Essay on Teen pregnancy

Teenage pregnancy is one of the leading crises in our country today. Even though, the decision to be sexually active is personal, there are various factors that encourage sexual activity within teenagers. My focus on this week’s assignment is to review a scholarly article and explain how it can contribute to the promotion of adolescent health. Teenage pregnancy is a major problem for all the people involved and many teenagers today are not aware of the responsibility it takes to raise a child. Teenage pregnancy can negatively impact the physical, emotional, social and financial well-being of a teenager's life as well as society. It does not only add strains to parent's life, but also forces a teenager to become an adult fairly quickly. Teenagers who are having children between the ages of 14 to 19 are not fully experiencing their childhood. Therefore, promoting teen pregnancy prevention is necessary and essential to our society.

The scholarly articles I have chosen for this assignment is title “It drives us to do it”: pregnant adolescents identify drivers for sexual risk by King Jones. The article focuses on risk factors that lead to sexual activity in teens. The case study focuses on teen factors that lead to adolescent sexual activity. The article provides information on external and internal factors that affect sexual decision making in adolescents. The article states that “According to the Centers for Disease Control (CDC, 2009), adolescent sexual risk-taking behaviors are a significant public health crisis” (King 1).The quote validates my statement on the importance of preventing teen pregnancy. The article provides environmental, personal, and cognitive factors that encourage certain behaviors in teenagers. Environmental or external factors influence teenagers to engage in sexual activity based on external encouragement. External factors include education, media, and pressure from peers and partners. Personal factors are internal factors that include interest, conformity, and parent role modeling in sexual behavior. Based on the data provide on page 88 of the article an internal factor would be “people {doing it} just to see how It feels, you know out of curiosity.” (King88). Internal factors are factors that relate to the individual's behavior and personal factors, without any direct external pressure. The need to fit in with others contributes to risky sexual activity in order to gain acceptance from a group of people, fitting in relates to the internal category of factors. In the other hand, external factors relate to the pressure from peers, partners and the media. For example, a 15-year-old participated stated “I felt like I wasn’t thinking at the time, I really didn’t want to do it at that Time, but it seemed like at that moment and it seem like he was pushing me more into it even though I didn’t want to” (King 91). The quote demonstrates that teenagers give in based on consistent external pressure. Overall, the article provides abundant illustrations based on participant’s stories and personal experiences.

The scholarly article will help me tremendously on my health promotion project. I believe it has provided me with the knowledge to educate the class on the different factors that contribute to adolescent decision making. It can also serve as a great reference for health promotion education and to prevent sexual activity that leads not only to unplanned pregnancies, but STD as well. My main role in the project is to educate the class on risk factors using examples as well as direct quotations from the article. The article does an exceptional job at describing the personal

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