Teenage Pregnancy - Teenage Pregnancy Rates

Teenage Pregnancy Rates

In reporting teenage pregnancy rates, the number of pregnancies per 1,000 females aged 15 to 19 when the pregnancy ends is generally used. The rates of teenage pregnancy vary and range from 143 per 1,000 women in some sub-Saharan African countries to 2.9 per 1000 in South Korea. According to a 2001 UNICEF survey, in 10 out of 12 developed nations with available data, more than two thirds of young people have had sexual intercourse while still in their teens. In Denmark, Finland, Germany, Iceland, Norway, the United Kingdom and the United States, the proportion is over 80%. In Australia, the United Kingdom and the United States, approximately 25% of 15 year olds and 50% of 17 year olds have had sex.

Save the Children found that, annually, 13 million children are born to women under age 20 worldwide, more than 90% in developing countries. Complications of pregnancy and childbirth are the leading cause of mortality among women between the ages of 15 and 19 in such areas. The highest rate of teenage pregnancy in the world is in sub-Saharan Africa, where women tend to marry at an early age. In Niger, for example, 87% of women surveyed were married and 53% had given birth to a child before the age of 18.

In the Indian subcontinent, early marriage sometimes results in adolescent pregnancy, particularly in rural regions where the rate is much higher than it is in urbanized areas. The rate of early marriage and pregnancy has decreased sharply in Indonesia and Malaysia, although it remains relatively high in the former. In the industrialized Asian nations such as South Korea and Singapore, teenage birth rates are among the lowest in the world.

The overall trend in Europe since 1970 has been a decreasing total fertility rate, an increase in the age at which women experience their first birth, and a decrease in the number of births among teenagers. Most continental Western European countries have very low teenage birth rates. This is varyingly attributed to good sex education and high levels of contraceptive use (in the case of the Netherlands and Scandinavia), traditional values and social stigmatization (in the case of Spain and Italy) or both (in the case of Switzerland).

The teenage birth rate in the United States is the highest in the developed world, and the teenage abortion rate is also high. The U.S. teenage pregnancy rate was at a high in the 1950s and has decreased since then, although there has been an increase in births out of wedlock. The teenage pregnancy rate decreased significantly in the 1990s; this decline manifested across all racial groups, although teenagers of African-American and Hispanic descent retain a higher rate, in comparison to that of European-Americans and Asian-Americans. The Guttmacher Institute attributed about 25% of the decline to abstinence and 75% to the effective use of contraceptives. While in 2006 the U.S. teen birth rate rose for the first time in fourteen years, it reached a historic low in 2010: 34.3 births per 1,000 women aged 15–19.

The Canadian teenage birth has also trended towards a steady decline for both younger (15–17) and older (18–19) teens in the period between 1992 and 2002.

The age of the mother is determined by the easily verified date when the pregnancy ends, not by the estimated date of conception. Consequently, the statistics do not include women who became pregnant at least shortly before their 20th birthdays, but who gave birth, experienced a miscarriage, or had a voluntary abortion on or after their 20th birthdays. Similarly, statistics on the mother's marital status are determined by whether she is married at the end of the pregnancy, not at the time of conception.