The State of World Population 2013, produced by the UN Population Fund (UNFPA), notes that out of the 7.3 million births, 2 million are to girls who are 14 or younger, many of whom suffer grave long-term health and social consequences from pregnancy such as obstetric fistula, and an estimated 70,000 adolescents in developing countries who die each year from complications during pregnancy and childbirth.Too often, society blames only the girl for getting pregnant. The reality is that adolescent pregnancy is most often not the result of a deliberate choice, but rather the absence of choices, and of circumstances beyond a girl’s control.

“Too often, society blames only the girl for getting pregnant,” said UNFPA Executive Director Babatunde Osotimehin. “The reality is that adolescent pregnancy is most often not the result of a deliberate choice, but rather the absence of choices, and of circumstances beyond a girl’s control. It is a consequence of little or no access to school, employment, quality information and health care.”

The report, Motherhood in childhood: facing the challenge of adolescent pregnancy, seeks to offer a new perspective on teenage pregnancy, looking not only at girls’ behaviour as a cause of early pregnancy, but also at the actions of their families, communities and governments.

Early pregnancy takes a toll on a girl’s health, education and rights. It also prevents her from realizing her potential and adversely impacts the baby. A country’s economy is also affected by teenage pregnancies as adolescent mothers are prevented from entering the workforce.

In Kenya, for example, if the more than 200,000 teenage mothers had been employed instead of becoming pregnant, $3.4 billion could have been added to the economy. Similarly, if girls in Brazil and India had been able to wait until their early 20s to give birth, the countries would have greater economic productivity equal to more than $3.5 billion and $7.7 billion, respectively.

The report notes that countries must not only increase efforts to prevent teenage pregnancies, they must also invest more in girls as the currently the global community directs less than two cents of every dollar spent on international development to adolescent girls.

In addition to funding, the report stresses that to tackle teenage pregnancy, countries must adopt a holistic approach which does not dwell on changing girls’ behaviour, but seeks to change attitudes in society so girls are encouraged to stay in school, child marriage is banned, girls have access to sexual and reproductive health including contraception, and young mothers have better support systems.

“We must reflect on and urge changes to the policies and norms of families, communities and governments that often leave a girl with no other choice, but a path to early pregnancy,” said Osotimehin. “This is what we are doing at UNFPA and what we will continue to do and recommend until every girl is able to choose the direction of her life, own her future and achieve her greatest potential.”

While teenage pregnancy is a much bigger challenge in developing countries, the report also found that it is a significant issue in developed ones. In the United States for example, only about half of the girls who become pregnant as adolescents complete high school by 22, compared to nine out of 10 girls who do not become pregnant. It also harms the economy as a whole, with nearly $11 billion a year in costs to taxpayers in the country.

In early September, a story emerged about an 8-year-old girl who bled to death on her wedding night after she was raped by her new husband, who is in his 40s. Since then, activists across the region have been discussing on various social media platforms how to combat the practice of child marriage.

A new Human Rights Watch video documents the psychological and physical harm that child marriage causes to girls. In the video, a father expresses his regret at having chosen to give up his two young daughters to marriage, and two members of the religious community and a Nobel Laureate speak about the need to abolish the practice.

“Thousands of Yemeni girls have their childhood stolen and their futures destroyed because they are forced to marry too young,” said Liesl Gerntholtz, women’s rights director at Human Rights Watch. “The Yemeni government should end this abusive practice.”

Members of the Rights and Freedoms Committee in the country’s National Dialogue Conference should recommend prohibiting child marriage during its final plenary session in September 2013, Human Rights Watch said.

When the committee charged with drafting a new constitution as part of the transitional period is convened, it should consider including an 18-year age minimum in the new constitution Human Rights Watch warns, adding that if no minimum age is included, parliament should pass a law setting the minimum age at 18.

The Friends of Yemen should at its meeting in New York consider increasing support for programs that boost girls’ and women’s access to education, reproductive health information and services, and protection from domestic violence, both in cities and rural areas, Human Rights Watch added.

Tawakkol Karman, the Yemeni activist who received the Nobel Peace Prize in 2011, has criticized the transitional government’s failure to ban child marriage. She told Human Rights Watch that: “[Yemen’s] popular, peaceful revolution came about for the sake of fixing these societal problems. It didn’t happen just to solve political problems, but also to address societal problems, the most important being child marriage.”

A 2011 Human Rights Watch report documented severe and long-lasting harm to Yemeni girls forced by their families to marry, in some cases when they were as young as 8. Human Rights Watch spoke to 34 Yemeni girls and women. They said that marrying early meant that they lost control over their lives, including the ability to decide whether and when to bear children. They said that it had cut short their education, and some said they had been subjected to marital rape and domestic abuse.

There is no legal minimum age for girls to marry in Yemen and the only legal protection for girls is a prohibition on sexual intercourse until the age of puberty. In some cases documented by Human Rights Watch, however, girls were married before their first menstrual period and were raped by their husbands.

Yemen’s transitional authorities have failed to seriously address child marriage, Human Rights Watch said. The transition period, which began after Ali Abdullah Saleh stepped down from the presidency under popular pressure in February 2012, will culminate with presidential and parliamentary elections in February 2014. As part of the transition, the six-month long National Dialogue Conference began on March 18. During the conference’s second plenary in June, it passed 363 directives, but not a single one referred to the practice of child marriage.

Yemeni government and United Nations data from 2006 shows that approximately 14 percent of girls in Yemen are married before age 15, and 52 percent are married before age 18.

Yemen has backtracked on protecting girls from forced marriage. In 1999, Yemen’s parliament, citing religious grounds, abolished the legal minimum age for marriage for girls and boys, which was then 15.

Yemen is party to a number of international treaties and conventions that explicitly – or have been interpreted to – prohibit child marriage and commit governments to take measures to eliminate the practice, including the Convention on Consent to Marriage, Minimum Age for Marriage and Registration of Marriage.

UN treaty-monitoring bodies that oversee implementation of the Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of Discrimination against Women and the Convention on the Rights of the Child have recommended a minimum age of 18 for marriage.

“The protesters in Change Square in 2011 risked their lives to demand equal rights for all Yemenis, and girls should be no exception,” Gerntholtz said. “Child marriage is a violation of their human rights and should be ended.”

Of these 140 million girls, 50 million will be under the age of 15, according to the UN Population Fund (UNFPA), which added that young girls who marry before the age of 18 have a greater risk of becoming victims of intimate partner violence than those who marry later.

“Child marriage is an appalling violation of human rights and robs girls of their education, health and long-term prospects,” said UNFPA Executive Director Babatunde Osotimehin. “A girl who is married as a child is one whose potential will not be fulfilled. Since many parents and communities also want the very best for their daughters, we must work together and end child marriage.”

Child marriage is increasingly recognized as a violation of the rights of girls as it interferes with their education, blocks their opportunity to gain vocational and life skills, and increases their risk to sexual violence as well as their chances to contract HIV.

“No girl should be robbed of her childhood, her education and health, and her aspirations. Yet today millions of girls are denied their rights each year when they are married as child brides,” said the Executive Director of the UN Entity for Gender Equality and the Empowerment of Women (UN Women), Michelle Bachelet.

In addition, child marriage also exposes girls to the risks of child-bearing at an early age, which can have fatal consequences. According to the UN Children’s Fund (UNICEF), complications from pregnancy and childbirth are the leading causes of death for girls aged 15-19 years in developing countries. Still births and newborn deaths are also 50 per cent higher among mothers under 20 than in women who get pregnant in their 20s.

“Child marriage makes girls far more vulnerable to the profound health risks of early pregnancy and childbirth – just as their babies are more vulnerable to complications associated with premature labour,” said UNICEF Executive Director Anthony Lake.

While 158 countries have set the legal age for marriage at 18 years, laws are rarely enforced since the practice of marrying young children is upheld by tradition and social norms. The practice is most common in rural sub-Saharan Africa and South Asia.

These issues are the focus of a special session on child marriage being held today by the UN Commission on the Status of Women (CSW) in New York. Strategies to be discussed include supporting and enforcing legislation to increase the minimum age of marriage for girls to 18 years; providing equal access to quality primary and secondary education for girls and boys; mobilizing girls, boys, parents and leaders to change practices that discriminate against girls; providing girls who are already married with options for schooling, employment and sexual and reproductive health information and services; and addressing the root causes of child marriage, including poverty, gender inequality and discrimination.

Currently, the 10 countries with the highest rates of child marriage are: Niger, Chad, the Central African Republic, Bangladesh, Guinea, Mozambique, Mali, Burkina Faso, South Sudan, and Malawi. However, in terms of absolute numbers, because of the size of its population, India has the most child marriages – in 47 per cent of all marriages there, the bride is a child.