ADDRESSING MACRO PRESPECTIVES OF SOCIETIAL INFLUENCES IN RELATION TO TEENAGE PREGNANCY BY THE PROFESSIONAL THROUGH THE NURSING PROFESSION
             "As your actions are informed by your awareness of values, your thinking and your ideas are shaped and changed by your experiences with those actions (Chinn, 1995, p. 3)."
             As a nursing professional, addressing the cause and not the symptoms of societal concerns in relation to teenage pregnancy would be the ideal. In order for a profession to evoke transition in this or any aggregate, it is important for that profession to correlate those macro perspectives, which influence poor lifestyle choices and how these choices may be approached in a health promotion perspective. It is the intent of this dissertation to relate current statistical information, some societal factors involved in the increased numbers of teenage pregnancy, and the nursing implications to this issue.
             Despite education about birth control and the negative connotations in regards to procreation in the adolescent, the number of teenage pregnancies in the United States are very significant. According to the National Campaign to Prevent Teenage Pregnancy that approximately one million teenage girls between the ages of 15 and 19 get pregnant each year in the
             United States and that nearly eighty percent (80%) of these pregnancies are to unmarried teens. Move than one half of teen pregnancies end in birth and fewer teens choose abortion or adoption. In the United States, teen pregnancies contribute to at least $7 billion in cost and the United States is ranked as having the highest rate of teen pregnancy in the industrialized world (1998).
             It has been noted that the educational success is significantly restrained by teenage pregnancy for both the teen and her child. Jane Manlove states that less than one-third of teens that begin families before the age of 18 ever complete high school and approximately fifty percen...