The daughters of teen mothers are 22% more likely to become teen mothers themselves. In addition, the children of teen mothers are at greater risk of abuse and neglect than children born to older parents. Children of teen mothers tend to have lower birth weights and are more likely to perform poorly in school. The sons of teen mothers are 13% more likely to end up in prison.
The vast majority -- approximately 85% -- of teen pregnancies are unplanned and 79% are to unmarried teens.
About 20% of the fathers marry the teen mothers of their first children. And, on average, the remaining 80 percent pay less than $800 annually for child support -- that is less than $16 a week.
Less than one-third of teens who have children before age 18 ever get their high school diploma.
About 4 in 10 girls in the United States will become pregnant at least once before the age of 20 -- almost 1 million a year.
In a recent poll conducted by the National Campaign, 63 percent of teens who have had sexual intercourse said they wish they had waited. (In the poll, 55 percent of teen boys and 72 percent of teen girls said they wished they had waited to have sex.).
If you have unprotected sex, you have an 85 percent chance of becoming pregnant within one year.
The only 100 percent way to be sure you do not get pregnant or get somebody pregnant is not to have sex. Contraception (i.e., condoms, birth control pills, Depo-Provera, etc.) helps to prevent pregnancy if you use it correctly and every single time you have sex, but no contraceptive method is 100 percent effective except abstinence. .
Not everyone is doing it. Recent data show that about half of high school students report having had sexual intercourse while half report that they are virgins.
• A quarter of sexually active teenage girls become pregnant.
• About six percent of babies born in Australia (or 15,000 of them) had teenage mothers (based on 1990 statistics).
