Más Información
This is no game. Sugey is 13 and got pregnant because she wanted to have a baby brother.
She knows her life changed. She realized that when she couldn't go to the park with her friends anymore. “Now I'm locked inside my house all the time, I miss that.” She says. She feels different, she doesn't feel like a little girl anymore.
She was studying high school but dropped out. Fortunately, she received the support of her parents although her mother, she says, got very angry at the beginning. “You're gonna have to find a job”, she told her.
According to numbers provided by the National Institute of Statistics and Geography (INEGI) in Mexico, Coahuila occupied the first place in teen pregnancy, with 15 thousand and 137 cases among girls between 10 and 19 years old, equivalent to 22% of the total figure; followed close behind by Chihuahua, with 21.4%, and Durango, with 21%. The lowest number belongs to Mexico City with 14%.
The Organization for Economic and Cooperation Development (OECD) put Mexico in first place of teen pregnancy out of its 35 member countries.
In 2015, INEGI registered more than 400 thousand births among mothers between 15 and 19, and more than 10 thousand in mothers under 15, the equation adds up to 18% of the total births per year. This figure goes up to 70% in rural and low-income homes.
Ana Laura García, head of the Responsible Sexuality program and coordinator of the teen mothers workshop of the National System for Integral Family Development (DIF) in Torreón, México, says there are many factors for the teen pregnancy phenomenon to be present, starting with the family dynamics, disintegration, education, misleading information that teenage girls receive and the taboos that still remain.
The workshop, from which 31 young mothers “graduated”, is made up of seven sessions in which they are taught how to look after themselves, the baby, their physical changes, development, and even make life plans. “I urge them to visualize themselves in the long term, their long term goals, because most of them have a very poor self-esteem”, says Ana Laura.
al
