Factors Contributing the Unplanned Pregnancy Among College Students

Being a mother is the most important and challenging role for a woman. A woman should be financially and emotionally ready to get pregnant, give birth, and raise her child. However, at present there are many risks of unwanted pregnancy among young female university students, as the majority of today’s university students have prematurely engaged in sexual intercourse. Consequently, without preparation, some of them face with unwanted pregnancy while studying.

Unwanted pregnancy among university students can cause many serious problems which can affect the body, mind, and social status of female university students who are not yet ready to be a mother.

Unwanted pregnancy sometimes forces university female students to face a tragic or dead end in their lives. They are nervous as they can’t solve the problem and their parents may not accept this. Some female students may finally seek illegal abortion which can cause their lives.

Even though they do not terminate their pregnancy, some of them are too young to give birth and they may have problems of miscarriages or great pains and difficulties when giving birth.

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These can affect the health of both the mothers and their children. Pregnant university students in some way are directly or indirectly forced to quite their studies to stay at home until they give birth. These unprepared young mothers often inevitably encounter financial problems.

Stress and worries can harm their mentality. Many of them lack knowledge to deal with the problem and don’t know how to take care of their children.

The problem can be two-folded. Typically, young people aged 10-20 years are not ready to become parents. Both financial stability and emotional maturity are the problem for parenting or caring responsibilities. Getting back into the education system is very difficult. University female students have to worry about losing the educational opportunities.

They have to quit university to escape the pressures of society while university male students can still go to university regularly. Therefore, women are responsible for the problem unilaterally and live in society difficulty. Unwanted pregnancy among university students is caused by sexual intercourse which is they will be pregnant while they are not ready in all aspects. So, they should realize that unwanted pregnancy can cause many serious problems. Despite modern methods of family planning, and idespread information about how to use it, unplanned pregnancy is one of the most common medical problems faced by sexually active women under 45.

Abortion, the most usual solution to the problem of unplanned pregnancy, is the most common operation among women in the fertile age range. It is impossible to calculate precisely just how many pregnancies each year are accidental. When medical sociologist, Anne Fleissig, asked a number of women who had given birth six weeks previously about whether their pregnancy was planned, she found that 31 percent of them were not.

She concluded in a paper subsequently published in the British Medical Journal that almost a third of births could be the consequence of accidental pregnancies. If this were the case it would mean 310 000 accidental pregnancies in Britain every year. In fact, this is likely to be a conservative estimate. Because Anne Fleissig conducted her research into the circumstances in which women's new babies were conceived, her sample did not include women who had conceived but ended the pregnancy by an abortion.

When these unplanned pregnancies are considered as well, it suggests the real extent of accidental pregnancy is even higher than, perhaps as high as 50 per cent of all conceptions. According to the Olaitan Olukunmi Lanre, 2011, Research Journal of Medical Sciences, 5: 336-339, the findings were that unprotected sexual intercourse and poor parental care are the causes of unwanted pregnancy while termination of educational programme and medical complications for both the mothers and children are the effects of unwanted pregnancy.

Abstinence and adequate teaching of sex education have been seen as measures to prevent unwanted pregnancy among the adolescents. It was recommended among others that sex education should taught as a subject at the secondary level and government should enact laws to compel parents to take proper care of their children to avoid all forms of immorality among the adolescents.