Teen Pregnancy

2 Pages 386 Words

Teenage Pregnancy
Despite the recently declining teen pregnancy rates, 35% of teenage girls get pregnant at least once before they reach age 20, resulting in more than 850,000 teen pregnancies a year. The United States has the highest rate of teen pregnancy in the fully industrialized world. Teen pregnancy is bad for the mother.
Teen mothers are less likely to complete school and more likely to be single parents. Less than one-third of teens who begin their families before age 18 ever earn a high school diploma. Only 1.5% earn a college degree by the age of 30. There are serious health risks for adolescents who have babies. Young adolescents experience a maternal death rate 2.5 times greater than that of mothers aged 20-24.
Common medical problems among adolescent mothers include poor weight gain, pregnancy-induced hypertension, anemia, and sexually transmitted diseases. Later in life, adolescent mothers tend to be at greater risk for obesity and hypertension than women who were not teenagers when they had their first child.
Teen pregnancy is closely linked to poverty and single parenthood. A 1990 study showed that almost ½ of all teenage mothers and over ¾ of unmarried teen mothers began receiving welfare within five years of the birth of their first child. The growth in single-parent families remains the single most important reason for increased poverty among children over the last twenty years, as documented in the 1998 Economic Report of the President. Out-of-wedlock childbearing is currently the driving force behind the growth in the number of single parents, and half of first out-of-wedlock births are to teens. Therefore, reducing teen pregnancy and child-bearing is an obvious place to anchor serious efforts to reduce poverty in future generations.
Children of teen mothers often receive inadequate parenting. Children born to teen mothers are at higher risk of poor parenting because their mothers and often their fathers...