This TED Talk features documentary photographer Christian Rodriguez, recorded live at TED Global 2017.

For the last five years, I have documented the lives of teenage mothers in Latin America.

I started with a series of photographs about the moment of birth in my country, Uruguay.

Oh, no!

Dade, d'all, do, do, do.

Oh, that is, I'm a little bit more.

Oh, my mom. I am the son of a teenage mother when she was a teenage mother when she was 16.

I began exploring this theme to better understand myself and my sister became a teenage mother when she was 16. I began experiencing the theme to better understand myself and my origins.

In developing countries, 7.3 million girls under the age of 18 give birth each year.

Projections suggest that the teen pregnancy rate in Latin America

will be the highest in the world for the next 80 years.

In Mexico, almost one in two sexually active adolescents

get pregnant between the ages of 12 to 19 years old.

Teenage pregnancy is not just about young pregnancies. get pregnant between the ages of 12 to 19 years old.

Teenage pregnancy is not just about young pregnancies. It is about gender violence,

physical, symbolic, psychological and economic violence.

Girls who become pregnant before they are 18

rarely achieve an adequate standard of living.

The pattern of poverty and limited access to education and health care are a common threat among teen pregnancies.

If a girl in Latin America get pregnant before she is 16, the risk of maternal death increases fourfold over a woman in their 20s.

And somehow, in spite of all this, motherhood also impart status and respect to the adolescent in her community.

Her child becomes her life project.

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