A new study suggests that teenage pregnancy may increase the chances of an early death. Canadian researchers show that women who became pregnant as teenagers are more likely to die before turning 31.
“The younger the person was when they became pregnant, the greater the risk of premature death,” The main author of the study, Doctor Joel Ray, an obstetrician at St. Michael’s Hospital in Toronto, shared with the New York Times. “Some people will argue that we shouldn’t judge, but I think instinctively we always know that we are too young to get pregnant.”
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The study, published on March 14 in JAMA Network Open, used a health insurance registry to monitor the pregnancy among 2 million teenagers in Ontario, Canada. The database included girls aged 12 and over. Those who had a teenage pregnancy before age 16 had the highest rate of early mortality.
Even after taking into account other problems such as health, economic and educational issues, teenagers who carried their pregnancies to term are twice as susceptible to early death. The situation was equally serious for teenagers who had ectopic pregnancies, in which the fertilized egg grows outside the uterus, or pregnancies that ended in stillbirths or miscarriages.
The researchers noted that although the risks decreased somewhat for women who terminated their pregnancies during their teenage years, there was still a 40% greater likelihood of premature death compared to those who did not become pregnant during this period. Additionally, they observed that women who had a teenage pregnancy had a higher rate of a history of self-harm between the ages of 12 and 19 compared to those who did not become pregnant.
The researchers also found that those who had a teenage pregnancy were more likely to reside in lower-income neighborhoods and in an area with lower high school completion. The average age of participants after the follow-up period was 25 years for women without teenage pregnancy and 31 years for participants with teenage pregnancy.
Among adolescents with no history of pregnancy, there were 1.90 deaths for every 10,000 adolescents per year. For women who became pregnant once as a teenager, there were 4.10 deaths per 10,000 teenagers per year. For those with multiple teenage pregnancies, there were 6.10 deaths per 10,000 adolescents per year.
