May is National Teenage Pregnancy Prevention Month. This month is devoted to promoting sexual health information and services for teens. Its purpose is to raise community awareness and support for pregnant teenagers.
Most people at JHS know at least one teen that is pregnant or has been pregnant during their teenage years. Teenage pregnancy is something that affects many people even if you don’t realize it. Did you know that the United States spends $7 billion every year to cover the costs of teen pregnancies?
The bottom line is that teenage pregnancy is something that cannot be stopped in a day, if at all. As teenagers, students get a few years of sex education and then are sent on their way and expected to follow society’s rules. The fact of the matter is that teenagers are still going to have sex and some are still going to get pregnant.
Kelsey Hayes, a senior at JHS, had a son last September. She wants teens to stay protected. “It’s hard going to school every day. It’s hard doing schoolwork and taking care of a crying baby at home. Your whole world changes. It’s definitely not how I thought senior year would be,” Hayes says.
In 2011, 329,797 babies were born to women between the ages of 15 and 19 years old.
Nationally, one in four teenagers has received abstinence-only education with no birth control instruction. States with higher pregnancy rates, like Arizona, Arkansas and Texas do not require sex education at all and if it is taught, they are required to stress abstinence; therefore, the students are not taught about other ways to prevent pregnancies and how to deal with a pregnancy if it does happen.
Eighty percent of teenage pregnancies are unplanned.
Roughly three in ten American girls will become pregnant at least once before they are 20 years old.
More than half of teen mothers will not graduate from high school, and less than two percent will earn a college degree by the age of 30.
Nearly 25% of teen moms will have a second child within two years of their first.
The U.S. teenage pregnancy rate is two times that of Canada, four times that of Germany and France, and eight times that of Japan.
Eight out of ten teen dads don’t marry the mother of their child, so who is helping those teenage girls raise a child?
A good place to start changing would be the programs taught in school. By educating teens more about the consequences of sex and what really happens to your life when you have a child at a young age, some teens may change their minds about how “it won’t happen to them.”