Teen Pregnancies Essay

Submitted By ycardeny
Words: 1862
Pages: 8

2013
Teen Pregnancies
How teen pregnancies affect our society?
Yarylys Cardentey
Miami Dade College

Everyday a teen girl in the U.S. is faced with the hardest decisions she will have to make, and I am not talking about what she will wear to school. This decision will change the course of her whole life all her dreams and aspirations will now be placed on hold. She has just found out she is pregnant. Teen pregnancy is defined as teenaged or under aged girls from 13-19 years old becoming pregnant. As she struggles to decide whether she will parent, give up her child so that someone else will parent or terminate her pregnancy. Now she has just become another statistic in our society which has become all too common. A study in 2008 shows that in the U.S. 59% of teen pregnancies ended with a live birth that 26% ended in termination and 14% ended in fetal loss. After she makes her decision on what to do, she now also needs to break it to her friends and family not knowing how everyone will react. She also now has do deal with the uncertainty of the father of her baby's support. Many families in the U.S. have to deal with this scenario every day. Even though the rate of teen pregnancy has gone down in recent years, 3 out of 10 American girls will get pregnant before the age of 20. That is about 750, 000 pregnancies a year according to http//:www.dosomething.org.
Teen pregnancy rates are larger in Latino and African American girls. Teen pregnancy does not just affect these girls and their families it also affects our society. How you may ask that their problem their decision well we all pay a price. With such high rates of teen pregnancies you are more likely to know someone directly or a family that has dealt with this issue first hand. Teen moms are more likely to have social and economical issue which might not affect you directly in your everyday life but it does affect us as a nation. Even though it will be hard to end this problem completely we have to find ways as a nation to reduce this rate of teen pregnancies.

As many of us women know being a mom is a full time job. So it is needless to say not all teenage girls are equipped to handle this task, which many adults have yet to master. For those teen moms that decide to raise their children now they have to multitask parenthood, education and social life. The majority of these girls have no support system at home. Being that they are so young the majorities of their own parents are working and are not able to sacrifice the time or energy to raise another child. These girls now have to juggle supporting a child and taking care their every need is not an easy task. All these factors that these girls have to deal with because of mistake that they made makes it harder to parent a child the right way. The stressors cause them to have little time to study and do well in school and with no real future in sight for them. These girls have to make another hard decision they stay in school and continue to strive for a good future or give up and leave school. It saddens me to say that more than half of teen age moms do not graduate high school and only about 2% receive a college degree by the age of 30. These teen moms are now to become "adults" when they have to pass through their adolescent years struggling to raise their child when they should be learning in a classroom. So they can learn to be productive member of society. Due to the increase in teen pregnancies our society has started to create programs so that these mothers do not have to leave school. So we now have to modify our schools and education system to cater to these young mothers. Unfortunately even with programs that assist young moms it is still too overwhelming for these girls to obtain their high school diploma. Teen moms with no education have to rely on the government to financially support them and their child putting