The Pervasive Problem of Early Pregnancy in Mexico
Early pregnancy is a widespread issue in Mexico, particularly affecting indigenous and impoverished girls. The consequences are severe: school dropout, poverty, and social isolation.
The occurrence of early pregnancies is not exclusive to one state or one locality in Mexico, it is a phenomenon that occupies the first places in the national territory, said the researcher of the Peninsular Center for Humanities and Social Sciences of the UNAM, Amada Rubio Herrera.
For example, every year in Mexico more than 10 thousand are reported in minors under 15 years of age, which, almost always, are related to some type of violence. It is a fact for which there are different explanations, "not only economic and social, but also cultural such as forced marriages, early unions, traditions and customs, among other aspects," explained the doctor in anthropology.
She indicated that based on information from the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development and the World Bank, Mexico is the sixth country in Latin America (AL) and the Caribbean for the rate of early pregnancies with 71 births per thousand adolescents, on average; it is surpassed by Nicaragua and Honduras, among other nations in the region.
Based on her research “Prevention of teenage pregnancy in Yucatan; challenges in institutional incidence”, two out of 10 women under 15 years of age become mothers.
“I have focused on the southern cone of the peninsula, where there is a higher percentage of indigenous population and where these expressions of early pregnancies are most clearly seen in rural, historically and systematically impoverished contexts,” she added.
According to the university expert, the United Nations Population Fund warned that due to the COVID-19 pandemic there would be a setback of a significant number of years in prevention in adolescents and its eradication in girls, and it was shown in a considerable impact on the number of pregnancies in this population. “That is something that I was able to verify on a small scale when I returned to the field after the strong period of the health crisis.”
Cycles of poverty and inequality
As part of the findings of her study, she observed that adolescents and girls experience the gestation period in a different way than what is represented in the collective imagination; that is, with deep sadness and violence. “In all the cases with whom I have engaged in dialogue about their situation, they are sometimes even expelled from their homes.”
They also face difficulties in continuing their formal education, which limits their opportunities for personal and professional development, contributing to the perpetuation of cycles of poverty and inequality, in addition to being the object of ridicule and criticism in their schools by classmates and teachers, which causes 80 to 90 percent of those interviewed to abandon their studies at the beginning of pregnancy, some doing so before.
Family and friendship ties are also broken, and in most cases they live this stage in complete defenselessness, emphasized Rubio Herrera.
Yucatán shows wide gaps in social well-being and inequality. As part of this, the female sector – adults, young people, adolescents and girls – suffers from these asymmetries arising from the processes of exclusion and inequities from other phenomena. “There I pay attention to pregnancy to analyze, with an anthropological perspective, what are the elements that support it,” she said.
In this Mexican entity, minors learn to be mothers in practice, with a significant lack of knowledge, for example, of the vaccines that babies should receive or the care in the first months of life. This is also a product of the context, because they feel bad when going to health centers to request information, they are predisposed to rejection and live their pregnancy in conditions of isolation, argued the university student.
For Rubio Herrera, intervention through anthropology has to start in public policy, which must consider the variables in this social problem. “It is useless to distribute condoms or contraceptive methods if there is no true cultural transformation, if sexual and reproductive rights are not really exercised.”
These issues, as well as sexual education, she said, must be addressed in a comprehensive manner and without taboos from an early age, that is, during primary education for girls, boys, teachers and parents, since it is a complex multi-causal problem that not only has to do with women, but also with an important cultural issue.
In addition, there must be sensitivity on the part of the institutions and personnel who are in charge of these health programs, such as the medical and nursing staff, as well as social workers, concluded Rubio Herrera.
