Mary is tucked into a big chair in a drab visitors’ lounge at Accra’s Korle-Bu Teaching Hospital.

She is recovering from a late-term, illegal abortion her boyfriend had demanded because he was planning to travel and feared that his family would not give him the money to go if they knew he had made his girlfriend pregnant.

Mary had barely escaped becoming another sad statistic.

In the developing world, the leading causes of death for girls between the ages of 15 and 19 are pregnancy related.

In numbers, Save the Children estimated in a report in May 2004 that at least 70,000 girls in that age group die each year in pregnancy or childbirth.

Others say that the number of teens killed by too-early pregnancy and motherhood would be even higher if deaths among girls below the age of 15 could be calculated.

Those who survive, like Mary, may be physically weakened and emotionally scarred for life.

Mary was led through her account of the tumultuous weeks that ended, luckily for her, here at Korle-Bu, the city’s best hospital, by Patience Aniteye, who now teaches nursing at the University of Ghana.

Patience said the story is all too common in Ghana, where teenage pregnancies are on the rise, many vulnerable girls and young women know nothing about contraception and young men are not sensitized to the damage, psychological as well as physical, they often inflict.

Some Ghanaian officials have begun to argue for prosecution of young men who are complicit in abortion in a country where by some estimates 40 to 50 per cent of teenage girls are sexually abused.

Many young women, mostly unmarried, are abandoned if they conceive, even in a steady relationship.