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Teenage Pregnancy Prevention
Preventing Pregnancy Among API Teens Involves Youth and Adults
 sian and Pacific Islander (API) teens and their parents face many of the same conflicts as families from other ethnic groups when it comes to communicating about dating, academic expectations and other issues. On issues such as healthy sexuality and pregnancy prevention, there is often no communication at all.
Staff at Los Angeles’ Asian Pacific Health Care Venture (APHCV) recognized the need both for clinical services for API youth, such as pregnancy testing, birth control counseling and STD screening and for creating a safe space where youth can come together for educational programs, teen theater and hip-hop dance classes that incorporate messages about healthy sexuality.
 To that end, APHCV operates a school-based clinic at Marshall High School and a weekly teen clinic at its facility in the Los Feliz neighborhood of Los Angeles, close to large communities of immigrants from Thailand, Korea, Vietnam and China. The clinics are designed to be places where youth can receive confidential services in a teen-friendly environment.
“It’s the Catch-22 of being an API-focused clinic,” said Jeanne Aguinaldo, APHCV’s youth services manager. “Some youth are reluctant to come in because they’re afraid that an adult they know or a friend of their parents will see them.”
So instead of tiptoeing around the cultural barriers of parent-teen communication and working only with teens on issues of pregnancy prevention and safer sex, APHCV is strategically looking at how to reach out to parents. By offering workshops at their community clinic facility on topics such as preparing teens for college admissions, they hope to foster more communication between parents and teens and to help parents become more willing to learn about healthy adolescent sexuality.
The organization is also looking to bridge the gap between youth and adults by bringing youth onto the organization’s board of directors. As a first step, they established a youth advisory board for the Marshall High School clinic.
“We ask the youth about what’s the ‘buzz’ in their community,” said APHCV's Aguinaldo. “Their feedback helps us plan our services.”
They plan to elect two students from this group to the organization’s governing board. By giving the youth a specific role – reporting on youth needs and bringing a youth voice to agency policy discussions – they hope that adult members of the board will also benefit from this interaction.
“These strategies reflect some of the best practices identified by researchers studying teenage pregnancy prevention in Asian and Pacific Islander communities,” said Cristina M. Regalado, TCWF vice president of programs. “In addition to making sure that teens have access to birth control and sexuality education, parents need to understand that sexual activity is taking place among their teens and know how to deal with its consequences.”
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