Sexual Identity and Pregnancy

Dear Colleagues,

The United Nations and the World Health Organization have made the health of adolescents a priority, acknowledging in their sustainable developmental goals that nations can benefit from this in the form of a demographic dividend if adolescents are active and contribute to the development of their countries. However, adolescence represents a critical period for young people from the age of 10 to 19 where they experience physical, psychological, and social changes.  Moreover, adolescence is a critical time period for the formation of self-identity, including sexual orientation. The changes occurring during adolescence are sometimes confusing and may lead adolescents to expose themselves to behaviours that are high risk, including high-risk pregnancies, maternal morbidity, high infant death rates, and sexually transmitted infections including HIV. Research has shown that a young person’s sexual orientation and the gender of their sexual partners are strongly linked with the risk of becoming pregnant or causing someone else to become pregnant, suggesting that adolescent pregnancy prevention efforts focused exclusively on heterosexual young people may be too narrow.  This Special Issue aims to focus on the challenges that adolescents face as they develop self-identities in sexual orientation, the risk of getting pregnant, support systems during pregnancy, and how pregnancy is viewed. The issue will also focus on how efforts to prevent adolescent pregnancies could be directed at minority groups.

Dr. Gloria Likupe
Guest Editor

Manuscript Submission Information

Manuscripts should be submitted online at www.mdpi.com by registering and logging in to this website. Once you are registered, click here to go to the submission form. Manuscripts can be submitted until the deadline. All submissions that pass pre-check are peer-reviewed. Accepted papers will be published continuously in the journal (as soon as accepted) and will be listed together on the special issue website. Research articles, review articles as well as short communications are invited. For planned papers, a title and short abstract (about 100 words) can be sent to the Editorial Office for announcement on this website.

Submitted manuscripts should not have been published previously, nor be under consideration for publication elsewhere (except conference proceedings papers). All manuscripts are thoroughly refereed through a single-blind peer-review process. A guide for authors and other relevant information for submission of manuscripts is available on the Instructions for Authors page. Adolescents is an international peer-reviewed open access quarterly journal published by MDPI.

Please visit the Instructions for Authors page before submitting a manuscript. The Article Processing Charge (APC) for publication in this open access journal is 1000 CHF (Swiss Francs). Submitted papers should be well formatted and use good English. Authors may use MDPI's English editing service prior to publication or during author revisions.

• sexual identity
• challenges
• pregnancy
• ethnicity
• culture
• sexuality education
• contraception