Tokyo – According to disastrous reports published through Japanese pregnancy hotline operators, COVID-19 appears to have triggered a terrifying epidemic: that of teenage pregnancy.
“I’m desperate”: teenage girls’ calls to pregnancy hotlines multiply the end of school,” said a typical headline last May at the main asahi Shimbun newspaper. An avalanche of terrifying anecdotes helps claim that interruptions in school schedules, which leave young people at home unsupervised for long periods of time, have led to an increase in unprotected sex among students.
Jikei Hospital in the southwestern city of Kumamoto, which operates an unnamed “baby trap” to accommodate the children discovered, said calls from high school and senior academics had peaked at 10 in April. A direct line in the western city of Kobe said consultations tripled in April, mainly from teenagers, and added one that said he turned to prostitution after wasting his part-time task due to the coronavirus.
Pilcon, a Tokyo-based nonprofit that manages sex education systems in schools, said it was flooded with calls from concerned teens after home pregnancy tests or lack of periods.
Fear of pregnancy in adolescence has influenced anxiety about unplanned births and child abuse. The Japan Times reported a 2016 Ministry of Health review of child abuse-related deaths, concluded that more than two-thirds of perpetrators were biological mothers and about a portion of the victims were unplanned pregnancies; most died without delay after birth.
While crime in general has declined for years, child abuse is on the rise in Japan. He reached a record in 2019.
Pilcon has introduced a crusade to make the tablet the day after more available. A petition on change.org’s online page calling for these features to be made more readily available in Japan obtained more than 87,000 signatures and sent to the Ministry of Health in July.
Currently, emergency birth control is prescription-only and, combined with the doctor’s fee, can charge up to $180. The organization said this forced many women and women to be between abortion and an unwanted pregnancy. Pilcon said there is an unregulated giant market for online emergency birth control, which puts women at greater health threat.
Dr. Kunio Kitamura, a gynecologist and educator who runs the Family Planning Association of Japan, told CBS News that it is too early to draw conclusions about a COVID-induced youth pregnancy boom.
“Unfortunately, there is still no knowledge of how the pandemic affects Japan’s sexual behavior. Many [clinics] are sounding the alarm, but we don’t have a concept yet.”
The accumulation of calls to counselling centers, he said, has not yet resulted in an increase in abortions. Sales of the day after fell year after year in April and May, according to Kitamura.
Outside Japan, the picture may be more dire: London-based Marie Stopes International said coronavirus blockades, disruptions to contraceptive source chains, and diversion of medical care to antiviral efforts would result in 900,000 unplanned pregnancies, 1.5 million unsafe abortions and thousands of maternal deaths in 37 countries , India’s large population and higher poverty rates make it vulnerable.
Last spring, the United Nations Population Activities Fund warned that pandemic-related disruptions in the circle of family members making on-site plans would have a devastating effect on women’s health, adding loss of access to contraception, resulting in 7 million unwanted pregnancies.
THE UNFPA warning, however, involved middle- and low-income countries, not countries like Japan.
Japan’s Ministry of Health said there were 161,000 abortions in 2018, the highest recent year for which knowledge is available. This reflects a prolonged and stable decrease in the frequency of the procedure. At one point, Japan was so pro-abortion that it even attracted medical tourists from the United States and other countries where abortions were harder to obtain.
The cases peaked at approximately 1 million in 1955, driven by overcrowded considerations and encouraged by doctors who saw the procedure as valuable income.
Abortions among women over the age of 15 to 19, after reaching a peak of thirteen, consisting of 1,000 in 2001, have fallen to near-post-war degrees, to 4.7/1000, according to knowledge compiled through Kitamura’s organization.
Therefore, they depend on an outdated and inferior contraceptive bureaucracy, the Japanese interrupt fewer pregnancies than ever before. Dr. Kitamura said it was because “the Japanese, in addition to young people, do not have sex.”
As he admitted, it is too early to know how the pandemic can justify this trend.