COVID CAUSING SURGE IN TEEN PREGNANCY AROUND THE WORLD By
Teresa Nam Marissa McCollum
The ongoing COVID-19 outbreak across the world has called into action numerous measures to mitigate the extremity of its exposure. National lockdowns, quarantining, and social isolation have been at the heart of the potential cure to this wildfire-like outbreak. To help the containment effort, schools all across the globe have shut down, resulting in “nationwide school closures in 194 countries, affecting nearly 1.6 billion learners—over 90 percent of the world's school-going population,” forcing students to stay at home with a newly-improvised remote education system. With students forced to stay home,
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there is now a new societal issue at hand: teen pregnancy. School shutdowns proved to be a complication for many low-income students that depended on the education system for food and resources. Many of these students are now lacking a safe haven, no longer able to run away from existing problems in their home lives. This proved to be especially true for girls, who are more at risk of spending time with adult male figures and engaging in risky sexual behavior without the protection of school. Those with ongoing sexual abuse and exploitation at home are now even more vulnerable to this atrocity.
With COVID-19, homes have now become the most dangerous place to be for many of these girls. Developing countries such as Kenya and Africa have been especially seeing this increasing trend in teen pregnancies, with girls at risk of never returning to school again. In a town of Lodwar in Kenya, the reported number of teen pregnancies seen at the International Rescue Committee aid was seen to nearly triple to a staggering 625 pregnancies from June to August, compared to 226 in the same length of time the previous year. This jump in teen pregnancies was seen in neighboring refugee camps as well, caused
