Elsevier

Journal of Adolescent Health

Volume 47, Issue 3, September 2010, Pages 312-314
Journal of Adolescent Health

Adolescent health brief
Unintended Pregnancy Among U.S. Adolescents: Accounting for Sexual Activity

https://doi.org/10.1016/j.jadohealth.2010.02.002Get rights and content

Abstract

Unintended pregnancy rates typically include all women in the denominator. This understates adolescent rates because many adolescents are not sexually active. When rates are recalculated including only sexually active people, adolescents aged 15–19 years have the highest rates, arguing for a continued focus on adolescents in efforts to reduce unintended pregnancy.

Section snippets

Methods

This analysis builds on a previous study looking at unintended pregnancy nationally and among various demographic subgroups. The primary methodology is described in detail elsewhere [1]. Briefly, data from the 2002 National Survey of Family Growth (NSFG) were used to determine the proportion of births and fetal losses to each subgroup of women that were unintended over a 5-year period ending in 2001. These proportions were applied to the actual number of births and the estimated number of fetal

Results

Figure 1 shows the proportion of women in each age group who had been sexually active in the past year. As expected, percentages were lowest for teen women, and relatively low for women aged 20–24 years, whereas there were few differences among women aged 25 and older, of whom approximately 90% had been sexually active in the past year.

Figure 2 shows traditional unintended pregnancy rates alongside the newly calculated rates. For all women, the rate is 51 per 1,000, compared with 69 per 1,000

Discussion

Traditional estimates of unintended pregnancy understate the extent to which sexually active adolescents experience such pregnancies relative to older women. Rates for adolescents aged 15–17 years are substantially understated, and a clear difference between women aged 18–19 and 20–24 years is obscured when only traditional rates are examined. This is not to say that the problem among those aged ≥ 20 years should be downplayed or efforts to address them should be discontinued. Indeed, there are

Acknowledgments

The author thanks Heather Boonstra, Rachel Jones, Kathryn Kost, and Stanley Henshaw for reviewing earlier drafts of this article. This work was supported by general support grants from the William and Flora Hewlett Foundation, the David and Lucile Packard Foundation, and the Ford Foundation.

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