They are children having children. As reported previously in DR1 Daily News, the number of adolescents having babies is a very serious problem. Previous reports centered on the University Regional Hospital in Santiago, called the “Cabral y Baez,” where 2,500 children are born each year to adolescent mothers. Today’s report from the country’s largest maternity hospital, “La Altagracia” in Santo Domingo is even more revealing. Diario Libre reports that 27% of the births at the Maternity Hospital La Altagracia, the largest in the country, are to girls between the ages of 11 and 19 years of age. These young mothers tend to be the children of women that had their first child at a very young age, and are from a low economic strata of the population.
85% of the girls were in some relationship and were carrying the baby of their partner. Nearly all of the girls were in school, either primary or secondary, and all of them quit school to attend their children.
Ester Portes, in charge of the Adolescent Program at La Altagracia, says the problem has been increasing over the 11 years she has been working at the hospital. She works with four gynecologists, three psychologists, two nurses and six nurse’s aides. This team sees an average of 65 patients a day and nearly half of them are between the ages of 11 and 16.
According to Portes, the lack of sex education in the home or in the school is the main reason for so many cases of adolescent pregnancies. Many young girls have no idea of the family planning programs available to women.
In the San Lorenzo Maternity Hospital in Los Mina, there were 2,340 births to adolescent mothers.
All of the units that treat these cases in the different hospitals have programs that try and teach family planning, breast feeding and a return to school, but 40% of the patients do not return to the units until their next pregnancy.