20 Percent Of Pregnant Teens Already Have One Child – Obviously Need Better Birth Control
The CDC has a new report out this morning that will make all of you choke on your coffee: 20 percent of all pregnant teenagers already have one other kid. What state has the highest percentage of teenagers with multiple children? Texas. The lowest rate was in New Hampshire. I am not sure if it is the glamorization of teen moms, like the sort you see on those reality shows, or the fact that these kids are just too stupid to use birth control. From Yahoo.com:
Of the 365,000 births to U.S. teens ages 15 to 19 in 2010, about 67,000, or 18 percent, were repeat births, the report says.
I was 24 when I had my first kid and in many ways, I feel like I was even too young. Now that he is a teenager and a pretty awesome human I think it all worked out okay, but there were many times when he was tiny that I felt overwhelmed and I wished that I could do things other girls my age were doing, like urinate without a tiny little person sitting in an “exersaucer” watching me. I can’t imagine what it would be like to be an actual teenager, you know at the age where all you want to do is add lilac chalk highlights to your hair and talk on he phone with your friends.
I have so much sympathy for teen moms, especially because the majority of teen moms don’t have a partner to share the work of raising a child and are, you know, still children themselves. I know a lot of teen moms work their asses off to graduate high school and be the best mom they can be but one child is more than enough for most moms to handle without support, especially when the maturity level and patience of a teenager is factored in. And I find it very hard to believe that most of these additional pregnancies are planned.
The IUD is the most effective form of birth control, other than that boring old abstinence method that no one wants to use, but only 20 percent of sexually active teen moms have one. I’m not sure why this is, because before I had my hysterectomy I had an IUD and I loved it to pieces. At the beginning it made my periods more crampy and a bit heavier than normal, but as a method of birth control it truly rocked. Maybe IUD’s need a makeover to make them more teen friendly and attractive to younger users. They are actually sort of cool looking devices, sort of like jewelry, but for your uterus! Now they just need to make them in fashion colors and make them a status symbol amongst teenagers who already have a kid. Yes, teens will still have to use a condom to protect them from sexually transmitted diseases but a condom coupled with an IUD would be some pretty fail-safe birth control. Now we just need a celebrity endorsement from someone like Justin Bieber!
(Image: Monkey Business Images/shutterstock)
