Because we don't see it in our faces doesn't mean it doesn't happen a lot in the general population. There is a reason why places like Denver Public Schools have maternity leave for girls. There's a reason why any number of schools now run daycare and nursery facilities. The link between poverty and teen pregnancy has long been connected but if you aren't living in those areas, the whole concept might seem unthinkable. There were more than a handful of girls that I went to school with that were pregnant long before the end of high school and although I hear people constantly pick at the issue of girls getting pregnant to go on welfare - that was not the case in any of those. The youngest that I knew, lived up the street from me, was 14 and in the 8th grade. Her boyfriend was at least 10 years younger and she went on to have a few more kids with him. It was more a case of growing up poor, with poor parental guidance or non guidance, poor neighbourhood - and that's not condemning any of those parents because they themselves could only deal with the cards they held. I grew up in one of those neighbourhoods and seeing a girl pregnant was not a shock - but because it was a poor neighbourhood, with it's own share of problems including violence, it didn't garner a lot of great, compassionate attention from the public. We were the fortunate ones with no pregnancies. sammieswife.
Women exposed to abuse, domestic violence and family strife in childhood are more likely than those without such experiences to have a teenage pregnancy, and the risk increases with the number of adverse childhood experiences. According to a 2004 study, one-third of teenage pregnancies could be prevented by eliminating exposure to abuse, violence and family strife. The researchers note that "family dysfunction has enduring and unfavorable health consequences for women during the adolescent years, the childbearing years, and beyond." When the family environment does not include adverse childhood experiences, becoming pregnant as an adolescent does not appear to raise the likelihood of long-term, negative psychosocial consequences.[46]Studies have also found that boys raised in homes with a battered mother, or who experienced physical violence directly, were significantly more likely to impregnate a girl than boys who had not.[47]
Studies have also found that girls whose fathers left the family earlier in their lives had the highest rates of early sexual activity and adolescent pregnancy. Girls whose fathers left them at a later age had a lower rate, with lowest rates found in girls whose fathers were present throughout their childhood. Even when the researchers took into account other factors that could have contributed to early sexual activity and pregnancy, such as behavioral problems and life adversity, early father-absent girls were still about five times more likely in the United States and three times more likely in New Zealand to experience an adolescent pregnancy than were father-present girls.[48][49]
Low educational expectations have been pinpointed as a risk factor.[50] A girl is also more likely to become a teenage parent if her mother or older sister gave birth in her teens.[51][52]
Foster care youth are more likely than their peers to become pregnant as teenagers. The National Casey Alumni Study, which surveyed foster care alumni from 23 communities across the United States, found the birth rate for girls in foster care was more than double the rate of their peers outside the foster care system. A University of Chicago study of youth transitioning out of foster care in Illinois, Iowa, and Wisconsin found that nearly half of the females had been pregnant by age 19. The Utah Department of Human Services found that girls who had left the foster care system between 1999 and 2004 had a birth rate nearly 3 times the rate for girls in the general population.[53]