Sexual health: teenage pregnancy

Discussion of this topic can be found on page 32 of Scotland's Sexual Health Information (SSHI) Report.

The teenage pregnancy rate is counted as the number of deliveries combined with the number of abortions. It does not include miscarriages. Available information is used to estimate the woman's age at the likely time of conception. 

The teenage pregnancy rate has been fairly steady for the past decade. In 2007 there were 58.6 pregnancies per 1000 females aged below 20 (denominator is females aged 15-19) and 8.1 pregnancies per 1000 females aged below 16 (denominator is females aged 13-15).  There have been some changes in the balance between teenage pregnancies which are aborted and pregnancies which are delivered. Over recent years, there has been a slight rise in the rate of abortions in all the teenage age groups.

There is a strong deprivation gradient. The most deprived groups have over eight times the rate of delivery as the least deprived, and close to twice the rate of abortion. These proportions have varied little since 2000, and do not vary much with age.  There are considerable variations in teenage pregnancy rates between different geographical areas. For the NHS Boards, Tayside has a consistently high rate.

The national target for teenage pregnancy reduction is to reduce by 20% the pregnancy rate (per 1000 population) in under 16 year olds from 8.5 in 1995 to 6.8 in 2010. 

For more information on this topic, see ISD teenage pregnancy website.

Please note: If you require the most up-to-date data available, please check the data sources directly as new data may have been published since these data pages were last updated. Although we endeavour to ensure that the data pages are kept up-to-date, there may be a time lag between new data being published and the relevant ScotPHO web pages being updated.