Prevalence of teenage pregnancy
By contrast, teenage parents in non-Western regions such as Africa, Asia, Eastern Europe, Latin America, and the Pacific Islands are often married, and their pregnancy may be welcomed by family and society.
However, in these societies, early pregnancy may combine with malnutrition and poor health care to cause long-term medical problems for both the mother and child.
With the exception of Maputo, the capital city, all provinces presented an increase in the percentage of early pregnancies.
[8][9] A 2004 Save the Children report identified 10 countries where motherhood carried the most risks for young women and their babies.
Fertility rates in South Asia range from 71 to 119 births with a trend towards increasing age at marriage for both sexes.
In South Korea and Singapore, although the occurrence of sexual intercourse before marriage has risen, rates of adolescent childbearing are low at 4 to 8 per 1,000.
[citation needed] Surveys from Thailand have found that a significant minority of unmarried adolescents are sexually active.
The Thai government has undertaken measures to inform the nation's youth about the prevention of sexually transmitted diseases and unplanned pregnancy.
In 1998, in several Asian countries including Bangladesh and Indonesia, a large proportion (26–37%) of deaths among female adolescents were attributed to maternal causes.
For instance, in the United Kingdom, the rate of adolescent pregnancy in 2002 was as high as 100.4 per 1000 among young women living in the London Borough of Lambeth, and as low as 20.2 per 1000 among residents in the Midlands local authority area of Rutland.
[citation needed] In Italy and Spain, the rate of adolescent pregnancy is low, at 6 births per 1,000 women aged 15–19 in 2002 in both countries.
[22] Canada's highest teen pregnancy rates occur in small towns located in rural parts of peninsular Ontario.
In 2016, the Minister of Health and Social Protection of Colombia, Alejandro Gaviria Uribe announced that "teenage pregnancy decreased by two percentage points breaking the growing tendency that had been seen since the nineties".
Teenagers of African-American and Latino descent retain a higher rate, in comparison to that of European-Americans and Asian-Americans.
A positive correlation, albeit weak, appears between a city's teen pregnancy rate and its average summer night temperature, especially in the Southern U.S. (Savageau, compiler, 1993–1995).
In 2022, research organization Child Trends found that teen birth in the United States had vastly reduced in the prior 30 years.
The data for most countries and a variety of groupings (e.g. Sub-Saharan Africa or OECD members) are published regularly, and can be viewed or downloaded from a United Nations website.
