Teen Pregnancy Rates Canada

Teen Pregnancy Rates Canada, With her hair in a ponytail and her smile quick and wide, it’s hard to tell that high school junior Donyell Hollins has been pulling all-nighters for most of the semester to take care of her infant daughter. Her situation isn’t unusual in the small Delta town of Marks, home to one of the highest teen pregnancy rates in the state that leads the nation in the statistic. But unlike teen mothers in previous decades, 18-year-old Hollins is benefiting from a change in attitude that’s paving the way for frank discussions about parenting skills, career goals and contraception.

Instructors from the Delta Health Partners Healthy Start Initiative come to Hollins’ high school monthly to teach lessons that incorporate some of the newest theories on the relationship between poverty and teen motherhood. It’s a far cry from decades past, when women in Hollins’ situation were given little guidance and often left to drop out and languish.During the last quarter century, there has been an overall decline in the teenage pregnancy rate in Canada, perhaps reflecting the availability of contraceptives, and the increased awareness of the risks of unprotected sex brought about by the AIDS epidemic.1 Nevertheless, in 1997, an estimated 19,724 women aged 15 to 19 gave birth, and a slightly larger number in this age range—21,233—had an abortion.

The social stigma that once attended out-of-wedlock pregnancy may have diminished; however, the risks of serious health consequences remain for babies born to mothers still in their teens. Children of teenagers are more
likely to have low birth weights, and to suffer the associated health problems.2

Pregnant teens themselves are also at greater risk of health problems, including, for example, anemia, hypertension, renal disease, eclampsia and depressive disorders.3,4 As well, teenagers who engage in unprotected sex are putting their own health at risk of sexually transmitted infections.1

Teenage pregnancy also has economic consequences. Childbearing may curtail education and thereby reduce a young woman’s employment prospects in a job market that requires ever higher levels of training.8,9 In addition, recessions in the early 1980s and 1990s meant that to maintain an adequate standard of living, dual earning became the norm in many Canadian households.10 But teenagers who give birth, particularly at ages 15 to 17, are likely to be single. Consequently, most teenage mothers lack a partner to contribute to the household income.3