Tips to teen pregnancy prevention and assistance

Teen preg­nan­cies have become very com­mon. There are many rea­sons for this. If par­ents are aware of the causes then to a large extent teen preg­nancy pre­ven­tion can be done. Once the teenager con­ceives there are few alter­na­tives to teen preg­nancy. But action can be taken for teen preg­nancy prevention.

Teen preg­nancy is not some­thing to be shrugged off – it causes con­sid­er­able dam­age to the soci­ety as well as to the indi­vid­ual fam­i­lies as regards finance and health. Gen­er­ally the teenage moth­ers do not get as much pre-natal care as oth­ers accord­ing to teen par­ent­ing sta­tis­tics.

Most the babies are born before term and are under­weight. Their gen­eral devel­op­ment later on is also slow. The teenage mother usu­ally fails to con­tinue with her edu­ca­tion in com­par­i­son to the moth­ers who have con­ceived in their late teens or early twenties.

A Preg­nant teen

A teenager’s body has devel­oped but the mind has not matured. Eager to be happy the young cou­ple does not think of the grave con­se­quences when they fall in love. Often teens resort to sex under the mis­guided notion that this is the only way they can hold on to their lover. They are not mature enough to real­ize that in true love, sex does not get such an importance.

Dur­ing the teen years the flow of hor­mones is at its peak and this sex­u­ally dis­turbs them eas­ily; con­trol becomes dif­fi­cult. So the teenager has to be taught about the grav­ity of the act and its seri­ous con­se­quences. They should also know about the pro­tec­tion for teen preg­nancy pre­ven­tion that is avail­able to pre­vent unwanted pregnancies.

But here arises another prob­lem. The teenager is some­times afraid of dis­pleas­ing the part­ner by sug­gest­ing the use of a con­dom. Often the cou­ple in the flush of their new pas­sion does not want to talk about it. The male part­ner is gen­er­ally reluc­tant to use one and this puts the female in a quandary. There is a nag­ging fear that if too much is insisted upon then the girl might lose her boy friend. There is a stigma about a girl who uses pro­tec­tion as some­one who is “bad.”

Another rea­son for teen preg­nancy is that par­ents who frown upon pre­mar­i­tal sex also look down on the use of con­doms and other birth con­trol meth­ods for teen preg­nancy pre­ven­tion. It is a very com­mon predica­ment. The irony is that although par­ents may not want such a sit­u­a­tion, human nature and the urges are so strong that it hap­pens in any case whether the par­ents give their con­sent or not. The par­ents would do well to mull over this point.

Thus both the teenager as well as the par­ents should know the dan­gers ahead to avoid pit­falls. The new­ness of her youth eas­ily causes impreg­na­tion in the teenager. That is all that Nature is con­cerned about and not the tra­vails human beings face as a consequence.