Mrs. Ellen Darkoa Asare, Eastern Regional Head, Reproductive Health Unit of the Ghana Health Service, says denying adolescents of family planning services would cause more harm than good considering the growing teenage pregnancies countrywide.

She said making family planning services available to teenagers helped to prevent unwanted pregnancies, which often send pregnant teenage girls out of school and further push them into child marriages.

Such denial also could force the young girls, who become pregnant, into using dangerously unorthodox methods and concoctions to cause abortions, which often lead to fatalities.

Mrs. Asare was speaking in reaction to some public observation that family planning would promote promiscuity among adolescents. This was at a symposium in Koforidua organised by the National Population Council to mark the World Population Day in Eastern Region.

Speaking on the topic, “Prioritizing Reproductive Health Services for Women and Girls in the Eastern Region,” she noted that abortion was not a family planning method and warned that having abortion frequently put one at risk.