Lígia, Gerluce and Joelly, protagonists of Globo’s 9 o’clock soap opera, “Três Graças”, become pregnant as teenagers. In fiction, they live on the outskirts of São Paulo, in a community called Chacrinha. The same thing happened in real life with Cowell, 40, and Emilie, 20, residents of Benha, in the eastern region of São Paulo, and Edlosia, 57, who lives in the interior of Bahia.
The Path of the Three Graces, the title of the characters, reflects the lives of many women, most of them black, who experience social injustice, poverty and violence. Edlosia Barbosa Amorim became pregnant at the age of thirteen after being raped. One of Edlosia’s daughters, Quill Cristina Mourao Oliveira, is a day laborer who gave birth to her first daughter at the age of 15. Since her second pregnancy, Emily Victoria Amorim, now a receptionist, became pregnant at 16 and is the mother of a three-year-old.
According to 2024 data from Sinasc (Live Birth Information System), from DataSUS, every hour, on average, 31 babies are born to teenage mothers in Brazil.
In 2000, the country recorded 750,537 births of teenage children – 28,973 births to girls aged 10 to 14 years, and 721,564 to young men aged 15 to 19 years. That year, one in four children in the country were born to a teenage mother.
In 2024, this number decreased to 272,520 births, a decrease of 63.7% – 11,981 births to girls aged 10 to 14 years and 260,539 to young men aged 15 to 19 years. Consequently, one in nine children born in this period had a teenage mother.
Regarding the frequency among adolescents themselves, the latest data suggest that in 2022, about 42 young people aged 15 to 19 years for every 1,000 children had it. Among girls aged 10 to 14 years, the rate was 2.1 births per 1,000 adolescent girls in the age group.
For Denis Montero, member of the National Specialized Committee for Pediatric and Adolescent Gynecology of FIBRASCO (Brazilian Federation of Obstetrics and Gynecology Societies) and a professional with more than 40 years of experience in the field, the factors that lead to early pregnancy have clinical, social and familial dimensions.
It highlights six central challenges, including early marriage. Even after a change in legislation in 2019, which banned the marriage of minors under the age of 16, informal marriages continue to exist and expose teenage girls to premature motherhood.
Dropping out of school is also crucial. Many young women drop out of their studies when they become pregnant, which increases the risk of new pregnancies and perpetuates cycles of poverty. Montero also highlights solitary motherhood, when a teenager does not have support from family or a partner, and repeat pregnancies, which affect 25.7% of young women ages 15 to 19 and 4.9% of girls ages 10 to 14, according to Senske.
Other challenges include pregnancy resulting from sexual violence. Under Brazilian law, any sexual relationship with children under the age of 14 is considered rape. Despite this, only a small number of teenagers are able to access legal abortion, which has been available since 1940 in cases of rape, risk to the pregnant woman’s life and, since 2012, anencephalic pregnancy.
Edlosia was 13 years old when she became pregnant in 1981. Born in a rural area, her parents sent her to work as a day laborer in a family home in central Itaperapa, inside Bahia – a profession she still practices today. He left his studies and did not learn to read or write, just to sign his name.
Her story is told by her daughter and granddaughter. The reporter tried to contact her by phone, but according to the family, Edlosia does not use technology and would not be able to answer the call. Cowell reports that her mother endured frustrations for years and that it had a profound impact on the family dynamics.
“Her whole life was difficult,” he says. “All she wanted was to study and have a different future, but she couldn’t.”
Psychologist Ana Silvia Sanseverino-Rino, who specializes in adolescent affairs, explains that pregnancy before the age of 18 stunts a girl’s emotional development and forces her to take on responsibilities for which she is not yet ready.
According to her, when a grandmother, mother and daughter become pregnant early, this reveals a cycle of intergenerational trauma: the first early pregnancy weakens emotional bonds, and these emotional failures are repeated in subsequent generations.
The expert highlights that many teenage girls become pregnant in contexts of sexual violence and that the trauma remains active for years, affecting self-esteem, boundaries and emotional choices.
Cowell says she got pregnant when she was 15 because she didn’t get sex education — she didn’t know she needed to use contraception and didn’t understand sex well. He left school and started working as a day laborer to support his daughter.
According to 2015 data from IBGE, pregnancy is the leading cause of female school dropout in Latin America, and in Brazil, 60% of teenage mothers are neither in school nor working.
After her first daughter, Cowell became pregnant twice more with the same husband. At first, he felt ashamed due to criticism from family and friends and the rejection of the child’s father. She remained married for years to the father of her children, a man addicted to drugs who was verbally abusive to her.
She became pregnant with her daughter, Emily Vittoria, at the age of sixteen while she was still in a relationship. She found out she was pregnant after feeling unwell and noticing the absence of her period. The mother’s initial reaction was anger, but support soon followed.
During her pregnancy, Emily missed school due to nausea, low blood pressure, and difficulty eating. With permission from the administration, he began studying from home and completed the academic year. He returned to school in 2023, when he finished high school.
At the time of discovery, she and her boyfriend considered terminating the pregnancy, but her older sister insisted against it, support that became crucial to the pregnancy continuing. Today, Emily is no longer with her son’s father, but she maintains a dialogue with him. He lives with his mother, son, sister, younger brother and stepfather.
Author Winnie de Campos Bowen, a jurist who specializes in race, gender, and social justice issues, says cases like the Quayle family’s cannot be explained as “individual choices,” but rather as a direct reflection of historical violence and the absence of public policies targeting black girls.
“They are poor black girls living in areas characterized by the absence of the state and the presence of multiple forms of violence. The repetition does not occur by chance: it occurs because the social conditions that surrounded the grandmother are almost the same as those that surrounded the mother and now surround the daughter.”
For Bowen, the school remains a weak point because it was not organized at all to receive these girls. “The school is not prepared to protect a teenager who is exposed to sexual violence, extreme poverty, excessive household burden or early motherhood,” he says. “This is no longer possible not because of the girl’s lack of will, but because of the lack of institutional structure.”
It highlights that education has a transformative role that the country still underestimates. “When a black girl stays in school, she not only learns the content, she gets protection, networks, information, and a future. Dropping out of school is not an educational loss, it is a structural loss.”