Caribbean needs to roll back adolescent pregnancies
–Deputy Chief Medical Officer
Guyana’s Deputy Chief Medical Officer (DCMO) Dr. Karen Gordon-Boyle has urged Caribbean countries to help roll back adolescent pregnancies through the exchange of knowledge, information sharing and adopting good practices.
“The social impact of unintended or early pregnancy is not limited to the frightened teen, but affects the parents, the trajectory for the child, and society as a whole,” Dr. Boyle was quoted as saying in a press release from the Ministry of Public Health (MoPH). Dr Boyle was at the time delivering the keynote address at Monday’s opening ceremony for the fourday Adolescent Health Orientation Programme for doctors and nurses of Region Four (Demerara/ Mahaica), at Cara Lodge, Georgetown.
According to the MoPH bulletin, Boyle’s regional call is echoed in a fiveyear regional strategic framework document to reduce adolescent pregnancy “by at least 20 percent” between 2015 and 2019. The blueprint which had been revealed in St. Lucia in 2015, rests on five key pillars: ensuring access by all adolescents to responsive sexual and reproductive health services, information and commodities and guaranteeing that all adolescents have “access to age appropriate comprehensive sexuality education (at least as of the age of 10) as included in the national school curricula…,”Boyle was quoted as saying.
The third pillar of the regional plan urges all Regional governments to implement social protection programmes to prevent “all forms of violence against adolescent girls and boys, especially the poorest and the marginalized,” the DCMO was quoted in the MoPH bulletin as saying. All governments in the English and Dutch-speaking Caribbean will be encouraged to adopt common legal standards about, “ages of marriage, consent, prosecution of perpetrators of sexual violence and access to social protection and sexual and reproductive health services,” Boyle was further quoted in the statement as saying.
According to the press bulletin, the final pillar addressed by Boyle calls for governments in the English, French and Dutch-speaking Caribbean to exchange knowledge, information and adopt good practices whilst tackling the social determinants of adolescent pregnancy.
The Public Health Ministry’s DCMO also provided statistical data on how the vulnerabilities of adolescent pregnancy affect the global female population, according to the media release. Information supplied included that 20 percent of the girls had had children by the age of 18, with the figures spiking in the world’s poorest regions, whilst the adolescent pregnancy rate in Guyana hovered between 20 and 22 percent.
Obstacles adolescent mothers and their babies faced included newborns with low birth weight, an increased rate for complications, pre-term labour, eclampsia and intrauterine growth restriction.
Poverty and lack of education are common root causes of teen pregnancies which demand a social contract from governments, the civil society and the religious institutions, the MoPH release stated. “Education is a major protective factor for early pregnancy- the more education a girl has the fewer pregnancies [are] recorded,” Boyle was quoted as saying.