Teen Fathers Lead to More Birth Problems

If a teenage boy has a child, the risk of birth problems is greater than for babies with adult fathers.

These results hold true independently of the age of the mother. From the article:

Compared to the reference group and after adjusting for confounding factors (such as race, education, smoking and alcohol drinking during pregnancy, adequacy of prenatal care and the sex of the baby), babies born to teenage fathers (aged less than 20) were more likely to be born early (a 15% increased risk), have low birth weight (13% increased risk), be small for gestational age (17% increased risk), have a low Apgar score (13% increased risk) or to die within the first four weeks after birth (22% increased risk) or to die in the period from four weeks to one year after birth (41% increased risk), although in all cases the absolute risk of death remained less than 0.5% . Fathers aged 40 or over did not have an increased risk of these adverse birth outcomes.

This does raise some follow-up questions, such as whether it is truly meaningful to talk about "teenage" fathers as a group when the term "teenage" applies to both thirteen-year-olds and nineteen-year-olds. The results may apply more to younger teenagers than older ones. Nevertheless, it is disturbing and another possible bad consequence of extremely young parenthood to add to the list.