News outlets continued their coverage of the UNFPA’s State of World Population 2013 report, which was released on Wednesday and “seeks to offer a new perspective on teenage pregnancy, looking not only at girls’ behavior as a cause of early pregnancy, but also at the actions of their families, communities and governments,” the U.N. News Centre reports (10/30). According to the report, titled “Motherhood in Childhood: Facing the Challenge of Adolescent Pregnancy,” “the underlying reasons for pregnancy in the young needed to be tackled,” including “keeping more girls in school until they are 18, providing quality sex education and access to health services, educating boys and men about girls’ rights, and enforcing laws against child marriage,” The Guardian writes (Ford, 10/30). “Placing high emphasis on developing human capital of young girls, and giving them the opportunity to make sexual reproductive choices for themselves, not only promotes the health and protection of young girls, it also gives them a seat at the global development table,” according to Inter Press Service (Erakit, 10/30).

“The U.N. report also illustrates the extent to which teen pregnancies perpetuate poverty — since pregnant girls often leave school — and harm a country’s economic productivity,” the Wall Street Journal notes, adding, “Brazil, for example, would have additional productivity equal to $3.5 billion a year if teenage girls delayed pregnancy until their early 20s, the report says, while India’s would be $7.7 billion higher” (Muñoz, 10/30). The report “notes the lifetime opportunity costs related to adolescent pregnancy range from one percent of annual GDP in China to 30 percent of annual GDP in Uganda,” VOA News writes (Schlein, 10/30).