Susan
L. Davies, Ph.D., of the University of Alabama at Birmingham’s
School of Public Health and colleagues, questioned 455 low-income, African-American
adolescent girls in Birmingham, Ala., aged 14-18 between 1996 and 1999,
and found that nearly a quarter (23.6 percent) expressed some desire
to become pregnant in the near future.
“Adolescent pregnancy research has predominantly focused on factors
associated with pregnancy occurrence and overlooked the possibility that
pregnancy is a desired outcome for some adolescents,” Davies says.
Instead, she adds, successful pregnancy prevention programs need to discern
between factors that contribute to intentional versus accidental pregnancies
among teen girls.
In their research, published in the August 2004 issue
of Health Education & Behavior,
Davies and her team tried to identify some of those factors. Self-administered
questionnaires asked participants about their desire to be pregnant,
their relationships with males and their birth control use.
The most striking data revealed that adolescent girls with at least some
desire to be pregnant were three-and-a-half times more likely to have a
boyfriend or partner at least five years older, were more than twice as
likely to have had sex with a casual partner in the six months prior to
the survey and also more than twice as likely to have used condoms inconsistently
in the prior month.
While the researchers say the likelihood of a significantly older partner
was surprising, the frequency of girls with a desire to be pregnant having
casual sexual partners was more telling.
“These findings suggest that the perceived role of the male partner
in parenthood, other than to assist with conception, may be minimal from
the adolescent girl’s perspective,” Davies says.
Considering that adolescent girls who want to be pregnant
behave in ways that will help them meet their goal, researchers say,
public health practitioners
and policy makers will need to address this particular population with
a tailored campaign. Some suggestions the researchers make include education
to help this population understand the realities of motherhood, amending
health education programs that assume adolescents regard pregnancy as
negatively as they view HIV and other STDs, and increasing public recognition
that
adolescent childbearing is “a symptom of larger social and economic
predicaments.”
The study was supported by a grant from the Center for Mental Health Research
on AIDS, National Institute of Mental Health.
