Event: Peter Barron

New research shows a steep decline in adolescent pregnancy rates across all nine provinces from 2021 to 2025, reversing course from previous years. It’s good news, even if it's not clear why it’s happening. (Unsplash) When public health researcher Peter Barron and his team sat down to update their 2022 analysis, which had found birth rates among teenagers climbing year on year in every province, they expected a straightforward exercise. Instead, the researchers were left scratching their heads. The rates of births by girls aged 10 to 19 declined every year, in every province, reversing the worrying trend their 2022 work showed. Dramatically. The study, published in the South African Medical Journal earlier this month, found an overall decline of 16% between April 2021 and March 2025, with births by the youngest girls, aged 10 to 14, dropping by nearly 40%. It should have been straight-up good news for the researchers. But Barron was baffled. “In public health, when you start getting 5 to 10% drops, that makes your crap detector go on red alert,” he says. “You start thinking: Is the data correct? So we looked at it from a number of different angles and everything suggested it was. “We were trying to find out the reason — delving into the information, trying to see if there were changes in institutions or provinces and districts. But it was across the board.” Barron went to some of the country’s leading demographic modellers to ask what could be causing it. But they couldn’t explain it either. “It’s the elephant in the room,” says Barron, who says he nearly scrapped the study because there was nothing solid the researchers could pin to the dramatic decrease. But the numbers tell an important story on their own. One that affects everything from the number…