To support an adolescent facing an unexpected pregnancy, what they need most initially is nonjudgmental support. You don\u2019t need somebody to say, \u201cWhy didn\u2019t you take your pills?\u201d or \u201cThat was stupid.\u201d or \u201cWhy do you want to have a baby now?\u201d You need someone to listen and help them think through where they want to be and what they want to do. There\u2019s always three choices for any adolescent pregnancy: either having an abortion, or staying pregnant and parenting, or staying pregnant and relinquishing and every one of those choices is tough and we always encourage the teen to make the choice that feels best for her inside her, not what feels best for all of the people around her.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
And what we\u2019ve found from experience is they will do well with their own choice and they will do very poorly if they\u2019ve been pressured into making a choice that they did not want. So initially what they really need from people that want to support them is a good listening ear, possibly some directed questioning to help them think out all of those paths and feel reasonably confident about what they want and that they\u2019re not being pressured.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
We\u2019ve seen kids that were pressured into staying pregnant becoming very depressed. And we\u2019ve seen kids that were pressured into having abortions becoming very depressed and even suicidal. So you have to support them in what they feel is going to be best. And it\u2019s hard for people to do that sometimes but that\u2019s the only thing that works well for the teenager.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
To support an adolescent facing an unexpected pregnancy, what they need most initially is nonjudgmental support. You don\u2019t need somebody to say, \u201cWhy didn\u2019t you take your pills?\u201d or \u201cThat was stupid.\u201d or \u201cWhy do you want to have a baby now?\u201d You need someone to listen and help them think through where they want […]<\/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-5473","page","type-page","status-publish","hentry"],"acf":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/content.scienceofecd.com\/transcript\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/pages\/5473","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=5473"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/content.scienceofecd.com\/transcript\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/pages\/5473\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":5474,"href":"https:\/\/content.scienceofecd.com\/transcript\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/pages\/5473\/revisions\/5474"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/content.scienceofecd.com\/transcript\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=5473"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}