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Main article: Global incidence of teenage pregnancy

A report by Save the Children found that, annually, 13 million children are born to women under age 20 worldwide, more than 90% in developing countries. Complications of pregnancy and childbirth are the leading cause of mortality among women between the ages of 15 and 19 in such areas.[4] The highest rate of teenage pregnancy in the world is in sub-Saharan Africa, where women tend to marry at an early age.[2] In Niger, for example, 87% of women surveyed were married and 53% had given birth to a child before the age of 18.[9] In South Africa, it is believed that this problem of teenage pregnancies is the result of introducing child support grant in 1999.[citation needed]

In the Indian subcontinent, early marriage sometimes means adolescent pregnancy, particularly in rural regions where the rate is much higher than it is in urbanized areas. The rate of early marriage and pregnancy has decreased sharply in Indonesia and Malaysia, although it remains relatively high. In the industrialized Asian nations such as South Korea and Singapore, teenage birth rates are among the lowest in the world.[10]

The overall trend in Europe since 1970 has been a decreasing total fertility rate, an increase in the age at which women experience their first birth, and a decrease in the number of births among teenagers. The United Kingdom, which has the highest teenage birth rate in Europe, also has a higher rate of abortion than most European countries. In contrast, most continental Western European countries have very low rates. This is varyingly attributed to good sex education and high levels of contraceptive use (in the case of the Netherlands and Scandinavia), traditional values and social stigmatization (in the case of Italy and Spain) or both (in the case of Switzerland).[3]

The teenage pregnancy rate was actually at an all time high in the 1950s. The increase in teenage...