Angel (not her real name), just turned 17 but she already has a one-year, four-month- old baby girl. She got pregnant by her first boyfriend when she was 15 years old. Angel started school late at nine years old, and stopped after sometime so she was not able to finish her elementary education.
Angel comes from a poor family. She is fifth of seven siblings. Her mother passed on when she was just a girl and the father was violent to his children which caused Angel and a brother to leave home. That was the time that she met her boyfriend through friends. They first had sex 12 weeks into the relationship in the house of her boyfriend’s family.
Angel does not have a job. Her boyfriend is 23 years old and works as an on-and-off garbage collector earning, on the average, P5,000 a month. They use this for everything they need including the P1,000 monthly rental for a small room they call home.
Angel said life is hard so she only wants to have two children. She uses contraceptive pills from the Barangay Health Center to avoid getting pregnant. She still sees her friends who are now in their last years of high school and wistfully says that she wants to go back to school.
Angel is one of the teenage mothers we interviewed about teen pregnancy. Her story is not much different from the others. These girls come from poor families and became sexually active at a young age. They did not undergo sexuality and reproductive health education and had no information on contraception. All the girls had to stop going to school to face the responsibilities of motherhood.
In the Philippines, around 24 babies are born to teen mothers every hour, or 566 babies per day. We have one of the highest teen pregnancy rates in the world. According to the 2017 NDHS, 9 percent of Filipino girls aged 15 to 19 have already begun childbearing. The highest rates are in Mindanao where rates in three regions range from 15 percent to 18 percent.
Data from the same survey also say that more girls in rural areas (10.1 percent) get pregnant than those in urban communities (6.8 percent); much fewer rich girls get pregnant (3 percent) compared with their poorest counterparts (15 percent); and more girls with only elementary education begin childbearing (32 percent) than those with college education (4 percent). The conclusion is that poor, uneducated girls especially in rural communities are the ones getting pregnant.
Sadly, however, the highest unmet need for family planning is among the 15 to 19 year olds at 37.5 percent. Thus, it is common to see repeat teen pregnancy in poor communities. In providing modern family planning education and services to poor communities, we see a lot of teen mothers with more than one child.
The Commission on Population and Development also said that an estimated 2,000 girls aged 10 to 14 have gotten pregnant in 2017. This age group is not included in the NDHS because the survey focuses on women of reproductive age pegged at 15 to 49 years old. However, PopCom’s statement is consistent with information given to my own organization from different provinces about pregnancy among girls in this age group. Can you imagine girls this young getting pregnant and giving birth?
According to Secretary Ernesto Pernia, teen pregnancy is now a national social emergency and it urgently needs addressing as this affects not only the girls and their families but the society as a whole. It breeds intergenerational poverty because it is more difficult for poor families to break the cycle of poverty when girls get pregnant and stop schooling.
To illustrate this, DepEd Secretary Liling Briones in an HOR Budget hearing said that from the 2017 PSA Annual Poverty Indicator Survey, school dropouts reached more than 2.97 million and 61.9 percent of those who dropped out were girls aged between 16 to 24. Of this figure, 57 percent were forced to stop schooling due to “family matters” and the biggest components of this were teenage pregnancy and early marriage. “Family matters” was the top reason for dropping out followed by financial concerns cited by 14.3 percent of female dropouts.
Employment and livelihood opportunities become very limited for those who get little formal education. It is estimated that between P24 billion to P42 billion women’s lifetime earnings are lost to teen pregnancy.
Moreover, since teen pregnancy is high-risk owing to the fact that the girls’ bodies are not yet mature enough to handle pregnancy and childbirth, the possibility of pregnancy and childbirth-related complications is very real. When these happen especially to poor girls, the State should be ready to address their needs to save their health and lives using public funds.
Indeed, teen pregnancy is a national social emergency. All efforts must be exerted to prevent more girls from getting pregnant, and for those who have already given birth, prevent repeat teen pregnancy.
For now, two crucial things must be done: provide sexuality and RH education to our young people in and out of school, and give them access to contraception and family planning services.
The DepEd is mandated by law to provide RH education in the formal and non-formal educational systems but it has been too slow in fulfilling its responsibilities. The law was passed in 2012 yet DepEd has yet to fully implement the provisions on RH education. The Department of Health must strengthen its Adolescent Reproductive Health program and reach young people as well as their parents, in the provision of modern family planning program for the youth.
The other important thing to do is to immediately pass the Teen Pregnancy Prevention bill now in both Houses of Congress so a comprehensive program to arrest the problem is implemented. Here, President Duterte (who, according to some Cabinet Secretaries is keenly aware of the problem) can play a major part by certifying the bill as a priority measure. This will assure passage of this important bill.
Angel, the girl in my story, still dreams of a good life for her family. She does not want to get pregnant again soon. She wants to go back to school because according to her, she does not want her baby to experience the hardships she now experiences.
There are hundreds of thousands, perhaps even millions of Angels in our midst. Nearly 600 of them are added each day. Teen pregnancy is a national social emergency that must be urgently address if we want our girls to have healthy and productive lives. Their quality of life will have an impact on their families, now and in the future.
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