Teen Pregnancy Prevention

QUESTION: Teen pregnancy prevention – How can I prevent pregnancy?

ANSWER:

There are many ways to prevent teenage pregnancies. Popular solutions include discussions of “safe sex” practices.

In addition to condoms, doctors can prescribe birth control pills that regulate the fertility of a woman’s eggs, or advise the use of other pregnancy prevention tools, like intra-uterine devices or spermicides. These options are not 100% effective. There is even the option of abortion, which terminates the pregnancy at the proven cost of a life and a lifetime of emotional scars.

Medicine has developed a pill named RU486, the morning after solution to a sexual encounter.

For teenagers, however, the option of a doctor’s prescription requires parental consent. Most teenagers do not want their parents to know of their sexual activity.

Media often promotes sexuality to children and teens before they are capable of making mature decisions about a pregnancy, or before they clearly understand the consequences of raising a child. They are under a lot of pressure to experience sex outside the boundaries set by God.

Sex creates an emotional bond between two people that does not end with the culmination of the act. Teenagers who experience sexual activity, while they may believe they are old enough to handle it, are rarely emotionally, spiritually, or psychologically prepared for the consequences of sex, which physically and emotionally joins two people together into one.

When a pregnancy results from sex, the couple has then been joined together for the rest of their lives, with or without marriage. No matter what choice they make regarding the pregnancy, the consequences of sex do not go away.

The best advice for avoiding teenage pregnancy is to abstain from sex completely before marriage. Abstinence is the only 100% certain prevention for:

• Sexually transmitted diseases
• Undesired lifetime ties to others
• Unwanted pregnancy

Many teenage pregnancies are terminated by abortion. Does this choice alleviate the feelings of responsibility for your actions? That might happen short-term, but they’ll never go away entirely. Those who choose abortion often find themselves haunted by the words, “if only…”