More teenage girls in the United States and United Kingdom become pregnant than anywhere else in the developed world, because they are poorly prepared for life in a modern and sexualised society, says a report out this week.
The United States has topped a table of teenage pregnancy rates put together by Unicef's Innocenti Research Centre in Italy, which looked at births among teenagers in 28 of the world's wealthiest nations.
Altogether, 52 out of every 1000 girls aged between 15 and 19 in the United States gave birth, while the United Kingdom topped the list in Europe—and came second overall—with just over 30 births in 1000 teenagers. At the other end of the scale Korea, Japan, Switzerland, the Netherlands, and Sweden had a rate of less than seven births per 1000 teenagers.
The researchers estimated that in the next 12 months at least 1.25 million teenagers in the world's wealthiest countries will become pregnant and three quarters of a million will become mothers. And, according to specially commissioned research from the University of Essex, teenagers who keep their baby are twice as likely to end up living in poverty than those who delay motherhood.
The eightfold difference in birth rates can be partly explained, the report says, by the move away from traditional family values in some countries to what the researchers call a “socio-sexual transformation” where sexual imagery permeates all aspects of life and teenagers are under greater pressure to experiment with sex. But the report adds that equally important is how these countries prepare their young people to cope with modern life.
Some countries, such as Sweden, the Netherlands, Denmark, Finland, and France, have “travelled far down the road from traditional values”, but they have also made “successful efforts to prepare their young people to cope with a more sexualised society.”
By comparison the United States and the United Kingdom are secretive and embarrassed about contraceptive services. After interviewing young people about sexual services, the UK government's Social Exclusion Unit concluded: “The universal message received from young people is that the sex and relationship education they receive falls far short of what they would like to equip them for managing relations as they grow into adulthood.”
By tackling teenage births governments have the chance to reduce poverty and its “perpetuation from one generation to the next”, says the report. 
Footnotes
The report is at www.unicef-icdc.org