What pregnancy and childbirth do to a young girl's body

The recent abortion of a 10-year-old girl in Ohio sparked fierce debate. Doctors in countries where teenage pregnancy is common say the toll of childbirth on young bodies is brutal. getting an abortion drew national attention last week, with some prominent abortion opponents suggesting the child should have carried her pregnancy to term.

But midwives and doctors who work in countries where pregnancy among young adolescents is common say those who push very young girls to carry their pregnancies to term may not understand the stark toll of pregnancy and childbirth on a child's body.

“Their body is not ready for childbirth and it is very traumatic,” said Marie Bass Gomez, midwife and senior nurse at the Reproductive and Child Health Clinic at Bundung Maternal and Child Health Hospital in The Gambia.

The critical problem is that the pelvis of a child is too small to allow even a small fetus to pass, said Dr Ashok Dyalch and, who has worked with pregnant teenagers in low-income communities in India for over 40 years.

"They have long labor, labor obstruction, the fetus presses on the bladder and on the urethra," sometimes causing pelvic inflammatory disease and the breakdown of tissue between the vagina and the bladder and rectum, said Dr. Dyalchand, who runs an organization called Institute of Health Management Pachod, a public health organization serving marginalized communities in central India.

"It's a pathetic state, especially for girls under 15 ", he added. "Complications, morbidity and mortality are much higher in girls under 15 than in girls aged 16-19 although 16-19 year olds have twice the mortality of women in their 20s. and more."

The phenomenon of young girls having babies is relatively rare in the United States. In 2017, the last year for which data was available, there were 4,460 pregnancies among girls under the age of 15, just under half of which ended in abortion, according to the Guttmacher Institute, which supports abortion rights and regularly surveys clinics.

But globally, complications from pregnancy and childbirth are the number one cause of death in girls aged 15 to 19, according to the World Health Organization.

Younger maternal age is associated with an increased risk of anemia pregnancy, infections, eclampsia and pre-eclampsia, emergency cesarean delivery and postpartum depression, according to a 2014 review published in the Journal of Neonatal-Perinatal Medicine.

< p class="css-at9mc1 evys1bk0">Babies born to girls are more often premature and have low birth weight, said the D r Willibald Zeck, Maternal and Newborn Health Coordinator for the United Nations Population Fund, who frequently delivered mother babies while working as a gynecologist in Tanzania and later oversaw maternal health programs in Nepal and the Philippines.

While a 10-year-old pregnant child in Ohio could access prenatal care and a caesarean section that would lessen the effects of obstructed labor , the experience of pregnancy for a young girl is the same in India as in the United States, said Dr. Dyalchand. "The girls would go through more or less exactly the same type of complications: the only difference is that because of access to better health care, they might not have the same kind of terrible outcomes. But that ...