Tony Blair's coming in for a lot of stick lately. But one of his government's long term targets, set in 1999, has surprisingly been met. And only a few years late. The ambitious target was to halve teenage (strictly speaking under 18) pregnancies by 2010, but it has just been achieved. But don't give government the credit....
The data (link to Office for National Statistics publication) showing “an extraordinary achievement” was published on 9 March. It shows that 23 young women aged under 18 out of every 1,000 became pregnant in 2014, compared with 47 out of 1,000 in 1998. There are "striking" regional differences, mind.
There is no doubt that a lot of work has gone into education in particular in pursuit of this objective, described in some detail in a government review covering the period to 2010 (see The Teenage Pregnancy Strategy - what we did and what we learned at https://goo.gl/iL40u0 - a rather dry powerpoint even compared with the ones I used to sit through). At that point the reduction in "teen" pregnancies was 25% (35% reduction in those leading to births) to what was then the lowest rate in over 40 years.
"Try wearing a cap" sang the Specials. But the reduction apparently isn't due to better availability of contraception. It's all due to social media, say the Daily Telegraph (http://goo.gl/Csj5Pm). The graph published there shows the teen pregnancy rate going down sharply from 2007, the year after Facebook expanded beyond university campuses. Young people are simply spending less time physically in each other’s company since the social media phenomenon went global.
And it's not just teenage pregnancies that are down. Figures published by the Office for National Statistics in February showed that the number of under-25s opting for total abstinence from drink had leapt by 40 per cent in just eight years, which looks like an almost identical pattern and timescale. Young people have overtaken the elderly as the most sober generation. More than a quarter of young people do not drink alcohol at all and binge drinking is also in decline.
"Life is a drink and you get drunk when you're young" sang Paul Weller in the 1970s. Not as much these days apparently.
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