The number of teenagers giving birth in England and Wales is at its lowest level in nearly 70 years, official figures have shown.
The Office for National Statistics said 25,977 women under 20 had babies in the two countries last year, the fewest since 1946.
The ONS data (pdf), published on Wednesday, reveals that pregnancies decreased in all age groups under 30 in 2014, bringing the average age of mothers in England and Wales to 30.2 – a 0.2% rise on 2013.
“In most developed countries, women have been increasingly delaying childbearing to later in life, which has resulted in increases in the mean age at first birth and rising fertility rates among older women,” the ONS said in its report.
It added that the delay in childbearing may be due to a number of factors such as increased participation in higher education, increased female participation in the labour force, the increasing importance of a career, the rising costs of childbearing, labour market uncertainty, housing factors, and the instability of partners.
A spokeswoman for the sexual health charity, FPA, welcomed the year-on-year decrease and said: “It shows that messages about safer sex are getting through to young people, and that they are able to access contraceptive services.
“The government’s 10-year teenage pregnancy strategy, which ended in 2010, had a huge impact in England and since then, successive governments have kept teenage pregnancy as a priority.
“However, there are still direct links between teenage pregnancy rates and levels of deprivation which need addressing, young people continue to miss out on quality sex and relationships education, and the UK as a whole lags behind the most of Europe in its efforts to reduce teenage pregnancy.”
Ann Furedi, the chief executive of the British Pregnancy Advisory Service, said the decline in the number of teenage births was due in part “to the huge improvements we’ve seen in contraception advice and services for younger women, with straightforward access to abortion services when their chosen method lets them down” .
She added: “Women are often warned about the dangers of leaving it ‘too late’ to try for a family, and this data confirms that far from facing a fertility cliff-edge at age 35, women still have a good chance of conceiving. We hope this provides some reassurance to them.”
Previous data has shown that the UK birth rate among 15- to 19-year-olds in 2012 was higher than the rest of the EU, at 19.7 births per 1,000 women, compared with 12.6 births in the rest of the EU. However, the UK rate has fallen by more than a quarter (26.8%) since 2004 compared with a fall of almost one-fifth (18.2%) in other EU countries over the same period.
This has been good news for the government, which uses teenage conception rates to measure the progress of child poverty in the UK. According to the ONS, teenage pregnancy and childbirth is regarded as a major contributor to death rates among both mothers and children, as well as to the cycle of ill-health and poverty. This is largely due to the socio-economic factors associated with teenage pregnancy, rather than the biological effects of young maternal age.
Overall, 695,233 births were recorded in the England and Wales in 2014, a fall of 3,279 on the previous year. Out of those, 27% were to mothers born outside the UK, a slight rise on 26% in 2013.
• This article was amended on 16 July 2015. An earlier version referred in few places to the UK where England and Wales was meant, and to pregnancies where it should have said births.
