Teen pregnancies in Britain at lowest level for 50 years

LONDON - The rate of teenage girls aged under 18 becoming pregnant in England and Wales has fallen to its lowest level since records started half a century ago, the Office for national Statistics (ONS) said Tuesday.

The estimated number of conceptions for young women aged under 18 fell to 18,076 in 2016, compared with 20,351 in 2015, a decrease of 11 percent, giving a conception rate of 18.9 per thousand women aged 15 to 17.

ONS cited stigma of being a teenage mom and girls having higher aspirations in education as reasons for the fall.

The estimated number of conceptions in teens aged under 16 fell to 2,821 in 2016, compared with 3,466 in 2015, marking a decrease of 19 percent.

The conception rate for girls aged 13 to 14 was also the lowest recorded since comparable data began in 1969.

ONS said in 2016, the latest year for which full records are available, there were an estimated 862,785 conceptions amid women of all ages, compared with 876,934 in 2015, a decrease of 1.6 percent.

Conception rates in 2016 decreased for women in all age groups, except for those aged 40 years and over where the rate increased by 2.0 percent, the study added.

The figures show women aged 30 to 34 years had the lowest percentage of conceptions leading to legal abortion (14.2 percent) in 2016, while teens aged under 16 years had the highest percentage (61.5 percent).

ONS statistician Nicola Haines said: "Conception rates for women aged under 18 years in England and Wales hit a record low in 2016, declining by 10 percent since 2015 and 60 percent since 1998. This could be associated with a shift in aspirations for young women towards education, stigma associated with being a teenage mother and program invested in by successive governments."