Teenage Pregnancy: Concerns Term Paper

Teen Pregnancies

Young women who become pregnant will be in a vulnerable position regarding the completion of their education and in realizing all of their goals. Women who become teen mothers are less likely to finish high school, less likely to go on to college, and extremely less likely to earn even a middle class salary. Becoming pregnant as a teenager is a situation that needs to be avoided at all costs. However, there are a host of legal and ethical issues which are directly connected to teen pregnancies which this paper will address. The desired goal of the issue of teen pregnancies as it manifests in society today is to find an adequate and effective means of combating it, without sacrificing any of the moral and ethical needs of any involved parties.

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The legal issues tend to abound from the issue, entangling it and obfuscating a more definitive method of treatment: "Legal issues which arise include those relating to the human rights of the teenager, consent to treatment and the determination of competence, confidentiality, rights of the parents vis a vis the teenager" (Dimond, 2002). Thus, as an autonomous individual, the teenager no doubt has rights over her own biophysical safety and well-being: the teenager has every right to determine what direction her life is headed in and what decisions need to be made. At the same time, another difficult issues revolves around the fact that in most cases, the teenager is not viewed as an informed adult, able to make her own decisions about her fate, the fate of her child or any options regarding birth control. It can be a difficult topic indeed.

In the UK, the nation which has the highest rate of teen pregnancies in Europe, there's a trend which suggests that prevention of teen pregnancies would be most effective if done with parental knowledge (Hand, 2009). As Hand is able to readily admit, the standards of parenting generally vary, as do the quality of teenage-parent relationships in various households. It would be unrealistic to expect that all daughter would feel comfortable and safe discussing methods of contraception with their parents: it would be unrealistic to make this an expectation in connection with preventing teen pregnancies. Furthermore, even teenagers who do have healthy relationships with their parents, still might want to exercise their pregnancy and autonomy when it comes to selecting a form of birth control.

What makes this an ethical dilemma is that some states and some citizens would argue that when a teenager is still not a legal adult, she should not have full confidentiality about her health decisions, nor…