Teen Pregnancy Rates

Data used to calculate teen pregnancy rates comes from a variety of sources and is usually evaluated within different categories, such as age, state and spans of time. A report published in January 2010 by the Guttmacher Institute compares national and state data from 1972 to 2006 concerning teen pregnancy, births, abortions and miscarriages. All statistics below are from that report.

It wasn't until the 1990s, when teen pregnancy started to take the first decline in decades, due to an increase in the practice of abstinence and use to contraception. Between 2005 and 2006, however, the pregnancy rate increased.

In 2006, about 7 percent of women between the ages of 15 and 19 became pregnant, which is equivalent to about 750,000 women. This was an increase from the previous year, in which the pregnancy rate was the lowest in 30 years. Between the five-year span of 2000 to 2005, pregnancy rates declined in every state except North Dakota. However, North Dakota has one of the lowest pregnancy rates in the nation, along with New Hampshire, Vermont, Maine and Minnesota. States with the highest teen pregnancy rates are: New Mexico, Nevada, Arizona, Texas and Mississippi.

Teen pregnancy rates are a product of education. While adoption benefits from an increase birth rate, there are hundreds of lives unnecessarily changed by unplanned pregnancy every day in every state.