Every year in France, several thousand teenage girls become mothers. This choice of early motherhood is not easy to assume, and it requires understanding, support and kindness. Our experts’ views on teenage pregnancies and the challenges young mothers face.
What are the causes of early pregnancy?
“Not controlling your fertility is seen as a fault, regardless of age,” observes Caroline Rebhi, head of the family planning sexuality education commission. But we forget three things, she continues:
“Inappropriate contraception, such as a pill given automatically to a young girl who will forget it, can lead to contraceptive failure;
There is an element of risk-taking among adolescents;
Sexuality education at school remains insufficient”. This is particularly the case for boys who do not have the equivalent of a gynecologist talking about it. “A large number of them think, for example, the risk-free withdrawal method, when it leads to 22% failure,” she says.
In developing countries such as Africa or South-East Asia, it is this lack of information as well as “the lack of sex education, but also forced marriages, sexual abuse, lack of access contraception, the ban on abortion” which explains the high rate of teenage pregnancies (Source 1).
Sexual violence is another cause of unwanted pregnancy in some developing countries. This is very widespread: “more than a third of young girls declaring, in certain countries, that their first sexual intercourse took place under duress”, reports the WHO
