Well preconception care for adolescents is a huge challenge because most of the adolescents aren\u2019t planning their pregnancies. When we see teens for family planning in clinic we ask them, \u201cDo you want to be pregnant?\u201d And we get three different responses. One is they look horrified and they say, \u201cWhy would I want to be pregnant?\u201d \u2013 and we know they\u2019ll contracept effectively. And then the other group says, \u201cI want to be pregnant\u201d and we don\u2019t give them contraception. We actually give them preconception counselling and prescription for prenatal vitamins. And the third group says, \u201cWell I don\u2019t want to be pregnant but I don\u2019t mind if I do\u201d and that\u2019s the hardest group to capture because if they\u2019re not motivated to use contraception and they will get pregnant and we just don\u2019t know when. So that group we can\u2019t capture with preconception counselling. <\/p>\n\n\n\n
The preconception, when we can do it, we talk about reducing risky behaviours. We actually have a high percentage of our teens coming in pregnancy smoking and most of them are able to cut down and we have the kids that are engaged in recreational drug use and sometimes more serious drug use. So we can take that opportunity to educate them about the risks of all of those things. And a big issue for teens is actually weight. Pregnancies are much healthier if you\u2019re at an ideal body weight and we have seen a rising number of obese teenagers and we shamelessly take advantage of that opportunity to get them to lose some weight and lead a healthier lifestyle.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
So if we could do preconception counselling we would include the folic acid and the behavioural changes and try and give them a solid idea of the challenges they\u2019d be facing and work on getting to a healthy body weight and good health status before they get pregnant. But we don\u2019t get very many opportunities to do that.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
Well preconception care for adolescents is a huge challenge because most of the adolescents aren\u2019t planning their pregnancies. When we see teens for family planning in clinic we ask them, \u201cDo you want to be pregnant?\u201d And we get three different responses. One is they look horrified and they say, \u201cWhy would I want to […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":39,"featured_media":0,"parent":0,"menu_order":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","template":"template-text-only.php","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":""},"class_list":["post-5409","page","type-page","status-publish","hentry"],"acf":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/content.scienceofecd.com\/transcript\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/pages\/5409","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/content.scienceofecd.com\/transcript\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/pages"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/content.scienceofecd.com\/transcript\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/page"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/content.scienceofecd.com\/transcript\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/39"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/content.scienceofecd.com\/transcript\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=5409"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/content.scienceofecd.com\/transcript\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/pages\/5409\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":5410,"href":"https:\/\/content.scienceofecd.com\/transcript\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/pages\/5409\/revisions\/5410"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/content.scienceofecd.com\/transcript\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=5409"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}