Introduction Teenage pregnancy is said to occur when a girl conceives and gives birth before she reaches the age of twenty years by the time she gives birth. The term encompasses such girls their marital status notwithstanding. In most cases, teen pregnancy tends to create the impression that such pregnancies occur in unmarried teens. Unlike in the recent past where teen pregnancy was not a big issue since there was a somewhat justified need to bear many children given the high child mortality and a much shorter lifespan of the time, teenage pregnancy and motherhood raises a major concern among parents, health care practitioners as well as authorities nowadays. This owes to the huge social and economic cost that accompanies it. This paper seeks to demonstrate the profound effect which high volume of teen pregnancies has on a healthcare system in terms of cost, quality and access of healthcare. Impact of teen pregnancies Even though teen pregnancies are highly undesired and equally discouraged in the modern world for the simple reason that advances in modern medicine have enabled people to live longer besides hugely increasing survival rates of infants, statistics for teen pregnancies are still high even in the industrialized nations. In 2001, for instance, teenage birth rate for the US was reported to be 52.1 per a thousand births; the highest (up to five times higher than Europe’s) teen birth rate among developed countries (UNICEF 2). In 2006, one in every ten children born in the United States was born to an adolescent mother. These figures had a positive side in the fact that they represented a downward trend in the rates of teenage pregnancies. In regard to this, between 1990 and 2005 teenage pregnancies dropped by 40 percent (from 116.8 per 1000 births to 70.6 per 1,000 births) (Ventura et al. 6). However, beginning 2006 the rates have been on an upward trend again. How teen pregnancies affect cost, quality and access of healthcare Substantial costs are incurred by public authorities both at state and national levels in efforts to provide for the significant needs of teen mothers and their children. This is because of the fact that even at subsequent stages of their lives, adolescent mothers for the reasons that they are highly likely to drop out of school, remain unmarried and to raise their child or children on their own. Consequently, they are highly likely to earn very low income barely enough to cover for their own needs as well as the needs of their children. According to the American College of Obstetricians and Gynecologists (ACOG) (4), this places them at great need of social services and other public assistance programs as well, and has consequently led to higher rates of enrollment of teen mothers in Medicaid upon deliver compared to the rates of older mothers. In 2004 alone, an estimated nine billion dollars was incurred by public authorities in the US to cater for costs linked to adolescent motherhood. This estimate, as intriguing as it is, was hardly all-inclusive as it factored a small portion of categories of costs; health care for the children, foster care, incarceration, lost revenues from unpaid tax, and public assistanc