by Larissa Cristina Margarido and Nelufer Nazrul
Every year, roughly 16 million girls aged 15 to 19 become pregnant. Strip away the statistics and what’s left is usually a single story: a girl derailed by poverty, ignorance and in need of rescue. This is a story international agencies have told for decades, and it is not entirely wrong – but a new comparative study of Bangladesh and Brazil, two of the seven countries where half the world’s adolescent births are concentrated, argues that it is a far too limited story to guide policy.
This “Gender, Sexuality and Law: South-South Perspectives” book chapter sets two very different countries side by side and asks the same questions of each: what actually happens when a girl becomes a mother before adulthood? Andb who gets to decide what that means?
Two countries, two very different “problems”
In Bangladesh, adolescent pregnancy is inseparable from child marriage. In rural areas, where over 44% of girls still marry as children, early motherhood is frequently framed – by their families – as protection: a route to social standing and stability. Urban girls with access to more education are increasingly deferring both marriage and childbearing, but in the countryside, the calculus of “early” motherhood remains strikingly rational within a world of few alternatives.
Brazil tells a different, but structurally similar, story. National adolescent birth rates have fallen sharply over the past decade, yet the remaining numbers are huge: over one million births to adolescent mothers between 2020 and 2022 alone, nearly 65% of them to Black teenagers, concentrated overwhelmingly in the country’s poorest regions. And here the authors identify a striking class divide: for middle- and upper-class Brazilian teenagers, pregnancy tends to be experienced as an interruption of a planned life – school, career, independence, all put on hold. For lower-income teenagers, it can be the opposite: not a disruption but a catalyst, a source of purpose, social status, and personal fulfilment in contexts where those “planned life” trajectories were never realistically attainable to begin with.
Why the “risk” framework isn’t enough
None of this is to deny that adolescent pregnancy carries real health dangers – preeclampsia, anaemia, obstetric complications, and higher infant mortality are documented in both countries. But the authors, building on decades of Global South scholarship, make an unsettling case: much of what gets attributed to a mother’s age is better explained by her poverty. Remove malnutrition, inadequate prenatal care, and structural neglect, and the age-specific risk diminishes considerably.
Treating adolescent pregnancy primarily as a biomedical hazard to be prevented, rather than a social phenomenon shaped by class, race, geography and gender, has consequences: it produces policies that lecture girls about “waiting” while leaving untouched the conditions that made early motherhood feel like the most sensible – or supposedly only – option available to them.
Where policy keeps falling short
The chapter is clear about the gap between legal reform and lived reality. Bangladesh’s Child Marriage Restraint Act of 2017 set 18 as the legal marrying age for women – and then built in a “special circumstances” loophole that lets courts and parents override it. Brazil raised its legal marriage age and criminalised statutory rape of children under 14, and yet hundreds of girls under 16 are still formally married each year, and access to legal abortion for the very youngest survivors of sexual violence is frequently obstructed in practice, regardless of what the law permits on paper. In both countries, comprehensive sexuality education exists mostly on paper too – relying on an ever-changing political will.
An argument for taking girls seriously
What makes this comparison genuinely provocative is its refusal to resolve into a single takeaway. The authors are not arguing that adolescent pregnancy should be quietly accepted, much less celebrated, nor that risk doesn’t matter. They are arguing something harder to sit with: that many adolescent girls are not passive victims of ignorance but agents navigating real constraints, and that policy which fails to recognise this will keep missing its target. Their proposed alternative, grounded in feminist public health and education justice frameworks, calls for adolescents to be treated as rights-holders and to be asked what they actually want.
Ultimately, the chapter argues that adolescent pregnancy needs a more holistic, contextualised reading, one that trades a single risk-based discourse for the messier work of holding intersectional factors, cultural norms, and individual agency together. It’s a shift that allows policymakers and practitioners to build interventions that are genuinely effective, equitable, and respectful of how different adolescent girls actually live, across Bangladesh, Brazil, and the wider Global South.
Whether you work in reproductive health, education policy, or human rights law, the full chapter offers something rare: a genuinely comparative Global South lens on a topic usually filtered through Global North assumptions, and a set of policy recommendations that take seriously the possibility that girls in Bangladesh and Brazil might have more in common with each other than they have with the international guidelines written to protect them.
Note: This blog post has been written as a result of the research conducted for the book “Gender, Sexuality and Law: South-South Perspectives”, edited by Lívia Gonçalves Buzolin, and published by Springer in 2026.
About Larissa Cristina Margarido
Larissa Cristina Margarido is a socio-legal researcher and a child and adolescent protection specialist. She holds a PhD and a master’s in law and development from the FGV São Paulo Law School, and a law degree from the University of São Paulo. She dedicates herself to promoting human rights through evidence-based public policies, working at the intersection of law, development, and social protection in the Brazilian Ministry of Justice and Public Security.
About Nelufer Nazrul
Nelufer Nazrul is a social researcher and a gender specialist. She is a PhD Candidate in Migration Studies at the University of Lisbon, holds an M.Phil. in Global Development Theory and Practice from the University of Bergen, an MA in Human Rights from Malmö University, an MA and BA in International Relations from the University of Dhaka, and an LL.B from the National University of Bangladesh. She dedicates her research and practice to promoting human rights, gender empowerment, and social protection for sexually vulnerable groups across the Global South.