Teen pregnancies halve since 2008

TEENAGE pregnancy rates have more than halved in eight years, it emerged yesterday.

The likelihood of a girl aged under 18 becoming pregnant dived during years marked by the rise of social media, falling unemployment, and increasing numbers of girls going to university, official figures show.

The Office for National Statistics figures said just over 4,000 girls under 18 became pregnant in England in the three months to the end of September 2016 – 43 per cent of the 9,286 in the same three months of 2008.

This contrasts with the failure of Tony Blair’s well-funded Teenage Pregnancy Strategy, launched in 1998, in which sex education was introduced at a younger age and teenagers were given contraception.

It only managed to cut the teenage pregnancy rate by 7 per cent in ten years, and was abandoned by David Cameron’s government in 2010.

The ONS said the number of teen pregnancies for the 12 months to the end of September 2016 was 18,592, compared with 39,474 in the year to September 2008, and 39,643 in the year to September 1999. Mr Blair

aimed to halve under-18 pregancies from 47.1 for every 1,000 girls in 1998. But by 2008 it was still over 40.

The latest figures show that in the year to September 2016 the rate fell to 19.3, and in the three months to September it fell further to 17.7 for the first time in four decades.

The fall has not been explained, but it follows evidence that drinking, smoking and drug abuse among teenagers are also in steep decline.

Some analysts point to the rise of social media and the increasing focus of teenage girls on going into higher education, careers and good jobs.

Research by Professor David Paton, of Nottingham University Business School, has found that the areas of the country with the biggest cuts in state subsidies for contraception and sex education schemes saw the biggest falls in teen pregnancy.

He said: ‘Since 2008, spending on these teen pregnancy measures has been cut by over 70 per cent.

‘Areas which cut spending on teenage pregnancy the most actually saw the biggest decreases in rates, suggesting that schemes such as those providing the morning-after pill in schools without parental knowledge may have encouraged young people to take more risks.’