Exam notes

Teenage Pregnancy

Discussing cultural issues involving teenage pregnancy, potential stigma

Wide determinants of health
Cause for comparative policy research
Forefront for evidence-based policy making
Better strategies for policy making
Issues:
Countries may not have full data sets
Various factors (eg. Pregnancies within marriage)
Abortion data varies greatly amongst countries
Large countries have considerable variations
Lack of understanding within a countrys social and cultural
contexts
Change in interpretations of family over the past decades:
Higher divorce rates
Lower marriage rates
A growth in non-marital cohabitation
More births outside of wedlock
An increase in the number of lone parent families
More mothers in employment
Increase in teenage sexual activity?
Similar levels of sexual activity across many European countries
Highest rates of teenage births occurred when no. of sexually active
teenagers was much lower than today.
European countries good sexual health promotion and life opportunities
for young people are key to their success
USA abstinence education
Stigma surrounding sexual images
Is the problem teenage sexual activity, teenage pregnancy or teenage
parenthood?
Public policies on adolescent pregnancyhave frequently mis-described
the problem and misled as to the solution Rhode (1993)
Increase the proportion of teenage parents in education, employment or
training to reduce their risk of long-term social exclusion.
Quick fix policy vs Tackling social disadvantage

Health inequalities
Systematic differences in health outcomes by:
Social class
Gender
Ethnicity
Race
Religion
Those in lower socio-economic groups (individual and area measures)
have poorer health outcomes for all-cause and disease specific conditions
(mortality and morbidity)

Why do health inequalities exist?

An artefact of the way in which health and social class/income is
measured largely discounted
Reverse causation (poor health leads to low income) largely
discounted
Behavioural/cultural explanations (incomplete explanation)
Income levels and distribution : Material deficits (George Davey
Smith, Lynch) and/or Psychosocial mechanisms (Wilkinson)?
Black Report 1980
Acheson Report 1998
Marmot Report 2010
Social inequalities are killing people on a grand scale