Unprepared Pregnancy Situation
Unprepared pregnancy, or unintended pregnancy, is a term widely used in Thai, resulting from research studies in Thailand that found women who cannot continue their pregnancy often cite reasons of being unprepared to continue. In other countries, terms with similar meanings include Unwanted Pregnancy, Unplanned Pregnancy, or Unintended Pregnancy, all of which imply that the woman’s pregnancy is under unprepared circumstances.
There is no clear data on how many women in the world are unprepared for pregnancy. The decisions of women who are unprepared for pregnancy include both continuing the pregnancy and terminating it. In Thailand, data from the counseling center for unprepared pregnancy options and the AIDS and unprepared pregnancy hotline 1663 found that the majority of women with unprepared pregnancies, or about 70-90%, choose to terminate the pregnancy.
Currently, the international community is increasingly focusing on teenage pregnancies, as it has been found that many countries, including Thailand, have a continuously increasing rate of births among teenagers under 20 years old. This is based on data comparison from similar years and rankings compiled by the Bureau of Reproductive Health, Department of Health, Ministry of Public Health.
It was found that the country with the highest teenage birth rate is the Central African Republic at a rate of 229 per 1,000, while the country with the lowest is Singapore at a rate of 3.6 per 1,000. Most countries with high teenage birth rates are in Africa, followed by countries in South America and some countries in South Asia.
For Thailand, it was found that Thailand has a teenage birth rate of 46.7 per 1,000, which is below the global average, ranking 107th in the world, 15th in Asia, and 6th in Southeast Asia.
The interpretation of teenage pregnancy as a problem depends on the context of each country, with related factors including beliefs, culture, traditions, quality of life, social welfare, societal expectations of teenagers, and many other factors.
International health organizations, such as the World Health Organization, focus on the consequences of unsafe abortion, which leads to infections and deaths among women. The latest report from the World Health Organization in 2012 stated that unsafe abortions occurred in 22 million women, resulting in approximately 47,000 women’s deaths and 5 million disabilities per year. It was found that more than half of the unsafe abortions, or about 10.5 million, occurred in Asia, and about one-third occurred in South Asia. Between 2003 and 2008, the issue of unsafe abortion did not improve, remaining at a rate of 14 per 1,000 people.
References:
1. Bureau of Reproductive Health, Department of Health, Ministry of Public Health. (2014). “Teenage Pregnancy: Policy, Operational Guidelines, and Monitoring and Evaluation”.
2. WHO. (2012). Safe abortion: technical and policy guidance for health systems, second edition.
3. Asia Safe Abortion Partnership accessed from http://www.asap-asia.org