Vice President Margarita Cedeño presented the National Plan for Reduction of Teenage Pregnancies 2019-2023 (PREA-RD). The plan seeks to reduce teenage pregnancies by expanding opportunities available to young people. The effort is a coordination of the Vice President Office, the Social Policies Coordination Cabinet (GCPS) of the Presidency, Ministry of Public Health (MSP) and the Inter American Development Bank (IDB).
A Vice President Office press release explains that it is a comprehensive multi-sectorial plan that attacks the main causes that trigger teenage pregnancies such as poverty, social exclusion, inequalities and lack of education. The project focuses on prevention, care and response, protection and political advocacy to ensure that adolescents have a life project, receive sex education and contraceptive methods, stay in school despite being pregnant or if they have children provide these with access to quality health services.
The Vice President’s Office says that there are on average 110 teenage pregnancies per 1,000 children in the Dominican Republic from 2010 to 2015, well above the Latin American average. 22% of the 127,279 births average a year in the country are to children 15 to 19 years old that is 34% more than the Latin American average.
Studies indicate that early sex is epidemic in the Dominican Republic with 12% of women 20 to 24 years having been in their first sexual relationship before they were 15 years old, and 36% before they were 18 years of age. This is 29% more than the regional average.
Vice President Margarita Cedeño says the plan is a priority in the understanding that children of teenage parents are more likely to have problems and to eventually become teenage parents themselves, thus perpetuating the cycle of poverty begun by a teenage birth.
The effort is backed by the Inter-institutional Commission for the Reduction of Teenage Pregnancies 2019-2023 that is made up by 27 government institutions, 10 non-governmental organizations, nine agencies of the UNDP and international cooperation, 11 universities, scientific societies and guilds.
The lack of sexual education in schools in the Dominican Republic has been routinely identified as one of the reasons for the high teenage pregnancy rate. For years, the influential Catholic Church and evangelical churches have impeded sexual education from being an integral part of the curriculum.
Read more:
Vice Presidencia
El Nuevo Diario
UNDP
Pulitzer Center
Acento
World Bank
13 February 2019
