Teenage Pregnancy

Teenage pregnancy can be defined as pregnancy of women who have not reached twenty years when the pregnancy ends regardless of the marital status. In South Africa one in three girls has had a pregnancy before the age of twenty. The community at large is aware of the problem of teenage pregnancy. Young women in our communities are falling pregnant while still at school, which limits their ability to achieve their long awaited goals in life. It also puts them at high risk of being infected with HIV because they are having unprotected sex. In the Eastern Cape, HIV prevalence is higher among school aged youth than adults and the province has the highest teenage pregnancy rate in the country. Causes such as social pressure, child support grant and lack of education to name a few, have been the major causes of teenage pregnancies. However there need to be solutions in order to reduce these high rates of teenage pregnancies. This essay is going to explore the causes of teenage pregnancies in East London and also the solution to this problem.
Social Pressures are the combined pressures that surround one during everyday life such as Peer Pressure, Academic Pressures and Socioeconomic Pressure. Poverty is associated with increased rates of teenage pregnancy. Peer pressure usually arises from friends at school who influence each other in gang activities such as smoking or drinking alcohol outside school. One would think that he or she has complete control over these pressures but when a situation arise your ideas may not be as clear as they are at another time. Social Pressures and self affirmation can be confusing and stressful as they often prevented young women from using contraception. Girls felt they would only be accepted as women once they had proved their fertility - many mothers wanted their teenage daughters to become pregnant so they could have a baby at home again," according to one teenage who faced the situation two years ago.
Drugs and alcohol abuse have