TEENAGE PREGNANCY

Practicing safer sex may reduce the amount of early teenage pregnancy rates in America



Table of Contents

Introduction3

Rationale4

Objectives5

Hypothesis6

Literature Review6

Research Methods9

Research Design10

Literature Design11

Participants11

Informed Consent12

Confidentiality Measures12

Data Analysis12

Results13

References14

Practicing safer sex may reduce the amount of early teenage pregnancy rates in America

Introduction

Teenage pregnancy has become a pressing issue in the western countries especially in U.K. and U.S. Biological determinists explain the differences between men and women according to the differences in their reproductive systems. According to the male-dominated world of science, the organs and functions of motherhood biologically handicap women. This handicap is said to go back to the animal world and makes females helpless and dependent upon the superior m le sex to provide for them and their young (Reed 1971: 7). While Reed (1971) recognizes the obvious biological differences between men and women, she finds no justification for the oppression of women in nature or in the study of primitive, classless societies. Engels (1884) also states that, in nature, females suffer no disability compared to males, but that it was with the rise of patriarchal class-based society and the development of the family as a social and economic institution, that the biological make-up of women became the ideological pretext for keeping them in servile status. Women's absence from the workforce or in education less then reinforced the notion that women were intellectually inferior due to their 'reproductive specialization' (Ussher 1989: 3).

Those women who challenged the narrow role prescribed to them were pathologies by medical men as hysterical. Thus, women who rebelled could be defined as sick and subjected to a range of treatments including cliterodectomy, as Victorian doctors attributed distress to biological factors rather than addressing the socio-political conditions underlying their behavior. These nineteenth-century biological ideas may seem out of date, but women's bodies are still used to define and confine women today. The male domination of science and medicine has led to a tendency to view the natural processes of the female body as pathological (Lee 1998). Science reduces women to a product of their hormones and thus infers that women are less able than men to act rationally and are inherently unpredictable, so controlling their life chances (Lee 1998). Pre-menstrual syndrome, postnatal depression and the menopause are perceived as problematic outcomes of normal physiological processes. Rates of psychological distress are low both during and after the menopause and, where distress arises; it is better explained by social and familial stress than by hormonal changes (Lee 1998). Within the medical model, childbirth is viewed as a hazardous process only normal in retrospect. Women's bodies are viewed with the same paternalistic stereotypes that have controlled women for centuries - unpredictable, frail and irrational (Bones 2005).

Rationale

Doctors, midwives and women become convinced that altering natural processes makes them more predictable, more controllable and therefore safer (Davis-Floyd 2001). Women, it seems, are not even in control of their own 'reproductive specialization'. Healthcare policy is in accord with the social expectations of the female gender role and subscribes to the restrictive social myths about ...