Sex Education and Teenage Pregnancy

Sex education and teenage pregnancies are concepts deeply linked with each other. Let us understand the approach and the importance of the concepts in detail.

• Sex education stands effective if the knowledge of birth control pills and their usage are made clear to teenagers. In other words, education on contraceptives remains vital to effectively decrease the abortion rate. Most teenagers remain uninformed about the choices available and their effects.
• Sex education also involves determining what is to be considered an act of sexual behaviour.
• Most teenage pregnancies happen due to a lack of knowledge of of contraceptives. Reproductive health should be given prime importance while imparting sex education to teenagers.
• Teenagers should learn to take the right decisions pertaining to sexual activities in the future. This is the goal of every session in sex education.
• Family planning must also find a necessary place in sex education. If it is a case of planned as seen most often in rural India, then they must be made aware of the consequences of having more than one child at an early age.
• At no point of time should a teenager be ashamed or embarrassed of taking medical assistance. Untimely abortions and stillbirths in cases of pregnancies that remain undetected until at a later stage can cause considerable damage to the woman’s reproductive system. Diseases such as anaemia and toxaemia can pose a permanent problem in some cases. This is because a teenager is not supposed to have completed her own period of growth. Therefore, premature conceiving of a child leads to a setback in the reproductive system which has not yet completely adjusted to the changes that the body is experiencing.
• Another crucial fact that all teenagers must accept and acknowledge is to take responsibility for their actions. It is not always necessary that the other partner will help the female out in unmonitored pregnancies. A teenager should never hesitate and think that their male counterparts will take care of it.
• Teenage pregnancies can lead to dropping out of school and possibly a social stigma. Also, latest researches have concluded that most teenage mothers remain unmarried for a very long time.
• It is always a wise decision to choose from the following options when a teenager is six months into pregnancy: passing the baby on for adoption or keeping the baby. If pregnancies are detected earlier, then abortion is the safest option to look forward to.

Teenage pregnancies should be handled with care. Parents and people around them should support them economically and emotionally. Otherwise, the trauma often leads to permanent psychological damage such as social phobia turning one into an extreme introvert. The achievement lies in making them become responsible in life and towards their own self.