Save the Children Philippines drew attention to the Philippine Statistics Authority (PSA) recording 3,135 cases of adolescent pregnancies among young girls aged 10-14 in 2022, which was a 35 percent increase from the 2,320 cases recorded in 2021.

The organisation said this was an "alarming trend" and called on the government and families "to join forces in educating children about their rights and reproductive health."

The PSA has noted a concerning upward trend in teenage pregnancies under the age of 15 since 2017, it said in a March 1 statement ahead of International Women's Day.

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The past ten years has also seen a downward trend in abortions, according to the latest Abortion Services Aotearoa New Zealand annual report .

The stats

Newly released figures from Stats NZ on Tuesday show that in 2022 there were 1,719​ births registered to 13 to 19 year-olds. They accounted for about one in every 34​ births that year.

In 2012, there were 3,786​ births registered to teenage mothers: roughly one in 16​ births.

These are very different numbers from those recorded back in 1972.

That was the year teenage births in New Zealand peaked. Statistics report 9,150​ teenage women gave birth, accounting for about one in every seven​ births.

Two years later, in 1974, the Auckland Medical Aid Centre Abortion Clinic opened.​

Teenage births "generally dropped" post-1972 - save for a "small peak" in 2008​. That year, one in every 12​ births (5,223​ births) was registered to under-20 year old mothers.

Stats NZ estimates and projections manager Michael MacAskill​ says teen births had generally decreased since then.

Why the decrease?

For every 1,000 women in New Zealand aged 15-19, there were 11​ births in 2022 - down from 25​ in 2012, a decrease of 55 percent.

Family Planning chief executive Jackie Edmond​ says the drop in teenage births mirrored global trends. It can be attributed in part to an increase in education and access to contraceptives.

It is very clear people need multiple contraceptive options, she says.

Increasing the range and choice in Aotearoa seemed to have made a difference, she notes. Today there are more reliable, readily accessible forms of contraception which have a lower failure rate than other forms.

However, there are still barriers, including cost, limited awareness of the range of contraceptives and health literacy of patients and practitioners.

There will always be unplanned pregnancies because no-one and nothing is perfect, she says. At the same time though, "this shows things have changed - and hopefully it continues".

Improved education also made a difference, with schools offering a range of relationship and sexuality programmes in their curricula, Edmond says.

"But we also know this is patchy. The quality and amount [of such education] is patchy as well."

There are "lots of great teenage parents out there" and many young people did "an awesome job".

At the name time, pregnancy at a young age could have long-term impacts on people's lives, so the downturn was "good to see", she adds.

Source

• Stuff

Given the choice between a very normal and appropriate conversation about reproductive politics and a glass window, I will be in the bushes out front, picking glass out of my torso.

That is because when I was 17 I got pregnant by accident and placed my baby for adoption.

As such, I have two options during these conversations: Stay quiet about my intimate familiarity with unplanned pregnancy and the difficult choices that come with it, or speak up and make everyone uncomfortable.

If my conversation partner is pro-life, I get to watch their eyeballs spin as they think back over our discussion and try to remember if they said anything suggesting that people like me are irresponsible or immoral.

If they are pro-choice, I get to watch steam pour out of their ears as they wonder if it was rude to imply that my 9-year-old son was once a zygote.

The sudden appearance of a birth mother in conversations about reproductive politics makes people uncomfortable—and who can blame them?

Usually, if birth mothers get mentioned at all, they are people we talk about, not with.

By inviting birth mothers into our conversations, we risk complicating the stories we tell ourselves about adoption and the people who participate in it.

Left Behind

For nine years, I kept my adoption hidden from almost everyone in my life, and it was incredibly lonely.

"Coming out" as a birth mother has been a healing journey for me, but it has not made the loneliness go away.

In fact, it has made me painfully aware of the near-total absence of birth mothers in media, politics, religion, family, academics and medicine.

That absence can be traced back to some deep-rooted societal discomfort with the institution of adoption.

For a long time, stigmas about infertility, illegitimacy, genetics and sexuality drove all three members of the adoption triad—birth parents, children and adoptive parents—to keep adoptions a secret.

Then, attitudes shifted. Today, U.S. culture largely celebrates adoption as a way to form new family ties.

Religious communities, particularly Catholic and Protestant Christian, played an important role in normalizing and encouraging adoptive families.

Meanwhile, adoption was ensconced in contemporary pro-life rhetoric.

If women get abortions because they do not want to be parents, the thinking goes, adoption is a life-affirming alternative.

But there is a problem. The cultural acceptance we rightly extended to adoptive parents and children was never extended to birth parents.

Birth mothers still feel pressure to keep their experiences secret, and that pressure speaks volumes about where our goodwill starts and ends.

While adoptive parents may enjoy telling new friends or coworkers their family's origin story, I cannot talk about my adoption without sucking the air out of a room.

While most everyone can rattle off a handful of adoptive parents or children they know personally, few people can name a birth mother.

In fact, I have never met another in person, and I have been one for almost a decade.

Erasing Loss and Silencing Grief

Adoption's move from hushed-up transaction to mainstream ministry relied on its portrayal as a positive, happy thing. And it is a positive, happy thing.

Adoption creates entirely new families bound by a powerful love. But adoption is also a sad thing; a parent and child, whatever the circumstances, are separated.

Some birth mothers willingly relinquish children because they are not ready or do not want to be parents.

Others are coerced into relinquishing children because of social pressure from families or communities.

Still, others are unable to parent their children because they lack resources, lack support or are dealing with addiction or other hardships.

Reckoning with birth mothers in all their complexity is tough. So, we usually do not bother to do it.

Instead, we take the beautiful dynamics of adoption, with its sadness, joy, gain and loss, and package them into simple, one-note stories: A heroic teenager spurns abortion and gives her baby a chance at life.

A pitiful, fallen woman abandons her child.

A weak-willed teen in an oppressive religious community has her choice made for her.

In all of these cases, to introduce a flesh-and-blood birth mother—her grief, her love, her courage—would ruin the story. Continue reading

The Report on Maternity found that in 2017 the teenage birth rate was 15 per 1000 females. In 2008 it was 33 per 1000. Read more

Newly released figures from the Office for National Statistics show that 23 young women under the age of 18 out of every 1,000 became pregnant in 2014, compared with 47 out of 1,000 in 1998. The estimated number of teenage pregnancies fell from 24,306 in 2013 to 22,653 in 2014.

So teenagers appear to be having less unprotected sex. But why?

The impact of technology
One theory put forward to explain the drop is that teenagers are spending more time in their bedrooms on social media and less time meeting up, getting drunk and doing things they may later come to regret.

Prof David Paton, an economist at Nottingham University Business School, told the Telegraph: "It does potentially fit in terms of timing. People [appear to be] spending time at home - rather than sitting at bus stops with a bottle of vodka they are doing it remotely with their friends ... Nobody really knows why we've got this sudden change around about 2007 to 2008."

Clare Murphy, director of external affairs at the abortion provider British Pregnancy Advisory Service (Bpas), added: "The plummeting level of teenage drinking, for example, may be reducing the likelihood of unprotected sex, and teenagers are also increasingly socialising online, limiting the opportunities for sexual activity."

Teenage drinking levels
The drop in teenage pregnancies is accompanied by evidence of decreases in drinking and drug-taking in the UK, particularly among those aged 16 to 24.

The proportion of young adults who reported that they did not drink alcohol at all increased by more than 40% between 2005 and 2013.

The rise of social media
Ofcom said last year that 16-24-year-olds spent more than 27 hours a week on the internet - almost three times the amount it was in 2005. Continue reading

Sources

• The Guardian, the beginning of an article by Nadia Khomami, a news reporter at the Guardian.
• Image: Mail Online

The chief executive of the New Zealand Catholic Education Office, Br Sir Patrick Lynch, spoke about an experiment at James Cook High School in south Auckland.

Condoms were given to teens as young as 15 as they went on study break for their end of year exams in 2011.

According to an article on the Stuff website, the experiment has been deemed so successful in terms of lowering teen pregnancy rates that researchers are calling for the approach to be rolled out at schools across the country.

The article reported Br Sir Patrick saying parents should be told if condoms are being given to teens as young as 15.

"It's skidding on thin ice if they are not telling parents," he said.

"We're not talking about 30-year-olds or 20-year-olds, we're talking about minors."

When it comes to reducing teen pregnancy rates, parents and schools must work together, he said.

"You must build a trust environment with the parents."

The condom give-aways were prompted after James Cook High discovered 12 of its girls returned to school pregnant after the summer holidays in 2011.

Three Auckland University nursing students came up with the idea of distributing the free condoms, which were put inside sex education pamphlets.

Among the advice given in the pamphlets was information as to where to get the morning after pill.

Now, four years later, no teens have returned to decile one school pregnant after the summer.

And the school's NCEA academic results have improved by 30 per cent since that time.

But principal Vaughan Couillault said there's more to the academic improvement than a minor intervention in sexual health guidance.

He said the school provides a range of services, with quality teaching being the main driver behind student achievement.

James Cook High has an on-site health clinic offering sex education advice.

New Zealand has the second highest teen pregnancy rate in the developed world.

Sources

• Stuff
• Newstalk ZB
• ABC