
- 3 in 10 teen American girls will get pregnant at least once before age 20. That’s nearly 750,000 teen pregnancies every year.
- Parenthood is the leading reason that teen girls drop out of school. More than half of teen mothers never graduate from high school.
- Less than 2 percent of teen moms earn a college degree by age 30.
- About a quarter of teen moms have a second child within 24 months of their first baby.
- The United States has one of the highest teen pregnancy rates in the western industrialized world.
- From 1990 to 2008, the teen pregnancy rate decreased 42 percent (from 117 to 68 pregnancies per 1,000 teen girls).
- In 2008 the teen pregnancy rate among African-American and Hispanic teen girls, age 15 to 19, was over two and a half times higher than the teen pregnancy rate among white teen girls of the same age group.
- 8 out of 10 teen dads don’t marry the mother of their child.
- A sexually active teen who doesn’t use contraceptives has a 90 percent chance of becoming pregnant within a year.
- Almost 50 percent of teens have never considered how a pregnancy would affect their lives.
- Teens had fewer babies in 2010 than in any year since the mid-1940s.
Got a question about teen pregnancies? Check out our interview with pregnancy expert, Jessica Sheets. GO [1]
Sources: The National Campaign to Prevent Teen and Unplanned Pregnancy [2], StayTeen.org [3], thenationalcampaign.org [4], CDC [5], Guttmacher Institute [6]