Jakarta – The number of abortions in Indonesia had reached an estimated one million cases a year, most of them carried out on teenagers, an expert told a medical meeting yesterday.

The Antara news agency quoted specialist Wimpie Pangkahlia as saying at a conference in Bali that the number of unwanted pregnancies indicated problems in sex education, partly because officials did not know how to tackle the issue. One problem was the easy public access to pornography and explicit sex through videos and films and through the mass media, even though such moves were illegal, he said.

Antara did not elaborate on the source of the figures given by Dr Pangkahlia for Indonesia, where mass family-planning programmes are considered successful, but abortion clinics are illegal. Abortion offences carry a maximum four-year prison team under a law which says that a pregnancy may be terminated only if it endangers the mother's health.

News reports last month said, however, that a baby boom loomed over the next few years as the price of contraceptives had soared five-fold because of the economic crisis. The reports said many of the 25.6 million active participants in Indonesia's family-planning programme – out of more than 33.7 million couples – were struggling to cover the cost of daily necessities and did not see contraceptives as a priority.

The prices of birth-control devices, especially injections and pills, have skyrocketed as 80 per cent of their raw materials are imported. Government statistics indicate that 96 million Indonesians or almost half of the country's 200 million population will not be able to afford food or other necessities by the end of the year because of the economic crisis.