Brazil’s teen pregnancy rate is plummeting: what can other countries learn from it?

For decades Brazil has struggled to bring down its stubbornly high rate of teenage pregnancy. The country has nearly twice as many adolescent births as the average upper middle income nation, and its absolute numbers are enormous owing to a population of 210 million. In 2015 alone 547 000 Brazilian mothers aged under 20 gave birth, 26 000 of them girls under 15.12

Adolescent births are driven by inequality and perpetuate it—so, in a nation as unequal as Brazil, this is one of the country’s largest health and socioeconomic issues. High rates of teenage pregnancy disproportionately affect the poorest communities, where they worsen already limited educational and economic opportunities for young mothers and increase the risk of maternal and infant health complications. Both the covid pandemic and ongoing moves to water down sex education in recent years have sparked fears that Brazil could take a step backwards, leading to more girls getting married, dropping out of school, or losing their lives in clandestine abortion clinics.

“It really is a public health crisis,” says Denise Leite Maia Monteiro, who heads the Brazilian Association of Obstetrics and Gynecology for Childhood and Adolescence. “If we want to achieve the [World Health Organization’s] sustainable development goals by 2030 we need to combat inequalities and invest in implementing policies focused on adolescent sexual and reproductive health.”