The epidemic of teenage pregnancy: An Indian tragedy

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By Taha Amin Mazumder,
New Delhi, 2 Sept 2015: A teenager is eve-teased, she clicks a pic of the culprit – and a social media sensation is created. At another pole of the society, another teenager dreams about a prince and ends up getting married to a much older man, while finally dies in giving birth to a kid when she is only 15-year old – an episode entirely contrary to a Cinderella story and surrounds a global epidemic called teenage pregnancy. The analogies are odd, but the social responses are too, divided oddly. The social media generation jumps when Facebook buzzes but waits for being informed by the media when a long and steady-growing epidemic such as early childbirth kills thousands of girls worldwide.

Interestingly, teenage pregnancy is one of the few issues that connects the East with the West, albeit in shades of negativity. Even developed nations such as the United States are faced with the same big problem of teenage pregnancy. According to the United States Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, 329,772 births were recorded among adolescents between 15 and 19 years of age in 2011. But there is a sharp difference beyond the data and figures in terms of the reason why teenagers get pregnant in more modernized societies such as the United States and in developing nations such as India. While in a developing country such as India, early marriages and traditional gender roles are to be blamed primarily for early pregnancies, in the United States, maximum teenage pregnancies occur out of unplanned sexual activities, an issue which is gradually gripping the Indian urban teenagers as well.

Tale of the rise in teenage pregnancy in figures
Per a United Nations Population Fund (UNFPA) report released in 2013, about 7.3 million girls under the age of 18 give birth to children, while the relative number of pregnancies is even higher because the girls often give birth to multiple children before they reach their mid 20s. Teenage pregnancies occur with varying rates across regions and countries and age groups. A worrying figure shows that in the period between 2000 and 2013, when the UNFPA report was released, with 11,875,182 pregnancies, India topped the chart of 10 countries with the greatest numbers of women aged between 20 and 24 who gave birth before their age was 18.

The UNFPA report mentioned that in 2010, 49 percent of adolescent girls lived in only six countries: China, India, Indonesia, Nigeria, Pakistan and the United States and that India (20 percent) and China (16 percent) together account for more than one-thirds of the global total. “India will retain the biggest national adolescent girl population, with hardly any net change from 2010 to 2030 (93 million to 95 million),” UNFPA predicted. Going by this trend, one can imagine where India may stand in terms of teenage pregnancy in a couple of years ahead.

Teen pregnancy rate declines in Delhi
There is, however, good news too, as the national capital Delhi registered a decline in the number of teenage pregnancies in 2014, as compared to two preceding years, per the Annual Report of Births and Deaths released by the Delhi government on 27 August 2015.

Causes and remedies
“Teenage pregnancies are on rise owing to a number of reasons including the societal control on women sexuality, lack of comprehensive education on sexuality and a lack of access to contraceptive services by adolescents and youth,” said Sana Contractor, a researcher in the fields of sexual and reproductive health rights, working with the Delhi-based NGO Centre for Health and Social Justice (CHSJ).

According to Sana, a major deficiency lies in the Indian society where discussions on sexual issues are taboo. Talking about the out-of-marriage teenage pregnancies, Sana said, “It’s natural for the adolescent to be curious about sexual issues. But when they don’t adequately know about it and engage in sexual activities, they tend to ignore taking any precautions. This leads to a lot of pregnancies as well as eventual abortions.”

CHSJ is an NGO focused on “Reproductive and Sexual Rights of women from marginalized communities with regard to maternal health and rights, right to safe abortion, counter effects of coercive population policies and informed choice in contraception and quality of care in family planning programmes.”

Child marriages and maternal health
Delhi-based lawyer Nazim Uddin Ahmed thinks there lies a strong relation between rampant child marriages in India and teenage pregnancy. “These two things are absolutely correlated. And a decrease in the rate of early pregnancy will result in the prevention of pregnancy-related health issues.” said Ahmed.

Interestingly, a recent recommendation by the Law Commission of India aims to equalize the marriage age for both males and females to 16, while India raised the legal age of marriage for girls from 15 to 18 years and for boys from 18 to 21 years by amending its related laws in 1978.

Early pregnancies and effects on newborns
According to Vinay Kaushik of Save the Children, an NGO devoted to the better of children, early pregnancies have severe effects on children as well, while impacting the mother’s health badly. “Teenage pregnancies drastically augment risks for pregnant women and the children they bear. The teenage bodies are not equipped to manage the pregnancy. Pregnant girls from marginalized communities they are at greater risk, since their upkeep during pregnancy is less secure and even the newborns face greater challenges, including the threat of malnutrition,” said Vinay.

Vinay Kaushik is handling a project that uses mobile games, video screenings and other innovative behavior-change tools to educate adolescents and community about the perils of teenage pregnancies and malnutrition. The United States Agency for International Development-funded and Half The Sky Movement-supported project is educating adolescents, young mothers and community at large on the issues of maternal and child health issues in Tonk, Rajasthan, as well as in Delhi slums.

With discussions ranging from livingrooms to research institutions to NGOs, teenage pregnancy has been one of the most controversial public issues of our day. The government has multiple programmes to check the rise of early childbearing, but the tumbling figures keep on telling the inconvenient story of a tragic epidemic with no signs to stop. The good side is NGOs such as CHSJ or Save the Children are trying their best to raise awareness among people, and probably here lies the solution too, in awareness drives for awaking the society from a scary limbo of ignoring and forgetting the steady and silent epidemic called teenage pregnancy.

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