And the United States has by far the highest teen pregnancy rate in the industrialized world, said a new survey by the non-profit Alan Guttmacher Institute in New York.
The survey said one out of seven American teenage girls ages 15 to 19 gave birth last year. That's twice as high as any other industrialized nation.
The institute said adolescents account for about one in 10 births worldwide and a high proportion are not planned or wanted.
Although teen pregnancy rates have dropped in many nations, the sheer size of the global adolescent population is daunting. There are nearly 1.1 billion people aged 10 through 19, the largest generation of youth in history. More than 900 million of them live in developing countries.
The report comes as Congress considers whether to release funds for international family planning programs. Congress last year cut funding and set a timetable for releasing money that would make only a portion available this year.
The House is expected to vote Thursday on whether to release more of the money.
We see encouraging signs that young women are now more likely to delay childbearing, said Jeannie Rosoff, president of the nonprofit research institute. Although this progress is uneven, much change has taken place in a short time period indicating enormous potential for swifter change if more is done to support adolescents in their life-altering decisions.
Educational opportunities have been crucial in encouraging women to postpone child-bearing and marriage.
Although teen childbearing rates are still very high in sub-Saharan Africa, and about one-third of girls become mothers in their teens in much of Latin America, the report showed substantial change in many nations.
In the Dominican Republic, for instance, a third of women aged 20-24 had their first child before age 20. Twenty years ago, more than half had their first child as a teen-ager.
In Morocco, the figures were 19 percent for today's young women, vs. 39 percent for the older generation.
But the study also found that many of the pregnancies were unplanned or unwanted. In 11 of the 20 Sub-Saharan African nations studied and in 7 of the 10 Latin American nations, at least one-third of the births were unplanned.