11 Facts About Teen Pregnancy

1. 3 in 10 teen American girls will get pregnant at least once before age 20. That’s nearly 750,000 teen pregnancies every year.
2. Parenthood is the leading reason that teen girls drop out of school. More than half of teen mothers never graduate from high school.
3. Less than 2 percent of teen moms earn a college degree by age 30.
4. About a quarter of teen moms have a second child within 24 months of their first baby.
5. The United States has one of the highest teen pregnancy rates in the western industrialized world.
6. From 1990 to 2008, the teen pregnancy rate decreased 42 percent (from 117 to 68 pregnancies per 1,000 teen girls).
7. 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. 8 out of 10 teen dads don’t marry the mother of their child.
9. A sexually active teen who doesn’t use contraceptives has a 90 percent chance of becoming pregnant within a year.
10. Almost 50 percent of teens have never considered how a pregnancy would affect their lives.
11. 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

Sources: The National Campaign to Prevent Teen and Unplanned Pregnancy, StayTeen.org, thenationalcampaign.org, CDC, Guttmacher Institute