Ecuador among the countries with the highest rate of adolescent fertility

The first regional Conference on population and development will be held between the 12th and 15th of August in the Uruguayan capital, Montevideo, organized by the Economic Commission for Latin America and the Caribbean (ECLAC), thanks to the support of the Population Fund (UNFPA).

The meeting aims to review and update the agenda established at the International Conference on population and development (ICPD) held in 1994 in Cairo, where 179 countries gathered and adopted a programme of action with a 20 year horizon.

Among the issues that most concern is the  adolescent fertility, since “in the majority of countries with available data, there has been an increase in the percentage of young mothers between 1990 and 2010 (12 of 18 countries)”.

During the last decade 10 of 18 countries suffered increases in adolescent fertility (Argentina, Bolivia, Colombia, Ecuador, Guatemala, Mexico, Dominican Republic, Nicaragua, Peru and Venezuela), although in the last three in a marginal way.

This reality  has prompted in Ecuador, public campaigns of prevention: despite the economic stability that the current Government of Rafael Correa has achieved and the decrease of  rates of some social problems, pregnancies in teenagers persist. Two weeks ago, the birth of a child from a 12 year-old girl in the  Pajan Canton, in Manabi, was a prominent headline in the media.

The problem of early pregnancies is of general concern and in the last presidential campaign, Annabella Azín, who is a doctor in medicine and as candidate to the Vice-Presidency of the Republic as her husband’s binomial, businessman Álvaro Noboa Pontón, pledged to work on programs to reduce pregnancies in adolescents, because of the high rates of the country.