''Society will condemn us if our daughters are not married off by the age of 15," say women from two Indian villages where the average age of marriage for girls is just 14.3. Many thousands of miles away on another continent, mothers in Burkina Faso agree: "She has to be married as soon as possible, otherwise she'll give birth to a tampiri —an illegitimate baby." And they remember their own marriages: "I had seen my washing (menstruation) only once before I left my father's house for the owner of the courtyard's house."
It has been estimated that 40 per cent of all 14 year-old girls alive today will have been pregnant at least once by the time they are 20. In Bangladesh, four out of five teenage girls are mothers; three out of four teenagers in Africa as a whole.
Africa has the highest rate of births to very young mothers: 40 per cent of teenage births are to women aged 17 or under, compared with 39 per cent in Latin America, 31 per cent in Asia and 22 per cent in Europe.
In many developing countries the majority of births of teenage mothers take place within marriage. The average age of marriage in countries with high teenage fertility rates is often very low precisely in order to ensure the resulting children's legitimacy. In Bangladesh, for instance, the average age of marriage is 11.6 years; in Pakistan and Sierra Leone it is 15.3 and 15.7 respectively; while in Jordan 58.5 per cent of teenage girls are married.
In industrialized countries, however, large numbers of teenage births are the result of pre-marital sexual activity three out of four in Denmark and Sweden, for example. In the US and UK over 50 per cent of all illegitimate births in 1982 were to teenage mothers.
Most newly-married teenagers in the developing world long for and welcome their first pregnancies, accepting the pain and dangers as the price of entry to the world of women.
An illegitimate pregnancy, on the other hand, can be catastrophic in rich countries and poor alike. One study in Zaire found that the typical hospital patient being treated for a septic or botched abortion was a 15 to 16-year-old unmarried schoolgirl who had never used contraception and who had tried to abort her pregnancy herself.
In the US 30 per cent of all teenage pregnancies end in abortion; in Norway a staggering 87.5 per cent of pregnancies in the under-18s are miscarried. Teenagers account for half of all late — and therefore more dangerous — abortions in the US.
One reason for these high rates is that family planning programmes tend to be aimed at married women; worldwide, three quarters of girls under 15, and half of those 16 or over, have no access to family planning information.
Dangerous though a late abortion may be for the young mother, the evidence from the US is that a teenage birth is five times more dangerous. Around the world, the teenage mother and her baby face a worse combination of risks to their health than any other age group. The mother herself is likely to be anaemic and her body not yet fully developed, she is less likely than older women to seek ante-natal treatment, and she faces possibly complicated and prolonged labour. Her baby is more likely to be premature and underweight.
In countries as different as Malaysia and Japan, the Dominican Republic and Bangladesh, the US, Tanzania, Nigeria, Jamaica and El Salvador, 15to 19-year-old mothers are twice as likely to die in childbirth as others aged between 20 and 24. Risks to the younger mother arc even greater: in Bangladesh the under-15-year-old is five times as likely to die in childbirth than a mother aged between 20 and 24; in the US she is three times more likely to die.
Babies born to a teenage mother are more than twice as likely to die in their first year of life, and they run double the extra risks associated with births spaced less than two years apart.
In Sri Lanka and the Republic of Korea, babies born to under 16-yearold mothers are three times as likely to die than those born to mothers between 20 and 24. If the first child dies, subsequent children to a teenage mother run three times the normal risk.
Teenage motherhood damages more than health. A teenage mother has much less chance of continuing her education and of ever becoming anything other than a mother. The pattern is likely to be passed on: studies in Denmark and the US show that teenage mothers beget teenage mothers. They also tend to be poor and to remain poor.
With an early start, teenage mothers go on to have large families. If their daughters also marry early, then the gap between subsequent generations is shortened.
Source:
UNFPA State of the World Population Report, 1989 Dev't Forum VolXVII, No. 3, May-June 1989 Published by the UN Department of Public Information for the Joint UN Information Committee