Many parents don’t think their teenagers are having sex, but statistics show, they are. Half of kids in high school are sexually active and almost half of them aren’t using condoms or protection.
"I thought the same thing. Oh, this one time, I'll be safe. And it just so happened that one time is all it took."
Kayla Wright got pregnant with her daughter, Adalia, when she was 17-years-old.
"When I found out I was pregnant, my whole life changed. Everything changed," Kayla shares. "I would rather sleep out on the streets than stay at home. I ended up sleeping in a garage."
Kayla’s childhood came to a screeching stop the second she found out she was having a baby. And she’s not alone. About 2,000 teens become pregnant every day in the United States.
May 5 is the annual National Day to Prevent Teen Pregnancy. Three out of ten girls will be pregnant by the time they’re 20-years-old. And people having unprotected sex regularly have an 85% chance of getting pregnant within one year.
"If I had to just tell all the teenage girls and the boys, just worry about school. Worry about getting through life without having to raise another child,” Kayla says with tears swelling her eyes. Bringing somebody else into the world that you already can't afford, it's not very fun."
Kayla got the help and love she needed at Hannah’s House in Mishawaka. Hannah’s House is a place that welcomes and nurtures pregnant women, mostly teens, who have nowhere else to go.
"A baby is for real. A baby is forever," explains Karen DeLucenay, from Hannah’s House. "If you have some goals in life, that you maybe want to do college, you want to someday be a mom later in life, just hold onto that and hold onto your own values. Be able to say that word, 'No' or 'I'm not ready now.' Because that's okay. That's okay to do."
Hannah’s House provides the young women with shelter, food and baby supplies. But they also learn responsibility and self-confidence.
"Teens are not really ready and prepared to know what it's going to be like to be a mom. Maybe they're excited that they're pregnant but they don't understand that it's going to take a lot of work. So we're here to help them with that," DeLucenay explains. "For the women we see, a lot of them are hoping for the daddy to be involved with their life and they're going to be a family and for a lot of these young women, they find that that's not going to happen. And that reality that he's not going to be there and they're not going to be a family, it hits real hard."
Pregnant girls in the South Bend Community School Corporation have the option of taking classes through the School Age Mothers Program. There, they take classes only with other pregnant students and get the special empathy and guidance they need.
"Along with academics, they need a lot of social support, a lot of empathy, a lot of understanding," explains Arlene Hall, School Age Mothers Program. "One of the things they need to remember is when they change their lives, they also change their parents' lives because that's there support mechanism.”
Teen pregnancies in St. Joseph County have actually gone down the last decade. In 2009, 280 teens gave birth compared to 335 in 2008, 342 in 2005 and 369 in 2000. Health officials contribute that to more awareness, education, birth control and the simple fact that people are talking more openly about sex and protection.
A resource parents and teens can use to talk about sex, pregnancy and protection is www.StayTeen.org.
By, Alana Greenfogel
WNDU.com
Subscribe to:
Post Comments (Atom)
No comments:
Post a Comment