Реферат: Teenage Pregnancy Essay Research Paper Teenage pregnancy

Granted, not all women use contraceptives, or use them effectively, but contraception does work, for teenagers as well as adult women. Publicly funded family planning services have prevented an average of 1.2 million unintended pregnancies, including 509,000 unintended births and 516,000 additional abortions, each year. Every dollar spent on publicly subsidized family planning services saves more than $4 that would otherwise be spent to provide medical care, welfare benefits and other social services to women who by law would be eligible for such services if they became pregnant and gave birth.

Meanwhile, public funding of abortion services for Medicaid-eligible women has been severely restricted since the mid-1970s. Studies have shown that 20-35% of Medicaid-eligible women (most of whom are AFDC recipients) who would have abortions if coverage were available continue their pregnancies to term in the absence of coverage-at a cost of millions of dollars annually to the federal government and the states.

Conclusion

Sexual activity is now common among teenagers in the United States, and there is little difference in levels of sexual activity among adolescents of different income levels. However, poor and low-income teenagers are less likely to use contraceptives when they have intercourse, and thus are more likely to experience an unplanned pregnancy. When they do get pregnant, teenagers from disadvantaged families are also less likely than their more affluent peers to have an abortion; about 60% of poor teenagers and nearly half of low-income adolescents continue their pregnancy and give birth. All too often, the poorest of these young women have-and perceive that they have-futures that are bleak. They see little reason why having a baby now will make their lives “worse,” or, why waiting until later will make their lives “better.”

A major challenge is to provide these young women with realistic incentives to wait. That means guaranteeing them-and their partners-access to the education and training that will enable them to get good jobs, which, in turn, will give these young people reason to hope that their lives will improve. It also means assuring that family planning and abortion services are widely available on a voluntary basis to all poor and low-income teenagers who want to delay having a baby.

Efforts to prevent adolescent pregnancies and births must be targeted not just at those already poor or currently living in welfare families, but at all women at risk of poverty and welfare, since research shows that most young women who give birth as a teenager do not immediately go on welfare. Eventually, however, many fall into poverty, and very often, welfare dependency.

The currently proposed disincentives to teenage pregnancies and out-of-wedlock births are misguided in this regard, if for no other reason than because they are targeted largely at the very small proportion of young women who are likely to go on public assistance immediately upon the birth of their baby. Yet, very often there is a lag sometimes of several years between the time most teenagers who eventually become welfare-dependent give birth and when they actually begin to receive AFDC benefits. These women are not expecting to go on welfare when they have a child and therefore are unlikely to change their behavior as a result of restrictions on welfare eligibility related to childbearing.

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The Alan Guttmacher Institute (AGI), The Politics of Blame: Family Planning, Abortion and the Poor, New York, 1995.

AGI, Sex and America’s Teenagers, New York, 1994.

General Accounting Office (GAO), “Families on Welfare: Sharp Rise in Never-Married Women Reflects Societal Trend,” GAO/HERS-94-92, Washington, D.C., May 1994.

GAO, “Families on Welfare: Teenage Mothers Least Likely to Become Self-Sufficient,” GAO/HERS-94-115, Washington, D.C., May 1994.

U.S. House of Representatives, Overview of Entitlement Programs: 1994 Green Book, Washington, D.C., July 15, 1994.