The Real Reason Why Young Girls Get Pregnant At 16,17,18, And 19 The reasons that teenage girls get pregnant are varied, just as they are for older women.
Some, particularly those who are 18 and 19, have made a decision to have a baby because they are in a stable relationship and want to start a family, as was the norm for this age group not so many decades ago.
For others, reasons include: contraception failure, not thinking, getting caught up in the moment, believing they couldn’t get pregnant, not feeling comfortable obtaining contraception, being drunk, feeling pressured to have unprotected sex, and being too embarrassed to ask a partner to use contraception. Many of these responses, particularly for young teenagers, do not portray a young person in control and making their own choices. There has been a lot of work to address these vulnerabilities amongst teenagers over the last decade, resulting in the under-18 conception rate now being the lowest it’s been since 1969.
However, this is not the whole story.
Most girls have time to make a decision whether to continue a pregnancy or not. For those who do decide to continue a pregnancy, it is often due to a feeling that they should take responsibility and that they could be a good mum. Even though the pregnancy wasn’t planned, the mother grows to want the baby. Maybe things didn’t start off as planned, but that doesn’t mean there isn’t a chance to take control and turn things around, as most young mothers do.
For some girls, this decision of whether to continue a pregnancy or not is the first major decision they’ve been able to make.
Girls who are not breastfed as babies or who grow up without a father are likely to have their own children earlier, according to a long-term study of more than 4,500 women across the UK.
The researchers looked at four kinds of dirsuption that might affect the family lives of young girls and found that each one brought forward the age at which they first became pregnant by six months on average.
The study underlines how setbacks in childhood can continue to have an impact into adulthood.
"The early environment matters a lot because it calibrates what kind of world you're living in and what kind of resources you have available to you," said Daniel Nettle, a behavioural scientist at the Institute of Neuroscience at Newcastle University, who led the work. However, he stressed that children could rise above problems during their upbringing.
The study found that even after controlling for major differences such as the parents' income and social class, four factors during upbringing had an impact on the age at which a woman had her first child: whether she was breastfed; how involved her parents were in her upbringing; whether her father was present; and whether her parents moved house regularly.
The key message, said Nettle, is that what happens to children early on in their lives is hugely influential. "As a society, we should never forget that. If you get girls when they're 14 or 15 and say, 'Hey girls don't have babies young', it may not do a lot at that point if, in fact, there have been more influential events much earlier in their lives that set them on a path towards a desire to have short time horizons and have babies young. A lot of those things are to do with stress and wellbeing of kids in deprived areas."
Rather than just telling girls to use condoms, he added, authorities should think much more about the context of people's early years. The research is published today in the Proceedings of the Royal Society B.
Nettle's team used data from the National Child Development Study, an ongoing longitudinal study of all people born in the UK between 3 and 9 March 1958. The cohort has been repeatedly surveyed to gather information about family life and health. Their parents and teachers have also been interviewed to add independent sources of information about their lifestyles.
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