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At least a quarter of all pregnant women in Mozambique are under 18 years of age, declared Deputy Health Minister Leopoldo da Costa on Wednesday.
He was speaking in the southern city of Matola at a ceremony to mark World Contraception Day, and said that the government regards the situation of teenage pregnancies as extremely worrying.
Costa was citing figures from ante-natal consultations – in the first quarter of this year, he said, 25 per cent of the pregnant women who went for an initial ante-natal consultation in Mozambican health units were less than 18 years old.
But since not all pregnant women go for ante-natal consultations, the real percentage of teenage pregnancies is likely to be considerably higher.
World Contraception Day is an initiative of the UN World Health Organisation (WHO). The motto for this year is: “It happens the first time too – protect yourself from pregnancy”.
Costa said the government has been promoting awareness campaigns to increase the use of contraceptives among adolescents. But the figures from the Ministry of Health are that only 25 out of every 100 women of childbearing age are using modern methods of contraception.
“As a government we continue to promote family planning so as to allow girls and women, boys and men, and couples to choose how many children they want, and when to have them”, said Costa.
One in every two girls aged between 15 and 19 is either pregnant or already a mother, he added, and the government regards these teenage pregnancies as a public health problem, since they bring enormous threats to the girls concerned, including obstetric fistulas, premature birth, and a heightened risk of death during childbirth.
At the ceremony, the director in Mozambique of the United States Agency for International Cooperation (USAID), Jennifer Adams, congratulated the government for improvements in the quality of health care, and urged it to continue seeking ways to keep girls at school and to delay as much as possible the onset of sexual activity.
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