Adolescent Birth Rates: Comparing the Standard with the Conditional Unintended Birth Rate across Age Groups

Jewel Gausman, Guttmacher Institute
Jessica Rosenberg, Guttmacher Institute
Jonathan Bearak, Guttmacher Insitute

Adolescents are at a high risk of unintended births due to various factors ranging from reduced access to contraceptives to higher risks of sexual violence. Traditionally, the standard unintended birth rate is calculated as the number of unintended births over the total population of women. However, rates constructed using this approach may obscure age-related differences in women’s success in achieving their fertility intentions, as the standard approach includes women who desire a birth and those who are not at risk of pregnancy. We have previously reported on the conditional unintended pregnancy rate, which includes only women wishing to avoid pregnancy in the denominator using the construct of contraceptive demand as a proxy. We refine the denominator to include only women at risk of pregnancy who want to stop or space childbearing. Further, we focus on unintended births instead of pregnancies. We compare the proposed conditional unintended birth rate to the standard among married versus unmarried adolescents across regions and over time using Demographic and Health Surveys from 75 low- and middle-income countries conducted between 1985 to 2021. Our results suggest that adolescents wanting to avoid childbearing are less successful than the standard rate suggests, with important geographic and temporal variation.

Keywords: Fertility, Children, Adolescents, and Youth, Data and Methods, Computational social science methods

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