Simran Fabiani's List: Justice Project - Teenage Pregnancy

• Latest data suggests that teen pregnancy in India is high with 62 pregnant

  

  teens out of every 1,000 women
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    In India, the problems are very different. Grappling with issues like early marriage, illiteracy and high infant mortality could be possible causes for the high number of young girls getting pregnant between the ages of 15-19.
• Teen pregnancy in India is high with 62 pregnant teens out of every 1,000 women In comparison, 24 British teens get pregnant before their 19th birthday while the figure is 42 in the US In India, issues like early marriage and high infant mortality are possible causes for high number of young girls getting pregnant between the ages of 15-19

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• According to a study conducted by the Centre for Voting Opinion & Trends in Election Research in September 2007, every third teenager in India today is not a virgin. Of the 1,004 teenagers from 10 cities who participated in the survey, 22 per cent claimed to have ‘done it’ by Class XII.
• Arati Basu Sengupta, a gynaecologist based in south Calcutta, says 10 per cent of her total patients are pregnant teenagers. Ignorance about contraception, she says, is a major cause of teenage pregnancy. “Although teenagers have become sexually promiscuous, their awareness of contraceptives remains low,” says Sengupta.
• Today, as a practising gynaecologist at Mumbai’s P.D. Hinduja Hospital, Gandhi sees five to six cases of teenage pregnancy every month. “All the girls are unmarried and most have had multiple sexual encounters.

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• About seven percent of girls in the 15-19 year age group in Mumbai were or had been pregnant, or were already mothers, news website dnaindia.com reported here Monday.
• The NFHS says there were 36,700 teenage abortions in Mumbai, Delhi, Kolkata and Chennai in 2005-06.

• The pregnant teen mother and the child born are likely to suffer health, social, emotional and economic problems.
• A sexually active teenager who does not use contraception has a 90% chance of becoming pregnant within one year.
• hey experience isolation, guilt accompanied by stress and depression, low self esteem resulting in lack of interest in studies, limited job prospects and lack of a support group or few friends to name just a few. 
• Health wise teenage mothers have a much higher risk for anaemia, pregnancy-induced hypertension, lower genital tract infections (which may lead to premature labour and delivery), caesarean section because of pre-maturity, large baby within a small pelvis, foetal distress and sudden infant death syndrome.

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• Child marriages are still prevalent in India the outcome of which is an increase in teenage pregnancies.
• Also, various cases of rape on minors and other factors like lack of adequate sex education in teenagers have resulted in teen pregnancies.”
• Zeba Smith, counselor says, “Teen pregnancies can also be attributed to the irresponsible behaviour of the media.
• eens have impressionable minds and tend to imitate on-screen actors and actresses.
• ccess to pornography is misleading children.” 
• They can easily get carried away by dating trends in the west and end up goofing up.
• Teenagers start dating at an early age and are often carried away or due to inadequate knowledge find themselves in crucial circumstances.”

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• Comprehensive sex education that includes discussion of birth control may help reduce teen pregnancies, while abstinence-only programs seem to fall short, the results of a U.S. survey suggest.
• those who'd received comprehensive sex ed in school were 60 percent less likely to have been pregnant or gotten someone pregnant than teens who'd had no formal sex education.