The teenage pregnancy rate in the Dominican Republic (19.7%) is second only to Nicaragua (19.9%), according to a new report published by the Economic Commission for Latin America and the Caribbean (ECLAC) released yesterday, Thursday 13 November 2014. This compares to the teenage pregnancy rate in Western Europe, which is around 2%.
ECLAC stresses the need for sex education and reproductive health services to be made a public policy priority. It points out that nearly 30% of young women in Latin America become mothers before the age of 20 and most are socio-economically underprivileged, which perpetuates the intergenerational reproduction of poverty, and hinders women’s autonomy and life projects.
A recently published study “Reproduction in Adolescence and its Inequalities in Latin America” (only available in Spanish) shows that the proportion of mothers between the ages of 15 and 19 in relation to the total adult female population has remained steady over the past 20 years.
This early teenage pregnancy rate is reflected in the fact that nearly 17.5% of all babies in Latin America and the Caribbean are born to teenagers, a higher rate than in Sub-Saharan Africa (15%) and the global average (11.2%).
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