In 2017, a report carried out by UNICEF determined that adolescent and child pregnancies were a growing problem in Argentina. Statistics showed that 15 percent of births were to underage mothers and that even every three hours, a girl under 14 years of age gave birth in the country.
However, according to new statistics collected by the Center for the Implementation of Public Policies for Equity and Growth (CIPPEC), that trend was reversed. In their reports “Demographic Odyssey. Demographic trends in Argentina: key inputs for the design of social welfare” and “Public policies to reduce poverty in the demographic transition”, specialists report that the fertility rate among Argentine girls and adolescents It was reduced, between 2014 and 2020, by 55 percent.
Although studies show that fertility decreased at a general level throughout the country by 34 percent, the drastic drop in the cases of adolescents and girls exposes a paradigm shift in sexual and reproductive health and education in the country. From National Law 26,150, which in 2006 began the National Comprehensive Sexual Education Program (ESI) to the Voluntary Interruption of Pregnancy Law (IVE) in 2020, a sum of measures allows us to understand the marked change that is observed in the youth pregnancies in Argentina.
Success
“Although it is a multi-causal phenomenon, the drop in the fertility rate during the last five years reflects the achievements made in access to sexual and reproductive rights,” CIPPEC highlighted.
Among all the measures that the researchers highlight is the ENIA Plan (National Plan for the Prevention of Unintentional Pregnancy in Adolescents), which “proposed to integrate inter-ministerial actions, intensify CSE in specific territories and scale devices that facilitate access to the sexual and reproductive health of adolescents from the schools themselves, contemplating counseling and concierge services in sexual and reproductive health,” they detailed.
In fact, the ENIA Plan was highlighted by the United Nations Population Fund at the IV Meeting of the Regional Conference on Population and Development of Latin America and the Caribbean. The Argentine case was used as an example to be replicated by other countries in the region in order to reverse a problem that in our country seems to have found a solution.
