Teenage pregnancy can be a cause of death

Teen pregnancy can change the trajectory of a person’s life, but now a new study suggests it could also shorten that life, HealthDay News says.

Canadian researchers report that women who were pregnant as teenagers were more likely to die before they turned 31.

“The younger the person was when they became pregnant, the greater their risk of premature death,” the study’s first author, Dr. Joel Ray, a specialist in obstetric medicine at St. Michael’s Hospital in Toronto, told the New York Times. “Some people will argue that we shouldn’t judge this, but I think we’ve always known intuitively that there is an age that is too early for pregnancy.”

The study, published in the March 14 issue of JAMA Network Open, used a health insurance registry to track pregnancy outcomes among just over 2 million teenagers in Ontario, Canada. That database included all girls who were 12 years old between April 1991 and March 2021.

Even after weighing confounding factors such as other health problems, income and education, teens who carried pregnancies to term were more than twice as likely to suffer an early death.

The picture was just as dire for teens who had ectopic pregnancies, in which the fertilized egg grows outside the uterus, or pregnancies that ended in stillbirth or miscarriage.

Although the risks were reduced somewhat among women who had terminated a pregnancy as a teenager, those women were still 40 percent more likely to die prematurely, compared to those who had not been pregnant as a teenager.

Still, the highest odds of premature death were seen among women who became pregnant before age 16 and those who were pregnant more than once as a teenager.

What exactly cut their lives short?

Injuries, both assault and self-inflicted, were most often the direct reasons for premature death, the analysis found.

Women who had been pregnant as teenagers were more than twice as likely to die young from an unintentional injury, while they were twice as likely to die from a self-inflicted injury.

Elizabeth Cook, a scientist at Child Trends, a youth-focused research organization, noted in a commentary accompanying the study that teen pregnancy may not actually be a causal factor in premature mortality.

Instead, it may reflect a number of other influences, including adverse childhood experiences, that increase the odds of premature death. Still, teen pregnancy itself may be a contributing factor.

“Teens who become pregnant often experience stigmatization and isolation that can make it more difficult to thrive in adulthood, especially if they lack the support needed to make such an important decision,” Cook wrote.

The findings “are a sobering reminder that pregnant teens should be encouraged, rather than judged for their decisions, to make decisions they believe are best for themselves and to be connected to support services to help them receive medical care.” “Teen-friendly, complete your education, learn about healthy relationships, and receive mentorship from compassionate people.”