Description
Reproductive health is an important issue for adolescents in the indigenous communities. Adolescent mothers are more likely to live in poverty, have lower academic achievements and have reduced job opportunities; pregnancy during adolescence represents higher health risks for the young mothers and their babies. Adolescent fertility is an emergent issue in Latin America, reproductive health programs have reduced fertility among young married women, but they have not had the same effect on adolescent fertility. Great advances have been made in Mexico for reducing the birth rate from 6 children per woman in 1960, to 2.2 in 2011.Unfortunately this reduction has not been equal for all demographic groups, the birth rate among indigenous women remains at 3 children per woman. Indigenous women have their children at a younger age, have lack of spacing between children, have larger families and poor health care. Very few programs have addressed this issue as we can observe in the scarce literature. Reproductive health programs must be tailored to the specific population, and towards young people. The materials must also be relevant to them. Peer-to-Peer programs are a popular way to provide information to young people, which is based on the fact that adolescents spend a lot of time interacting with each other and get a lot of reproductive information from their peers. The Bixby program was implemented in an indigenous community in San Quintin, Mexico. It had a quasi-experimental design, and compared the differences in knowledge, intentions and opinions of reproductive health, between an intervention and a control group. The program lasted 2 months and the participants received a peer session and a teacher-led class, a baseline and a post-intervention survey. The demographic analyses revealed profound differences, while the intervention showed to be younger, in lower level grades and with more indigenous presence, the control group was older, in higher level grades, and more sexually experienced. The postintervention analyses found few statistically differences in knowledge, and no differences in intentions and opinions regarding reproductive health and specifically condom use. Nonetheless, two important differences were found: the intervention group was 2.5 times more likely to identify 2 correct answers regarding contraceptive methods which prevent sexually transmitted diseases, when compared to the control group. Also, the intervention group correctly identifies the necessary time between each pregnancy, to give adequate space between children with a significant difference when compared to the control group.
