Biological Determinants and Influences Affecting Adolescent Pregnancy

The basic assumptions employed by professionals to define adolescent pregnancy give direction to research and authority to policy and interventions that form the services provided by the medical and helping professionals. Accordingly, because adolescent pregnancy is first of all a biological process, logically professional assumptions would start from a biological perspective. The biological reality is that adolescent girls and boys need sexual and reproductive health care and education designed to meet their needs given their physical and emotional development. The risk they face from genetic vulnerabilities and environmental exposures is too great to keep them ignorant about their sexual and reproductive development. One example of a service that is obvious from a biological perspective is based on data that show almost 1 in 8 girls reaches menarche while still in primary school. When designing programs to provide sexual and reproductive health information and health services for adolescent girls, if we first consider the biological variations in sexual development among primary school girls, we would provide them with the education and services girls need when reaching menarche. Yet, in many countries, adolescent sexuality and pregnancy are seen as a moral problem not as a biological process. Thus, in many countries and cultural groups, primary school girls are viewed as too young to receive sexual and reproductive services and, too often as a result, suffer from long-term adverse consequences. Adolescent pregnancy is a natural phenomenon that is biologically available to virtually all adolescent girls. This biological imperative means that essentially all adolescent girls have the potential to become pregnant. Because of this reality, there is a bona fide need to provide maternal health education and care in the most comprehensive way possible. From a biological perspective, the answer is to intervene medically and psychosocially to prevent a pregnancy from doing harm to the adolescent mother and her child. This includes providing services to address specific physical and psychosocial issues that are common among adolescent girls. Novelist Hilary Mantel A. L. Cherry (&) University of Oklahoma, Tulsa, OK, USA e-mail: [email protected]