The Incidence of Teenage Pregnancy of Female Youth in a Disaster-Prone Areas in the Philippines

The super typhoon Haiyan that hit the Philippines in 2013 rendered 3.5 million families homeless. These displaced families experienced stage by stage process of resettlement, from emergency shelters, then to transitional shelters and finally to permanent resettlement. Because of living in makeshift shelters with shared utilities and the lack of reproductive health care in these shelters, the well being of female teenage youth particularly, the risk of pregnancy is a concern. A survey of 742 female youth, 12 to 21 years old from Eastern Visayas, Philippines found that incidence of pregnancy in 2013 is 18% in severely hit areas and 14% in moderately hit areas. The incidence of pregnancy by severity of typhoon experienced depends on the number of moves and number of days that the youth have stayed in these various shelters. Those who have changed emergency shelters only once, had stayed in relocation sites between 91 and 180 days, stayed less than 330 days in transitional shelters, had been staying for less than 120 days in donated permanent housing, and those who had been living in their own houses from 666 to 730 days were found to be simultaneously related to the incidence of pregnancy and severity of typhoon. But regardless of their experiences of moving from one shelter to the next and their length of stay in these various shelters, the youth with risk behavior characteristics such as alcohol use, exposure to pornography, suicide attempts and premarital sexual experience remain to be significantly related to incidence of pregnancy