Teenage Pregnancies

Teenage Pregnancies and Their Options

Teenage pregnancies are a difficult thing to deal with but teenage girls have options; adoption, abortion, foster care, and parenting. Being pregnant as a teenager can cause many mishaps in a girl's life. Some people believe that the reason why adolescent girls are becoming pregnant is due to their family situation, for example, the parents' failure to teach certain values and not encouraging their children's goals.

Although teenage pregnancy is a major concern in our society, the number of teenagers getting pregnant is declining. "A total of 3,900,089 babies were born in the United States in 1995, one percent fewer than in 1994. The birth rate for Black teens decreased from 104.5 births per 1,000 women in 1994 to 95.5 births per women in 1995. This rate dropped 17 percent from 1991 to 1995. Overall, the teen birth rate between 1994 and 1995 dropped 3 percent between the ages of 15 and 19 from 58.9 to 56.9 births per 1,000 women. This is the four consecutive year of decline in the teen rate." (Births in U.S. drop for fifth year; black teens lead the way.) Reasoning for the decrease in teenage pregnancies could be because birth control is being offered to teenagers without parental consent.

Because most teenage pregnancies are outside of marriage, they are looked down upon. The teenage mother will be considered an outcast among peers. Teen mothers will have to deal with the challenges that come with single parenting, including low-income status, a much greater challenge on time, and the attention that the growing baby needs.

The laws are very decent when it come to adolescent parents. Once a teenager becomes pregnant, she has some of the same rights as an adult who is pregnant. She cannot be forced to have an abortion by her parents. Although she is becoming a mother, that doesn't automatically make her capable of becoming emancipated. She is, however, given the right to raise her baby and make the right decisions for the baby. The law also makes it so that she cannot be discriminated against while still going for her education. She is allowed to continue her studies and participate in any extracurricular activities. Although she is allowed to do this, if there is harm to herself or her unborn child, she cannot continue until after the baby is born. As a mother-to-be, she has the right to seek prenatal care without the help of someone else.

One of the options that an adolescent mother-to-be has is an abortion. For an adolescent to have an abortion depends on what state she lives in and what her age is. Different sates have different laws when it comes to adolescent abortions; if they are under the state's age they while need consent by a parent or guardian to have the procedure down. Eight states including Alaska, Arkansas, Hawaii, Maryland, Michigan, New Jersey, New Mexico and North Dakota the legal age for an adolescent to have an abortion is ten years old. As for the legal age for an adolescent to have an abortion at the age of twelve there are fifteen states including Arizona, California, Colorado, Florida, Idaho, Kentucky, Massachusetts, New Hampshire, North Carolina, Ohio, Oklahoma, Pennsylvania, South Dakota, Utah, and West Virginia. As for the legal age for an adolescent to have an abortion at the age of fourteen there are twenty-three states including Alabama, Connecticut, Delaware, Georgia, Illinois, Indiana, Iowa, Kansas, Maine, Minnesota, Mississippi, Missouri, Nebraska, Nevada, New York, Oregon, Rhode Island, Tennessee, Texas, Virginia, Washington, Wisconsin, Wyoming, and also includes the District of Columbia. Out of the fifty states only four of them have the age consent are not specified, those states are Louisiana, Montana, South Carolina, and Vermont. Although these ages consent law is there, if an adolescent feels as if getting the parent consent will cause harm to her, she is allowed to petition the court to be able to get the abortion without consent.

Although an adolescent has the right to have an abortion, she will not realize all the emotional pain that comes with the abortion. It will take her years to forgive herself for having the abortion. I know someone who had an abortion when she was fifteen years old, now at twenty-eight years old she still has to see a counselor about the abortion. She told me that she couldn't forgive herself for killing her child.

An adolescent may have many different reasons on why she would choose to have an abortion. She is not ready to be a parent. She feels that she is too young and immature to have a child right now. Her parents or partner wants her to have an abortion. She was a survivor of rape or incest. Although these are some of the reasons that an adolescent may choose to have an abortion, there are still many different reasons. When an adolescent goes to receive an abortion, she has the choice of going under sedation to have the procedure done.

Another choice that an adolescent can make is to carry the baby full term and then give the baby up for adoption. There are two different types of adoption that she can choose from: an open adoption and a closed adoption. An open adoption allows the birth mother to still have a part in the child's life. Although she is a part of the child's life, she cannot make decision on what happens in the child's life. A closed adoption means that the birth mother is not allowed to have contact with the child. When the child turns eighteen he or she can search for his or her birth mother, but until then, no contact can be made between the child and the birth mother.

As stated in the book Adoption, "Although greater openness in adoption has been a positive development, openness generates a number of difficult practical, ethical, and legal concerns. Legal concerns include whether courts must enforce open adoption agreements and whether authorities should unseal adoption records. Practical concerns include whether adoption agencies can effectively mediate potential conflicts between communicating birth and adoptive families. Ethical concerns include the limits of birth parents' responsibilities to provide information about their health, genes, and families to adoptive families. On ethnical concern goes straight to the heart of the very idea of post-placement open adoption arrangements in domestic adoptions: whether adoptive parents are ethically bound significantly to include birth parents in their lives, after an otherwise successful placement and termination of birth parents' legal rights." (Williams 174)

Foster care is an option for an adolescent but it is not recommended because it can be harmful to the infant. It is not a lifestyle that any child should have to go through, being bounced from one family