There are too many adolescent mothers bearing children in Bangladesh, thanks to an uptick in child marriage, finds a government survey published this week.
Currently, almost a fourth of newborns in Bangladesh are children of adolescent mothers falling within the 15-19 years age group.
According to the final outcome of Bangladesh Sample Vital Statistics 2023 released by Bangladesh Bureau of Statistics (BBS) on Sunday, of every 100 cases of pregnancies in the country, over 25 pregnancies occur in the case of adolescents aged as low as 15 years to 19 years.
This high percentage of adolescent childbearing appears to be linked with an increasing rate of child marriage in the country.
The latest BBS findings are a testimony to that correlation.
Among Bangladeshi women between 20 and 24 years of age now, the percentage of their getting married before reaching 18 years of age rose from 40.9 in 2022 to 41.6 in 2023.
And the percentage of children getting married even before reaching the age of 15 years surged from 6.5% in 2022 to 8.2% in 2023, shows the BBS conducted Bangladesh Sample Vital Statistics.
It notes that though incidents of child marriage showed a little improvement in urban neighbourhoods, dropping from 34.9% in 2022 to 33.5% last year, a reverse trend is noticed in rural Bangladesh, surging from 42.9% in 2022 to 44.4% last year, thereby pushing high the national average.
Bangladesh enacted a new child marriage restraint law in 2017, replacing the British-era law, Child Marriage Restraint Act 1929, but civil society members decried the inclusion of a provision in the new law allowing marriages below 18 years of age in special situations under certain conditions. A protracted period of the Covid-19 pandemic has also been attributed to the rise in child marriage in Bangladesh in recent years.
High number of child births from adolescents
Unicef statistics show that women in Bangladesh (who are in the 20-24 years age group) gave 24.2% child births before they had reached 18 years of age.
This rate is 20.4% in Afghanistan, 13.8% in Nepal, 8.3% in India and 7.4% in Pakistan.
Meanwhile, the BBS study says, 25.92% of total pregnancies occurred among adolescents between the ages of 10 and 19 years in 2023 and as an outcome of such adolescent pregnancies, 10% of those have been lost either through miscarriage or abortion.
According to a paper, titled “Determinants of Adolescent Childbearing in Bangladesh”, published in Journal of Child and Adolescent Behavior, approximately 17 million adolescent pregnancies occur annually worldwide, accounting for 11% of all births. Among adolescent pregnancies, 95% occur in low- and middle-income countries, perpetuating cycles of ill-health and poverty. The burden is particularly high in the Southeast Asia region, which accounts for 35.5% (6 million) of adolescent pregnancies.
It notes, around one fourth of all pregnancies occurred in the adolescent age in Bangladesh, caused by various individual, household and community-level factors. Proper education and increasing awareness about the adverse effects of adolescent pregnancy are necessary to reduce occurrence of adolescent pregnancy in Bangladesh. It finds early marriage a key factor contributing to adolescent pregnancies in Bangladesh.
In a recent development, in its pursuit to address the high prevalence of anaemia in adolescent girls and women and high prevalence of low birthweight in infants, Unicef has decided to include Bangladesh in a group of 16 countries where the UN agency and partners are launching an “Acceleration Plan to Prevent Anaemia and Malnutrition in Women.”
It aims to fast-track the delivery of a package of essential services across 16 priority countries: Afghanistan, Bangladesh, the Bolivarian Republic of Venezuela, Burkina Faso, Ethiopia, Madagascar, Mongolia, Myanmar, Nepal, Nigeria, Pakistan, the Philippines, Rwanda, Somalia, Sri Lanka and the United Republic of Tanzania. By the end of 2025, 16 million pregnant adolescent girls and women are expected to receive the package of nutrition services, including MMS.
According to Plan International, globally 12 million girls marry before the age of 18 each year – almost one every 2 seconds and “if we don’t act now, more than 150 million girls will become child brides by 2030.”
Among girls growing up in South Asia, 30% experience early marriage, compared with 25% in Latin America and the Caribbean. The figures are 17% in the Middle East and North Africa, and 11% in Eastern Europe and Central Asia.
