It is a dramatic turnaround: in 1998, England had one of the highest teenage pregnancy rates in western Europe. Last week, the Office for National Statistics released data revealing the fall in the conception rate among females aged 15 to 19 as the standout success story in the public health field: just 14.5 per 1,000 births were to women in their teens, with drops in all age groups under 25.
“It’s the result of an unusually long-term and ambitious strategy launched by the Labour government in 1999,” said Alison Hadley, director of the Teenage Pregnancy Knowledge Exchange at the University of Bedfordshire. “The drive to reduce teenage pregnancy was given 10 years to achieve a 50% fall in under-18 conception rates. Unusually for government schemes, efforts really were sustained for the full 10 years and ambitions weren’t lowered, despite difficulties and slow progress at the start.” [...]
“The two things that would make the biggest difference to regional differences in conception rates are making sex and relationship education compulsory in schools, and engaging with parents. Schools are vital but they can’t do it all. Parents have to be engaged for rates to go down.” [...]
“The conclusion of our paper was that there was a fair wind behind the teenage pregnancy strategy because all over the world rates were dropping,” she said. “The strategy made a big difference but the underlying trend towards fewer early pregnancies has been attributed to increased education, later completion of education and increased access to reliable contraception: long-acting, reversible methods which don’t depend on the reliability of the user.”
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