Legal and ethical issues in teenage pregnancy prevention

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.

Gather Data

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 should she have the full right to exercise independent decisions regarding her own health and biophysical body.

Another major issue is if a teenager becomes pregnant and decides on her own that she wants to have an abortion and not have her parents know. For healthcare providers, they need to employ the following key strategies: they must immediately assess if the child is competent or at least partially competent (Allmark, 2002). They have to determine that the child is also not being abused, and engage in any necessary advocacy for the child if that is the case (Allmark, 2002).

Implement the Strategy

Implementing the strategy was difficult and depended on firm communication. It was a struggle and its success was largely based on a case by case basis, depending on how open and communicative the parents were.

Evaluate Outcomes

The dilemma can be resolved if all parties wake up and accept the fact that teenagers have an evolving right to control their bodies and the destinations that their bodies take. Recently a 16-year-old girl sued her parents because they opposed her from having her baby: "Privacy rights in the U.S. give all women the right to terminate their pregnancies. It was successfully argued that the same laws allow women to choose to keep their baby. Teenagers have evolving rights to determine their own medical care" (Goldbas, 2013).