Why Are Teen Pregnancy Prevention Programs Important?

Children are precious gifts of life that inspire, mature and bring joy to the lives of their parents. Children grow, learn and develop into adults quicker than we dare think. Children are the platform from which many organizations have been launched. Children are full of dreams, promises and visions of the future. Unfortunately, many children are having children--their childhoods crushed beneath the weight of parenthood.

• Pregnant Teen

History

• With the bombardment of beauty products, mature clothing and sexy role models, teenage girls are being blasted daily on TV, in magazines and on the Internet with images of sex and other adult activities. Whatever happened to playing out back with their dolls in the kiddie pool? Those days have gone the way of music videos, Britney Spears and Cosmo Magazine. Sexiness has been pushed into these girls' lives from the time they could sit up on their own and form a cohesive thought. What else can be expected of them when the world around them seems to want them to be sexy? Because they don't have the mature adult reasoning capacity, many young girls equate sexiness and love to sex.

  What does this mean? This means that more and more teen girls are having sex at younger and younger ages. Teen sex leads to teen pregnancy; children having children.

Effects & Significance

• Because most teenage girls are just entering womanhood, they don't have any clue what it means to be a woman. Sadly this doesn't mean that they cannot become mothers. Women's bodies mature faster than their minds, meaning baby can come long before the knowledge is there to prepare them for it.

  When they find out they're pregnant, many teenage moms turn to abortion or adoption, but some choose to raise the children despite the hardships that will come. This means dropping out of school, in some cases, having to find work to support themselves and their child, and in many cases they find opposition from family members. The life of a teenage parent is anything but glamorous.

Programs

• In recent years statistics have shown that 34 percent of American women have gotten pregnant before the age of 20. Not surprisingly enough, many programs have realized the growing problem of teenage pregnancies--and they've decided to do something about them. Programs like The National Campaign to Prevent Teen and Unplanned Pregnancy are fighting to get the word out about abstinence, protection methods and alternatives to raising the children on their own.

  Planned Parenthood is another program that focuses on getting the word out to schools, teen organizations and parents about preventing teenage pregnancy.

Concequences

• More and more teen girls are having sex at younger and younger ages. Teen sex leads to teen pregnancy; children having children.

Potential

• Children shouldn't have children--teenage girls need to know that pregnancy prevention is vital in their lives. Programs like the ones mentioned above, along with sex education in the public school system, is the best way to help teenage boys and girls realize the dangers and pitfalls of having unprotected sex.