More Pregnant Girls Opt to Forgo Abortion

Pregnant girls younger than 15 are increasingly opting to have their babies rather than abortions, federal health officials reported Friday.

About 900 teens younger than 15 had abortions per 1,000 live births in 1989, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention reported. It was the lowest abortion rate for that age group since 1974, when girls younger than 15 had slightly less than 1,200 abortions per 1,000 live births.

“It would be safe to say that an increasing number of them are opting either to keep the child or to have the child and make it available for adoption,” said CDC spokesman Bob Howard.

Women over 35 have the second-highest rate of abortions after girls younger than 15 but they, too, are increasingly more likely to have their babies than to have an abortion, according to the CDC’s annual report on abortion.

Researchers attributed that trend to better prenatal medical tests that make older women more confident of delivering healthy babies.

The number of legal abortions increased slightly from 1.3 million a year in 1980 to 1.4 million a year in 1989, the latest year for which statistics are available. But the ratio of abortions to live births--346 to 1,000--has remained virtually the same.

Among other findings, of women having abortions, the percentage of unmarried women increased from 70% in 1972 to 80% in 1984 and has stayed the same since.

In 1972, 24 women died from legal abortions and 39 from illegal ones. In 1987, the latest year death statistics were available, six women died from legal abortions and two from illegal ones.