KINGSTON, Jamaica – Children’s Advocate, Diahann Gordon Harrison told Wednesday’s joint select committee of Parliament reviewing the sexual offences legislations, that 25 per cent of babies in Jamaica are born to girls between 10 and 19 years old.
She added that 108 out of every 1,000 babies are the children of teenage mothers.
“These are only live births, and we also have figures for teen pregnancy (in general) which we use to measure the scope of the problem,” she told the meeting of the parliamentary committee chaired by Minister of Justice, Senator Mark Golding, at Gordon House.
Gordon Harrison noted that a United Nations Population Fund State of the World Population report in 2013 indicated that currently Jamaica has the fourth highest incidence rate of adolescence pregnancy in the Caribbean, at 71 of every 1,000 births.