Teenage pregnancy decreasing in Baguio

ABOUT 10 percent of the total live birth registered in Baguio City comes from teenage pregnancy, according to Local Civil Registry.

Assistant City Civil Registrar Bernardina Tabin said out of the 4,192 live births registered as of May this year, 353 or 9.14 percent of which came from teenage pregnancy, not far lower than last year where out of the 9,867 annual live births registered, 966 or 9.79 percent came from teenage mothers.

“The percentage of teenage pregnancies is stable over the total number of live births,” Tabin said.

Dr. Maria Alice Torres, Maternal and Neonatal Child Health and Nutrition Head from the City Health Office added as of May this year, there are about 320 teenage pregnancies coming from women ages 1519 years old and three teenage pregnancies coming from women ages 10-14 years old.

Meanwhile, City Health Officer Dr. Rowena Galpo claimed the trend of teenage pregnancy in Cordillera is going down.

Galpo stated based from the previous statistics of Young Adult Fertility Survey (YAFS) done in 2012, the teenage pregnancy in CAR is 18 percent, which is the highest. However, over the course of six years, CAR is now the second to the last in terms of teenage pregnancy basing from the National Demographic Health Survey this year.

Galpo also explained the 9.14 percent teenage pregnancy does not necessarily come from the residents of Baguio City but also transients.

“With the present statistics, there is also a data from the Local

Civil Registry on teenage deliveries where 60 percent are resident of Baguio and 40 percent are transients that just gave birth here in the city. So, from the data, from those 60 percent teenage deliveries from Baguio, actually the trend is going down,” Galpo added.

Galpo added they have been doing preventive measures to even lessen the case of teenage pregnancy in the city.

“We have put our acts together. Our first ever policy is the creation of Adolescent and Youth Health Development Council composed of several partners. We also trained our health staffs on how to deal with these adolescents so that they will not be afraid to come in our centers. We are also providing adolescent reproductive health services in and of course we are promoting abstinence,” Galpo added.