One of the biggest, most controversial issues in
society today all around the world is Teenage Pregnancy. Many people have their
own perceptions on the issue whether they are against it, or whether they
support and accept the fact. Teen pregnancy is something that affects over one
million young teens. For some, these pregnancies are planned, but for most, they are unplanned. As a teenager, high school is where a lot of peer
pressures are surrounding them. Teens take risks, but sometimes those risks are
the worst choices they can make. Experimenting with alcohol is one of those “peer
pressures.” Drinking and the use of narcotics have a large impact on the judgment
of the teen before the pre-pregnancy state comes about and that is why underage
drinking has been blamed to be one of the major reasons for the increase in teenage
pregnancies over these past years.
The Office of Adolescent Health has stated that there were 29.4 births for every 1,000 adolescent females within ages 15-19, or 305,420 babies born to females in this age group in the year of 2012. Three in ten American teenage girls will get pregnant at least once before reaching age 20. That is at least 750,000 teen pregnancies that occur every year. Although
majority of people around the world look at teenage pregnancies as a negative
thing, with teenage pregnancies being such a controversial issue all around the
world, there is always going to be that group of people that also do accept and support teen pregnancies in our society. While the group
that is against teenage pregnancies is believing that underage drinking is the
major reason as to why the rate of teen pregnancies has increased, the other
group of people who support the issue have all the right to argue that underage
drinking is not the major cause of the increase. One may argue that because of
many various reasons. Research points out that the number of causes of teenage
pregnancies are still fairly debatable, so technically, one may not be granted
the right to blame the increase on just one thing in particular. In this case,
underage drinking. Aside from the increase in pregnancies being looked at as
the biggest problem in the world, research proves that the causes of such and
the giving birth process is NOT the only thing people around the world are
getting heated up about. It has been proven that abortions are actually a much
bigger deal. As stated in prolifeacrossamerica.org, abortions are legal
in America through all nine months of pregnancy. Over 1.3 million legal
abortions occur in America each year. The total number of abortions in the U.S.
from 1973-2011 was 54.5 million plus. Updated July 26, 2012, http://all.orgpointed out that according to
the Centers for Disease Control and Guttmacher Institute, there were 234
abortions per 1,000 live births, 1.2 million abortions per year, 3,288
abortions per day, 137 abortions per hour, nine abortions every four minutes,
and one abortion every 26 seconds.
However,
aside from that on a more positive
note, http://ncbi.nlm.nih.gov stated that
adolescent pregnancy and babies being born to adolescents have dropped since
reaching an all time high in 1990 due to the increased use of contraceptions
such as condoms. Teenage pregnancies are still now and always will be a big
concern in society, but a 2001 survey mentioned that over the past decade, the
number of sexually active teens has declined from 54 to 46 percent. Let's just
hope that it stays that way.
Those who may look at the issue the way that I do
would come out and state how they too feel that teen pregnancies is linked to
what is referred to today as "binge drinking" or very heavy drinking.
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