Teenage pregnancy rate falls to record low

The conception rate among under 18s in England and Wales has fallen to its lowest level in over 40 years, to 22.9 conceptions in every 1000 young women aged 15-17.

Figures from the Office for National Statistics show that the conception rate in under 18s peaked in 1971, at 54.9 in 1000 women. It then dropped throughout the 1970s and rose again through the 1980s, until it peaked at 47.1 per 1000 in 1998. From that time the rate began to fall, dropping sharply since 2007, when the rate was 41.6 per 1000.

The estimated number of conceptions in women under 18 fell from 24 306 in 2013 to 22 653 in 2014.

“In most developed countries, women have been increasingly delaying childbearing to later in life, which has resulted in increases in the mean age at first birth and rising fertility rates among older women,” the ONS said in its report.

It added that the delay in childbearing may be due to a number of factors such as increased participation in higher education, increased female participation in the labour force, the increasing importance of a career, the rising costs of childbearing, labour market uncertainty, housing factors, and the instability of partners.

A spokeswoman for the sexual health charity, FPA, welcomed the year-on-year decrease and said: “It shows that messages about safer sex are getting through to young people, and that they are able to access contraceptive services.

“The government’s 10-year teenage pregnancy strategy, which ended in 2010, had a huge impact in England and since then, successive governments have kept teenage pregnancy as a priority.

Ann Furedi, the chief executive of the British Pregnancy Advisory Service, said the decline in the number of teenage births was due in part “to the huge improvements we’ve seen in contraception advice and services for younger women, with straightforward access to abortion services when their chosen method lets them down” .

She added: “Women are often warned about the dangers of leaving it ‘too late’ to try for a family, and this data confirms that far from facing a fertility cliff-edge at age 35, women still have a good chance of conceiving. We hope this provides some reassurance to them.”

Previous data has shown that the UK birth rate among 15- to 19-year-olds in 2012 was higher than the rest of the EU, at 19.7 births per 1,000 women, compared with 12.6 births in the rest of the EU. However, the UK rate has fallen by more than a quarter (26.8%) since 2004 compared with a fall of almost one-fifth (18.2%) in other EU countries over the same period.

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