Young pregnancy can radically change adolescents’ life. All the demands of parenthood are a shock for adolescents that depend on their parents; many girls who live with their parents get pregnant between the ages of fifteen and nineteen years old. Those girls deal with many medical risks like preeclampsia, preterm labor, and severe anemia. Furthermore, adolescent parents face problems regarding the social environment. For example, they face social discrimination while they discover how to develop their roles as parents; adolescent parents can also suffer depression anxiety, stress, family problems, and serious emotional disorders. For teenagers, having an early pregnancy represents huge changes that can have several effects in their lives.
First, adolescents’ social life is affected as they are not ready to face the consequences of young pregnancy, for example, shortage of money, their parents’ refusal, and their boyfriend’s abandon. Besides, a pregnant adolescent is rejected by both her family group and social system; these rejections can cause psychological instability in the pregnant girl by increasing the feeling of guilt for getting pregnant at an early age. Also, thank to guilt they get, they tend to leave their future goals by knowing they have new responsibilities linked to the baby. However, the majority of pregnant adolescents show irresponsible motherhood since they are not prepared to develop their role as mothers, so the younger the parents, the more challenges they may find in parenthood. Therefore, young pregnancy can make adolescents’ social life a hell.
Second, teenagers will show a poor performance as mother when giving birth. Adolescents face the big conflict of abandoning typical behaviors of teenagers to start thinking as mothers; it increases the possibilities of being an irresponsible mother. Likewise, the consequences of being a teen mother are fatal for the baby since the main function of a parent is to provide the baby all the physical tools to face the world. A mother must have enough security and love to have a baby, but teenagers do not have those qualities so that it will be impossible to provide security to their babies. Those aspects can provoke postpartum depression which makes teenagers to go to psychotherapy to avoid depression and anxiety. As a result, teenagers will not feel as doing their best during parenthood.
Third, adolescents may look for different solutions for their problems; unfortunately, the majority of young women seek abortion as the quickest and easiest solution for young pregnancy. Teenagers do not know that abortion is never a good experience for any girl; pregnant girls think that they can have abortion as the best pill to avoid the social problems an early pregnancy represents. However, abortion generates as many psychological problems as having a baby does. Some pregnant adolescents decide to have illegal abortion to eliminate what they consider is a problem; teenagers can live with insomnia, weight loss, exhaustion, and nervousness for the rest of their lives thank to the abortion they decided to have. Since young women do not want to have a baby in such a young age, they will probably see abortion as a solution.
To sum up, premature pregnancy creates changes in the life of adolescents. Those changes appear in sociocultural, psychological, and economic contexts. Also, pregnant teens are forced to drop out of school which means they will have a little or no education generating fewer skills and opportunities to find a job. Equally, social discrimination affects pregnant adolescents by provoking sadness and depression. On the other hand, younger bodies are not developed to go through the process of pregnancy without consequences as having higher risks of obstructed labor. Overall, the premature pregnancy can create several changes in teenagers’ lives.
