In Developing Regions, Greater Investment Is Needed to Help Adolescents Prevent Unintended Pregnancy
Nov 9, 2018
20 Million Adolescent Women Have an Unmet Need for Modern Contraception
Ensuring that adolescent women are able to choose whether and when to have children is crucial to their sexual and reproductive health, yet new data published today by the Guttmacher Institute show that contraceptive services in developing regions fall short of meeting adolescents’ needs. The new data, published in a series of fact sheets, indicate that as of 2017, an estimated 36 million young women aged 15–19 in developing regions are married or sexually active and want to avoid becoming pregnant in the next two years. Yet the majority of this group—20 million adolescents—are not using a modern contraceptive method and thus have an unmet need for modern contraception. Most adolescent women with unmet need are using no contraceptive method (85%), while the remaining 15% are using traditional methods, such as withdrawal or periodic abstinence, which are less effective than modern methods.
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