Although the U.S. teen birth rate has declined each of the last five years, it is still the highest in the industrialized world. In 1996 alone there were 11,148 births to girls under the age of 15, and in that year one quarter of all teen births were not first births. The consequences of teenage pregnancy and childbirth are devastating to both mothers and babies.
Many teenage mothers end up raising their children alone in poverty.
Children born to teen mothers are at risk of premature birth, low birth weight, lower academic achievement, more behavior and emotional problems, and greater likelihood of becoming teenage parents themselves. The fathers of babies born to adolescent mothers are likely to be older than the young women. About 1 in 5 infants born to unmarried minors are fathered by men 5 or more years older than the mother. The average age of marriage in the U.S. has been increasing steadily in recent decades and the age of menarche has been slowly going down, creating a longer period between puberty and marriage. While most experts suggest that it is unrealistic to expect abstinence until marriage, policy makers are increasingly adopting abstinence-only education as their primary pregnancy prevention strategy despite the lack of evidence backing this approach.