Number of women pregnant in their 40s doubles in 20 years
RECORD numbers of women in their forties are conceiving while the pregnancy rate among teenagers has plunged, figures have revealed.
The switch away from teenage to older pregnancies has followed historic changes in the way millions of women lead their lives, experts said.
Pregnancies among girls under 18 more than halved in number between 2010 and 2017, from 34,633 to 16,740, the office for national Statistics (onS) said in its latest report. But over the past two decades the number of women over 40 who became pregnant has more then doubled.
There were 28,793 pregnancies in the over-40 group in 2017 – more than double the 14,115 pregnancies recorded in 1996, when the rate was 8.4 for every 1,000 women aged 40-plus. The rate is now 15.8 for every 1,000 women in the age group.
The rate of under-18s getting pregnant in 2017 was 17.9 for every 1,000 in the age group, down from 41.6 per 1,000 recorded a decade earlier, a rate little changed during the 2000s. The figures, released yesterday, also showed a rise in the share of pregnancies that end in abortion.
more than one in five (22.7 per cent) of the 847,204 conceptions in england and Wales in 2017 ended in a legal abortion, with most carried out for women who were single or living in unmarried cohabiting relationships.
The figures showed almost a third of unmarried pregnancies ending in abortion (32.6 per cent) compared to well under one in ten pregnancies among married women (8.6 per cent).
only 41.3 per cent of the conceptions occurred within marriage and the total number of pregnancies was down 1.8 per cent on the year before.
The changing balance of age and pregnancy has occurred as women are more likely to delay having a family because of the call of careers, the need to earn high salaries to pay mortgages or rent and because of the difficulty in finding a stable relationship with a father, the onS said.
Among the ‘Facebook generation’ of teenagers, many aspire to education and career rather than forming families, and the onS report said there was ‘stigma associated with being a teenage mother’. Kathryn littleboy, of the onS, said that ‘ increased participation in higher education’ was a cause of lower pregnancies among younger women, alongside ‘improved sex and relationships education and better access to contraceptives.’
However this second claim has its critics who say there was no significant drop in teen pregnancy until ten years after Tony Blair launched his Teenage Pregnancy Strategy in 1999. Professor David Paton, of nottingham University Business School, said: ‘There is no evidence that easier access to contraceptives or improved sex and relationships education have any impact on teenage pregnancy rates.
‘We do know that education is very important so it is quite likely that increased participation rates in further and higher education have contributed to the downturn. The decline in teenage pregnancies over the past ten years has coincided with steep cuts to sexual health services around the country.
‘As a result there has been a reduction of 70 per cent in the number of under-16s accessing these services in the past ten years. That this period has coincided with such a drop in teenage pregnancies is pretty clear evidence that providing contraction to underage children has not caused the decrease.’
The past decade has also seen large reductions in the level of drinking, smoking and drugtaking among young people, a decline that some have linked with the powerful influence of social media in teenage lives.
‘Stigma around teenage mothers’