Ruth Alexander

speaker

4,250 appearances 120 recordings 1 series first heard Jan 2011 last heard Aug 2018

Ruth Alexander’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.

Trend

recordings per month · last 12 months

No recordings in the last 12 months.Older appearances are listed below; set an alert to hear about the next one.

Appearances

newest first · ▶ plays the moment

More or Less · WS MoreOrLess: Soviet World War Deaths · 13 Dec 2014 podcast

If you have any numbers you want investigating, please do email us at moreorless at bbc.co.uk.

You can also listen to other editions of More or Less by going to our website bbcworldservice.com slash moreorless.

More or Less · Teenage Pregnancy · 29 Nov 2014 podcast

Hello, this is More or Less on the BBC World Service and I'm Ruth Alexander.

And I'm joined today by Charlotte MacDonald.

And Charlotte, you're with me because you've seen a number in the press that you just think is a bit strange.

Hello, Ruth.

But Charlotte, for you, anything.

So I've looked at this opinion piece in the New York Times, written by Nicholas Kristof, and helpfully, he did link to his source.

So that one in three figure you mentioned, it was from a non-profit organisation in the US called the National Campaign to Prevent Teen and Unplanned Pregnancy.

Now, they calculated the cumulative risk of a teenager becoming pregnant once between the ages of 15 and 19, and they were using data from 2006.

All right, so it was correct in 2006, but is it correct now?

Well, that's what we wondered, because, I mean, there are good reasons, aren't there, to think that numbers might have fallen since 2006.

I mean, that was eight years ago.

So here's what the National Campaign to Prevent Teen and Unplanned Pregnancy's chief programme officer, Bill Albert, said when we spoke to him.

Well, we've used the same method, but using the latest set of complete data, which is from 2010.

And that puts the figure much lower, less than one in four.

However, there's some more recent data that suggests it could be even lower than that.

Now, remember this is pregnancy, so the sum of teenagers who gave birth had abortions and who had a miscarriage.

Now, we don't have the abortion data, but we do have the US teenage birth rate for 2013, which shows that since 2010 there's been a 22% drop.

22%?

Showing 1081–1100 of 4,250 · page 55 of 213