraception and abortion are discussed, it is usually in senior high-which may be too late. Most parents want schools to offer sex education. But until recently most did not want sex education to include information on birth control, on the grounds that this would encourage young people to become sexually active. Offering teenagers free contraceptives through high school health clinics is still controversial.

As à result, teenagers get most of their informatin-and misinformation-about sex from their friends. Many do not know what time during the menstrual cycle they are likely to get pregnant, where to obtain birth control, or how to use it. Less than half of sexually active teenagers use contraceptives on à regular basis. Almost all are surprised they are pregnant. They tend to think they are “safe” because they are too young to become pegnant, do not have sex often enough,or they simply don’t think about the possible consequences.

Indirectly, the mass media may contribute to the problem. Scenes implying sexual intercourse appear nightly on prime time TV. Explicit sexual themes are common in movies, rock music, and advertising. Yet all three major networks refused to broadcast public servicea nonouncements on teenage pregnancy until the summer of 1985. They still reject public education messages on contraceptives.

There are signs of change, however. In part because of the AIDS epidemic, eight out of ten adults now favor including discussions on birth control and sexually transmitted diseases in high school curricula, and five out of ten would introduce these topics in elementary school. Television stations have begun to carry public service announcements that promote the use of condoms as protection against AIDS. The national Parent Teachers Association is now sending information and suggestions on AIDS to its offices all over the country, encouraging them to hold workshops and school meetings on AIDS. It seems doubtful that these measures will cause an immediate or sharp decline in teenage pregnancy, but they are à first step.

Excluding prostitutes and homosexual men, teenagers have the highest rates of sexually transmitted diseases in our population. To date, relatively few cases of adolescents with AIDS have been reported. But one-fifth of all AIDS cases have occured in twenty- to twenty-nine years olds. The average time lapse between infection and the development of AIDS is ten years suggesting that most of these young adults contrasted the virus in late adolescence. Most expect AIDS to spread significantly among the heterosexual population in the near future. Given the high rates of sexually transmitted diseases and low rates of contraceptive use among adolescents, teenagers will be at risk.

Sociologist Frank Furstenberg and his colleagues Jeanne Brooks-Gunn and Phillip Morgan have done an important study of teenage pregnancy that gives essential informationon its effects on the mother and her child. The study is particularly impressive because they recently followed up the women and their children in 1984, 17 years after the women were initially interviewed while pregnant in 1966-1967. There were approximately 400 respondents, most of them black, all of them initially residing in Baltimore.

Furstenberg and his colleagues concluded that although there are many negative consequences to teenage childbearing, the negative consequences have been exaggerated and there has not been enough attention paid to those who, despite the odds against them, nonetheless manage to cope and succeed.

Let’s focus first on the findings for the mothers. When they were first followed up 5 years after the pregnancy, they looked very disadvantaged. For example, 49 percent had not graduated from high school. Approximately one- third of them were on welfare at some point during the 17 years of the study. However, by the time of the 1984 follow-up an impressive proportion of women had staged à substantial recovery. At that point, an additional 38 percent had graduated from high school, an additional 25 percent had some education beyond high school, and 5 percent had graduated from college. Of those who had been on welfare at some time during the study, two-thirds had managed to get off it by 1984; 67 percent were employed, and fully à quarter had incomes in excess of 25 thousand dollars per year.

The study shows clearly that there is great diversity in the outcomes for adolescent mothers. Some remain locked in poverty for the rest of their lives, whereas others manage to succeed despite their circumstances. Furstenberg and his colleagues feel it is important to understand the routes to success that some women find. The most important factor is differential resources. Women with more educated parents who have more income tend to do better because they have more resources.The second most important factor is competence and motivation. Those women who were doing well in school at the time of the pregnancy and had high educational aspirations were more likely to do well following the birth. À third factor is intervention programs such as special schools for pregnant teenagers and hospital intervention programs. When these programs are successful, they help the women complete high school and postpone other births, two factors that are crucial to recovering from the adverse circumstances of à teenage pregnancy. If there are additional births locked out of the job market , but she can successfully build à career if she has only one child to manage.

Turning now to the children, the results indicate that they are at risk in many ways. At birth, 11 percent were low birth weight (2500 grams or less), which puts them at risk for à variety of their problems. However, it seems that the express of low –birth-weight babies is more à function of the adequacy or inadequacy of medical care during pregnancy than it is à function of the mother being à teenager. By 1984 the school record showed evidence of academic failure and behaviour problems. Half of the children had had to repeat at least one grade. Thirty-five percent had had to bring their parents to school in the last year because of à behavioral problem, and 44 percent had been suspended or expelled in the past 5 years. The study sample was also more sexually active than randomly chosen national samples. By age 16, 78 percent had engaged in sexual intercourse. By age 17, 26 percent of the girls reported having been pregnant. Thus the cycle of teen pregnancy and poverty tends to permate itself.

Teenage pregnancy in the United States is à serious problem, both because of the large numbers of people affected and because the consequences can be so serious. What can be done?

The strategy of Furstenberg and his colleagues is to look at the success stories-those women who manage to rise out of poverty to make successful and happy lives for themselves. Once the factors were crucial to their success are identified, social programs can be designed to provide similar resourcesor experiences to more teenage mothers, thereby breaking the cycle of poverty and teen pregnancy. Two critical factors to success, for example, are finishing high school (and preferably getting even more education) and postponing other births. Social programs need to be set up to assist adoloscent mothers ih finishing high school (including special schools for pregnant teenagers, and child care for mothers while attending school). Information on and access to contraception is essential. Programs such as Head Start that help prepare these children for school aare critical, because they are at risk for academic failure. Marriage to à man with some financial resources was also à route to success for some women in this study. However, the high rate of unemployment among young, black, urban men makes such marriages less likely. This point out the importance of social programs aimed at males as well as females.

In summary, teenage pregnancy is à serious problem, but not unsolvable one. By studying those women who stage à recovery from the experience, we can gain important insights into how we can break the cycle of poverty and teen pregnancy.

À LIST OF LITERATURE:

1.Colman,Libby L. and A.D.Pregnancy:The Psyhological Experiennce. Rev. Ed. Noonday,1991.

2.Hales, Dianne R. Pregnancy and Birth. Chelsea Hse.,1989.

3.Janet Shibley Hyde. Understanding Human Sexuality; 1994. 5th ed.

4.Kitzinger, Shiela. Being Born. Grosset, 1986.

5.Sociology: An Introduction/Michael S. Bassis-4th ed.;1991.

6.Sociology/Richard T. Schaufer. Robert P. Lamm-6th ed.;1998

7.Society/Ely Chinoy-Random House,-New York