Going by the claims of the researchers in the UK and Norway, teenage pregnancy appears to be “contagious” among sisters --- with girls likely to be influenced by their elder sisters having children at a young age!

On the basis of an analysis of the records of over 42,000 Norwegian teenage girls, researchers at Bristol University – in conjunction with scientists from the University of Bergen and the Norwegian School of Economics – found that there are suggestions galore that teenage girls apparently had more chances of becoming pregnant if their older sisters too had a baby as a teenager.

Noting that the “contagious” effect of teen pregnancy was the maximum when the sisters were from a similar age-group or from a poorer background, the Family Planning Association said though the results of the study were not necessarily applicable to the UK, they nonetheless were quite interesting.

Despite the fact that it has been found earlier that better education of women often leads to lower teenage pregnancy rates, the new study showed that the chances of a girl having a child in her teens increased from one in five to two in five in families that had teenage mothers.

Stating that the study reveals that “the positive sibling effect (on conception rates) still dwarfs the negative effect of education,” University of Bristol Professor Carol Propper – a co-author of the study - said: “These findings provide strong evidence that the contagious effect of teen motherhood in siblings is larger than the general effect of being better educated”!