Vulnerable Population Essay

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Vulnerable Population: Teenage Mothers NUR/440 January 4, 2012 Bobby Hoover Vulnerable Population: Teenage Mothers The vulnerable population chosen for this paper is teenage mothers. Does evidence support that teenage mothers are an at-risk population? I believe the answer is yes. Several factors exist that can identify this group as vulnerable. Research shows that teenage mothers may come from violent homes, single parent homes, have poor self-esteem, a history of depression, and a history of drug or alcohol abuse (Quinlivan, Tan, Steele & Black, 2004). The average teen mother is 17.5 years old. UNITED STATES birth rates are higher than any other country. $9 billion are spent annually on teen pregnancy. Florida alone had 354,000 teen births between 1991 and 2004, costing taxpayers $8.1 billion. On a local level, Orange County, Florida, had 1771 teen births in 2004, costing the county around $36 million (“State of denial:,” n.d.). From a socioeconomic standpoint, teen births in the UNITED STATES are too high to confine the data to one economic group or household makeup. More encouragingly, the teen birth rate for young women between the ages of 15 and 19 decreased by 2% in 2007/2008 according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention’s National Center for Health Statistics. Birth rates data for ethnic groups showed a decrease across the boards according to the National Center for Health Statistics (“The national campaign,” 2011). On a personal level, my awareness of this population did not go farther than to notice when a teenage girl was pregnant. I admit to bias thinking that the girl must be promiscuous and not have any moral grounding. Frankly, I blamed the girl’s mother for not instilling better values in her daughter and often times thought no better of the mother. I did not notice one ethnic group more than
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