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Teenage Pregnancy

Adolescent pregnancy is a major concern in Botswana as it can have negative implications for the young mother, her child, family, community, and country. According to the WHO, about 16 million girls aged 15-19 give birth each year, with most occurring in low and middle income countries like Botswana. Adolescent pregnancies often illustrate a lack of contraceptive use and increase the risk of HIV/AIDS and other STIs. These pregnancies can disrupt the mother's education and lead to social and psychological issues due stigma. They also carry health risks for both the mother and child. While the government is working to address this issue, more still needs to be done to continue sexual education, discourage unsafe sex, and

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339 views2 pages

Teenage Pregnancy

Adolescent pregnancy is a major concern in Botswana as it can have negative implications for the young mother, her child, family, community, and country. According to the WHO, about 16 million girls aged 15-19 give birth each year, with most occurring in low and middle income countries like Botswana. Adolescent pregnancies often illustrate a lack of contraceptive use and increase the risk of HIV/AIDS and other STIs. These pregnancies can disrupt the mother's education and lead to social and psychological issues due stigma. They also carry health risks for both the mother and child. While the government is working to address this issue, more still needs to be done to continue sexual education, discourage unsafe sex, and

Uploaded by

Kedi Boikanyo
Copyright
© © All Rights Reserved
We take content rights seriously. If you suspect this is your content, claim it here.
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Download as DOCX, PDF, TXT or read online on Scribd
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Adolescent pregnancy is important as it has implications, not only for the

young mother involved but also for her baby, family, community and the
country at large. In the following discussion these will be highlighted in an
effort to show how significant this topic is.
According to World Health Organization aabout 16 million women aged 1519
years old give birth each year, which is about 11% of all births worldwide.
Majority of these births occur in low- and middle-income countries which
Botswana is one of them
Adolescent pregnancy is a concerning issue in our country despite efforts by
the government to decrease the rate. Firstly these pregnancies illustrate the
lack of use of birth control methods and this has consequences including
getting HIV/AIDS and other sexually transmitted diseases. Furthermore, these
young women are impregnated by older men who have much more sexual
experience and therefore pose a high risk of transmitting the HIV and other
STIs.
This is a major concern as Botswana is one of the hardest hit country with this
epidemic of HIV/AIDS therefore the efforts to reduce the spread become
unsuccessful.
Most of adolescent pregnancies are unintended and there is a high chance of
performing an abortion in that case and majority of the abortions are done in
an unsafe manner in backstreet locations due to fear of stigma and also
because abortion is illegal in Botswana. This is dangerous as in can result in
serious complications which include death or future infertility due to damage
of reproductive organs.

A lot of these young women who fall pregnant are not married and are
coerced by these older men into having sex. To make matters worse, these
men are likely to abandon them and fail to take responsibility for raising the
child. Also, a significant number of the adolescents who fall pregnant cannot
even identify the father of their child and therefore they cannot held
responsible for maintenance of the child. This leads to financial burden on the
family of the adolescent as most of them are still in school and dependent
upon their parents.

As mentioned above, these adolescents are still in school and pregnancy can
result in disruption of school and at worst drop-out from school completely.
This has negative implication for the individual, their family, community and
country at large because they become financially dependent and also are
beneficiaries of the countrys resources which could be used to develop other
areas of the economy.

Other negative impact of adolescent pregnancy include social isolation and


psychological illnesses such as depression. These can be as a result of stigma
from peers at school and other people in the community due to cultural attitudes
that view pre-marital sex as well as teenage pregnancy as unacceptable. This
can even lead to a more devastating consequence of suicide.
If the adolescent continues with the pregnancy; more negative consequences
occur mainly due to the fact that the body is still developing and is not fully
prepared for reproduction. The risk for the mother include bleeding during labour
due to tearing of birth canal, risk of birth by operation and even death. For the
baby, they are at increased risk of having being born with low weight, neglected
after birth and worse, death at birth or soon after birth. Also pregnant
adolescents are more likely to engage in high risk health behaviors like smoking
and heavy alcohol drinking which is dangerous for both the unborn baby and the
mother.
In a nutshell this topic of adolescent pregnancy is very important and needs a
great deal of attention to tackle this problem. Although the government has
measures in place to address adolescent pregnancy, a lot still has to be done as
the numbers of these pregnancies are still high. Continuing with education of
young people at school about sexual health; discouragement of premarital sex
and unprotected sex are very important. Furthermore parents need to be
involved to ensure that the adolescent get same message both at school and at
home to avoid confusion. Furthermore there is a challenge to make it easier for
young people to access contraceptives if needed and for health workers to
change their stigmatizing and negative attitude towards these young people
when seeking help related to sexual health.

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