Teen Talk with Collins Hekson It’s an undeniable fact: more and more teens are having early and unprotected sex, which we all know leads to teenage pregnancy. It happens so often nowadays, it’s almost as if it’s fashionable!
Most teens do not plan to get pregnant, but many do – and the consequences are serious. Aside from the cost of raising a child, teenage pregnancies also carry extra health risks to the mother and the baby. Often, teenagers don’t receive timely prenatal treatment.
Let me paint a picture for you. You’re a young girl, about 15 years of age. You’ve being with a guy for a year and decide that you’re ready to have sex. The odds are that neither of you have any experience, and most research shows that a sexually active teenager who doesn’t use contraception has a 90 per cent chance of pregnancy within one year.
So you go through with it, and afterwards you think you might be pregnant. But who can you turn to for advice? Not your parents, you think: your mother would be disappointed and your father would disown you.
It might seem like just a story, but it’s the reality for many pregnant teens, who feel they only have two options: an abortion, which is illegal in Ireland, or keeping the baby and placing your future on hold.
It seems our leaders don’t know how to deal with the rapidly increasing problem either. A multi-million pound initiative in the UK to reduce teenage pregnancies more than doubled the number of girls conceiving, according to the Daily Mail.
Many British teens in this predicament turn to abortion as the solution. At first it sounds like the best option, but no one really tells you what happens, or how you might feel afterwards. Teenage abortion also carries many risks, with studies pointing to an increased risk of cancer and other diseases. And none of this is to mention the emotional effects.
Whether you choose to keep your baby, put it up for adoption or have an abortion, your hormones run crazy when you are pregnant. And as you feel the life inside you start to grow, you will become attached to it, or perhaps even angry at it. But this life is exactly that – he or she is alive, and it is a part of you.
Collins Hekson is a secondary school student on work experience with Metro Éireann
