It’s hard to raise a child when you’re still a child
Teen pregnancy is a blot. Not on the girl, but on the society and on the country. It is a curse of low socio-economic status, a curse of poor education. And the often-lifelong morbidity among teen mothers and their babies places a burden on public healthcare system that it cannot carry. So, teen pregnancy is a public health issue.
Look at these numbers: India is home to 33% of child brides of the world; 33.6 percent of India’s population is born of adolescent pregnancies; 1.6 crore girls in the age of 15-19 in India become pregnant each year; half of the 4.85 crore pregnancies in India were unintended; thousands of adolescent mothers and their perinatal and neonatal babies die each year; and lakhs of women and children suffer from morbidity caused by teenage pregnancy.
Also, delaying the onset of child-bearing could reduce India’s projected 2050 population of 1.7 billion by 25.1 percent.
Teen pregnancies overload the public health system because teen mothers and their babies have higher mortality and morbidity. Teenage girl’s body, and her maturity, is not sufficiently developed to bear a baby. Their short stature and undeveloped pelvis cause low birthweight babies. Other complications of adolescent pregnancy are obstructed or prolonged labor, poor maternal weight gain, postpartum hemorrhage, eclampsia, sepsis, anemia, preterm and still birth or baby dying within a few weeks of birth, pregnancy-induced hypertension – with excess protein in the urine, swelling of a mother’s hands and face, and organ damage that need medication – and postpartum depression. Also, sexually transmitted diseases are strongly associated with teenage pregnancy.
Pregnant teens in rural areas are less likely to receive vitamins and folic acid – ideally taken from before getting pregnant – and thus their babies are at higher risk of certain birth defects such as neural tube defects. In urban areas, pregnant teens are at risk of nutritional deficiencies from poor eating habits and from attempts to lose weight by dieting, skipping meals, food faddism, fad-diets, snacking, and eating fast food.
Because of raging hormones, social media, peer behaviour, and a variety of other factors and pressures, teenagers are vulnerable to mental disorders such as depression, anxiety, and eating disorders. Pregnancy induced depression makes the situation worse.
Teenage pregnancies result from poverty, underage marriage, rape, and peer pressure on girls and boys to engage in sex, which mostly is unprotected because of the teens lack of knowledge of contraceptives and lack of contraceptive services.
Teenage pregnancies can be reduced by promoting marriage in later years, by education, by making contraceptive services easily and freely available and publicizing them widely. Laws like Prohibition of Child Marriage Restraint Act 2006 has caused a reduction in number of child marriages. But a large-scale program on reproductive health is needed. Present programs are small scale. Countries like Sri Lanka have a systemic framework for teaching about sex in schools. Better female literacy and education in Kerala has reduced child marriage to 2.4%, the lowest in India; and has also reduced teen pregnancy to lowest in India. A few NGOs like the International Planned Parenthood Federation and Marie Stopes International provide contraceptive advice for young women worldwide. Government should encourage and support NGOs in India to undertake similar programs.
Public health system in India is already wobbling from high demand and low resources. Death of hundreds of children in government hospitals in Bihar, UP, Rajasthan in just the past two-and-half years is evidence of that. A program to prevent teen pregnancy will reduce the pressure on limited public healthcare resources and will save tens of thousands of lives each year. Such a program is the crying need of the hour.
