Tuesday, 11 November 2014

Daily Mail article - Feb 2009

Labour's £300m policy 'disaster' as teen pregnancies rocket to highest level in decade

By STEVE DOUGHTY FOR THE DAILY MAIL
UPDATED: 00:13, 27 February 2009

Pregnancies among girls under the age of 16 have shot up to the highest level in a decade, official figures have shown.

The news dealt a fresh blow to Labour's hopes of cutting rates of teenage motherhood.

It was also revealed that half of pregnancies among girls under 18 now end in abortion.

Young parents: Samantha Humphries, 15, and Daniel Sargent, 16, have twin sons - pregnancy among under-16 girls is at its highest level in a decade

Labour has spent £300million on trying to reduce teenage pregnancy by handing out contraception and expanding sex education.

However, pregnancy rates among under-18s in England are now higher than they were in 1995 - four years before Labour launched its Teenage Pregnancy Strategy and three years before 1998, the year the Government uses as its ' benchmark' for measuring progress.

There are suggestions that Labour chose 1998 because it had an unusually high number of pregnancies following a scare about the contraceptive pill.

In 2007 there were 7,715 conceptions among girls between 13 and 15, who are below the legal age of consent. This was the highest since 1998.

Under-16s now account for one in 100 of all pregnancies. Some 8.3 in every 1,000 girls in this age group became pregnant in 2007 - the highest rate since the benchmark year.

And in the month that has seen national concern over 13-year-old father Alfie Patten, the figures showed pregnancies among under-14s leapt by nearly 29 per cent from 295 in 2006 to 380 in 2007.

Ministers have responded by redoubling their efforts to persuade teenagers to use contraception. They announced £20.5million in new spending, which will take the total spent on the Teenage Pregnancy Strategy since its launch to £306.5million.

'Broken Britain': Baby-faced Alfie Patten, who reportedly became a father at just 13, is demanding a paternity test after two other teenagers claimed they slept with his 15-year-old girlfriend

Among the new schemes is an NHS plan to text young girls to remind them to take the contraceptive pill. To keep the messages secret from parents, NHS clinics have been sending girls code phrases such as 'Call Alex' or 'Walk the dog'.

Children's Minister Beverley Hughes said: 'More teenagers may have been engaging in risky behaviour and not using contraception, resulting in an increase in conceptions leading to abortion.

'Our strategy is to encourage teenagers to delay early sexual activity, but to use contraception when they do become sexually active.'

Tories called on ministers - who are now certain to miss their target of halving English under-18 pregnancy rates by 2010 - to refocus their policies to support families and teach children and teenagers about relationships. Conservative health spokesman Andrew Lansley said: 'This demonstrates once again how pointless it is to set targets if the Government doesn't do what is needed to deliver on them.

'Reducing teenage pregnancy requires more than teaching children about sex.

'It requires a supportive and responsible family, together with high-quality relationship education which gives teenagers the self-confidence and guidance needed to recognise their interest in avoiding early and unprotected sex.'

Independent analysts called the Government's Teenage Pregnancy Strategy a 'disaster'.

Professor David Paton, of Nottingham University Business School, one of the leading experts on the policy, said: 'The disaster is particularly obvious if you look at pregnancy rates among under-16s. They are higher even than in 1999.

'The strategy is failing, but it seems to be failing the youngest and therefore most vulnerable teenagers most of all.'

This failure is reflected in stories such as that of Samantha Humphries, 15, and her 16-year-old boyfriend Daniel Sargent.

Samantha, known as Sammii, recently gave birth to twins Liam and Ryan three months early.

In between visiting their premature babies at the neonatal centre, Samantha and Daniel have been trying to study for their GCSEs.

It was also revealed that 50 per cent of pregnancies among teenagers ended in abortion in 2007, up from 48.4 per cent the year before.

The decision of more than 20,000 teenagers in England and Wales to have an abortion was part of a remorselessly rising pattern that means there are now more than 200,000 terminations each year.

Abortions among teenagers have risen by nearly a third since 1997.

Tuesday, 21 October 2014

The Telegraph - Why do teenagers really get pregnant - 15th November 2012

Why do teenagers really get pregnant?

Not all teenage pregnancies are unwanted; nor are all young mums having babies to receive benefits, as a new survey conducted by former teenage mother and Telegraph writer, Prymface shows.

In September this year Conservative MP Amber Rudd officially launched a cross-party inquiry looking into the issue of unwanted pregnancy in the UK. The inquiry was set up in the backdrop of two apparently “striking” trends:

1. Abortion rates in some age groups have risen in the past few years, namely in the 30-34 age group.

2. Although teenage pregnancy in Britain has declined over the past decade, it remains the highest in Western Europe.

The inquiry has so far received little media attention, yet it is a real opportunity to ensure that new voices are heard. It seems to have replaced the proposed abortion counseling consultation, which has angered pro-life campaigners, but there is still a danger that those with strong opinions about how others should live their lives are given priority.

An assumption has been made that “unwanted” and “teenage” are inter-changeable when it comes to being pregnant, which brings into question whose values are being promoted and whether the term 'unwanted' is more about being undesirable to the Government or society rather than the women themselves.

Only by consulting with those who have had a teenage pregnancy, we can attempt to really understand the needs and aspirations of this group without assuming an age bracket can define a whole population. To that end, I decided to conduct a survey via my Twitter account. You can look at the results here. At the time of writing I had 82 responses.

Why teenagers really get pregnant

The reasons that teenage girls get pregnant are varied, just as they are for older women.

Some, particularly those who are 18 and 19, have made a decision to have a baby because they are in a stable relationship and want to start a family, as was the norm for this age group not so many decades ago.

For others, reasons include: contraception failure, not thinking, getting caught up in the moment, believing they couldn’t get pregnant, not feeling comfortable obtaining contraception, being drunk, feeling pressured to have unprotected sex, and being too embarrassed to ask a partner to use contraception. Many of these responses, particularly for young teenagers, do not portray a young person in control and making their own choices. There has been a lot of work to address these vulnerabilities amongst teenagers over the last decade, resulting in the under-18 conception rate now being the lowest it’s been since 1969.

However, this is not the whole story.

Most girls have time to make a decision whether to continue a pregnancy or not. For those who do decide to continue a pregnancy, it is often due to a feeling that they should take responsibility and that they could be a good mum. Even though the pregnancy wasn’t planned, the mother grows to want the baby. Maybe things didn’t start off as planned, but that doesn’t mean there isn’t a chance to take control and turn things around, as most young mothers do.

For some girls, this decision of whether to continue a pregnancy or not is the first major decision they’ve been able to make.

Dispelling the myth that teens get pregnant to receive benefits

However, there is a common assumption, (likely to be expressed by those who have never experienced a teenage pregnancy), that teenagers get pregnant to receive benefits or housing; that it’s an “easy way out” so they don’t have to get a job, and that by removing such incentives the number of teenage pregnancies will drop. But not one of the 82 young women who responded to my survey considered benefits or housing in their decision to continue a pregnancy.

Placing young mothers in boarding houses, increasing stigma, punishing them for being pregnant are other ideas based on the assumption that teenage girls are manipulative and calculating enough to have a baby simply for financial gain.

This myth of young mothers enjoying a luxurious lifestyle on benefits encourages a focus of blame and disdain for young mothers, which isolates them further.

Removing the limited benefits that some young mothers are entitled to (such as the proposals to remove housing benefit for under 25s) can only succeed in taking agency away from young mothers who are already making their own sacrifices to make up for a time when they didn’t have choices.

It is worth recognising that there are two people involved in an unplanned teenage pregnancy - and while young fathers can have varied support needs themselves, around half of these fathers are likely to be older than “teen” age, with a significant number much older and yet their role and responsibility is often ignored.

Alcohol and abuse

Those who responded to my survey also highlighted the much wider social problems around alcohol and abuse that may contribute to the higher rates of teenage pregnancies in Britain than the rest of Europe, as well as the lack of openness around sex - while at the same time, as one young mother said, “being fed sex through advertising and media with distorted images portraying sexual attractiveness as the height of success for girls/women” doesn't help.

If we really want to address unplanned pregnancies in teenagers, then we need to look at what their aspirations are. They seek: improved confidence, higher self-esteem, recognition of unhealthy relationships, access to non-judgmental contraception services and a feeling that they can make decisions and that they have goals to aim for.

We won’t help them to achieve their goals by punishing young mothers based on assumptions that they planned to have baby just to avoid getting a job at 16. If this is what society thinks of our young people, and how much it values them, then it really does have much wider social problems to address. And maybe we need an separate inquiry into that.

The Guardian - drop in teenage pregnancy article - 13th December 2013

The drop in teenage pregnancies is the success story of our time

The fall in young women having children is no accident – it's thanks to a programme that should be a model for social policy

The teenage pregnancy strategy's focus on 'good sex education, with good contraception services', led to a remarkable drop in pregnancy rates. Photograph: Linda Nylind for the Guardian

Good news is a rare commodity, so here's a cause for celebration.Teenage pregnancy has fallen at an astonishing rate in recent years, "dropped like a stone", said one surprised national statistician. Why? It's no accident, but a prime example of determined social policy, driven nationally and implemented locally with ringfenced funds, good training, joined-up departments and constant checking to see where and why it was working best. Here's a success for what the right calls "social engineering".

At the time many said it couldn't be done: governments can't change deep, intractable cultural mores. Some leftwing social theorists dismissed it as fixing symptoms, not economic causes: these girls were making a rational choice in their dire circumstances. Louder voices on the moral right rejected sex education, opposed friendly local contraception clinics, TV campaigns, school nurses telling girls how to get help and chemists selling morning-after pills.

But the programme ploughed ahead – and it worked, with advisers at its heart from Brook, the service most experienced in sex advice for the young. Few know about this success because good news gets scant reporting. Besides, this counterfactual flies in the face of belief, rubbing against the grain of every "to hell in a handcart" Mail wail, where the young are always worse than their parents in culture, education and, above all, their frightening sexual habits.

Here are the facts: since 1998, the proportion of pregnancies in under-18s has fallen by a remarkable 34%, to 30.9 per thousand. Until then the number had been rising since the late 1960s. But here's what people wrongly think: Ipsos Mori says people think 25 times more under-16s get pregnant than really do. Oddly, the 15- to 24-year-olds themselves grossly overestimate the rate. They think 40% of their own generation of under-18s get pregnant – which would mean 12 in a classroom of 30. Most people (80%) think teen pregnancy is still rising.

The Conservatives ran a grossly misleading campaign at the last election, following Iain Duncan Smith's fear-inducing Breakdown Britain reports. Moral panic about everything was their theme, figures often wildly wrong. An election document called Labour's Two Nations claimed that a staggering 54% of 15- to 17-year-olds in the most deprived areas were getting pregnant. The real figure was 5.4%. When caught out, they said it was an errant decimal point – but that figure was repeated three times without anyone at Tory head office stopping to wonder whether it could possibly be right. That suggested deep ignorance of life in the large parts of Britain they don't represent, distant "bad lands" of their worst imaginings. At that time Chris Grayling was called out by the UK Statistics Authority for his misleading use of figures to try to claim violent crime was rising, when it had been falling for years – and still is. But ignorance is the right's friend, bogus figures bolstering wrong public estimates of benefit fraud (24%; real figure 0.7%) or numbers of black and Asian people, (a third, real number 11%). When people talk of "single mothers" they imagine girls, like the "young ladies" Peter Lilley mocked in the horrible "little list" he once sang to the Conservative party conference, about teenagers getting pregnant to get a council flat. In real life, the average age of single mothers is 38.

Here's another interesting fact: of the declining numbers of teens who do conceive, many more choose abortion. Nor are the outrageous young behaving any worse than their parents, according to a recent report in the Lancet. The survey of sexual attitudes and lifestyles by the London School of Hygiene and others is a vital 10-yearly study that was personally cancelled by Margaret Thatcher, who thought it prurient, until it was rescued by the Wellcome Trust. It finds teenagers are not having more sex or sex at a younger age than they were 20 years ago, with no change in the average age of first sex, still 16. Here's an odd fact: in 2010, the proportion of conceptions rose for women in their 20s, 30s and 40s – but not for the under-20s.

The fall in teen pregnancy is no accident or whim, but almost entirely due to a programme that should be a model for social policy, backed by evidence and monitored for success so it could be altered as it progressed to learn from what worked best. The 1999 teenage pregnancy strategy had the advantage of an outcome measure that can't be massaged by proponents, nor denied by doubters, its results set out in Office for National Statistics conception and birth numbers.

Back in the optimistic days at the start of the last Labour government, when 18 study groups set out to track and eliminate causes and effects of what was somewhat euphemistically called "social exclusion", the teenage pregnancy unit was set up. A modest investment of £25m has led to the probable non-birth of 60,000 babies to very young mothers, children whose lives on every measure would have been harder than average. Local clinics, nurses and well-trained teaching in sex, relationships, anti-bullying and resisting peer pressure had an immediate effect. Results were markedly different between places that cut pregnancies dramatically – Lambeth, Hackney and Hull – and similar areas that didn't, attributable to where there was good sex education, with good contraception services, and where too little was done.

Will it last? Teen pregnancy rose steeply in the 1980s with raised poverty and unemployment. The figures lag by more than a year, but so far they are holding up well. Alison Hadley, now of Bedford University, who ran the teen pregnancy unit until it was shut down, says the best local champions are still in place, and schools that embraced good sex education have it embedded in their culture. But she worries at the huge cut in youth services, a crucial part of reaching young people most at risk outside school. The National Youth Agency says the outlook is grim: no longer ringfenced, councils are cutting teen pregnancy funding by 19% this year. Labour failed to make sex education a statutory part of the school curriculum and Michael Gove has no interest, removing all this stuff from his department. Will the new chaotic NHS commissioning give priority to school nurses and good contraception services for the young?

The lesson from this programme is that extraordinary things can be done, people can change, but it takes both strong central conviction and good local enthusiasts to see off the doubters.

Glee - Quinn Fabray

Quinn was always the most 'popular' among the characters in glee. She was captain of her cheer squad, she had the equally popular Finn has her boyfriend and had a brilliant time at school. However, her life took a drastic turn when she learns that she is pregnant with Noah Puckerman's Baby. Noah is Finn, her current boyfriends, best friend.

However, she lies to Finn and tricks him into believing that she got pregnant when Finn ejaculated prematurely when they were in a hot tub. The truth eventually comes out, and she and Finn break up. Afterwards, at Regionals, Quinn gives birth to her daughter, Beth, whom she gives up for adoption.

She has cheated on all of her boyfriends throughout the series, however the one with the pregnancy was by far the worse cheating experience she had because it resulted in a baby.

The Mirror article - Britain's youngest parents - 16th April 2014

First picture of Britain's youngest parents: Couple aged 12 and 13 pose with newborn daughter

Britain's youngest ever parents

Britain's youngest parents have been pictured with their newborn daughter as the dad of the 12-year-old girl said yesterday he is proud of her and vowed to support her.

Greg – not his real name – said the family only discovered her pregnancy last month but vowed to stand by her following her daughter’s birth.

He told Nick Ferrari on his LBC radio show yesterday: “She’s brought something beautiful into the world. We’re all going to stand by her and support this.”

Asked if he believed in shame, he said: “No. Shame’s nothing. That little girl does not bring shame to me at all, I’m so proud of her. She’s still my little girl. I’d rather come home and had this, than find that she’s on drugs at 11 or 12. There’s plenty of routes in this day and age kids can go down. She’s not the first and won’t be the last.”

Greg, who is separated from the girl’s 27-year-old mum and does not live with the family, said he cried when his daughter revealed her pregnancy. He said: “You break down with emotion.”

The girl gave birth to her daughter on Sunday. It emerged she lives in North London and has a little brother, nine, and a three-year-old sister. Greg said: “I don’t think they understand.”

He said the news of the pregnancy was “heartbreaking”. But he added: “But you can’t turn back time, you can only go forwards. I come from a working background. It’s not as if we’re all scrounging off the social like people are suggesting. I own my own business. I’m fully going to support them with my own money.”

It is believed the Year 7 girl was just 10 when she met the 13-year-old father of the baby, a Year 9 pupil at a different school in North London.

The pair have the lowest combined age of any British parents. At 12 years, three months, the girl is five months younger than the UK’s previous youngest mum.

Asked about the boy, Greg said: “He’s a great kid. We’ve had a discussion with his parents and we’ve come to the conclusion that ‘what’s happened has happened’.”

He was angry that people had claimed they “allowed it to go on”.

Greg added: “We didn’t allow anything to go on at all, we didn’t know this was happening,”

Daily Mail Article - Britain's youngest parents - 16th April 2014

'It could have been worse - she could have been doing drugs': Father of new mother, 12, says he is proud after she and boyfriend, 13, become Britain's youngest parents

Mother met boyfriend a year ago and was 11 when baby was conceived
Pair from London have combined age of 25 and 'intend to stick together'
Girl's 'father' admits: 'It is heartbreaking, but you can't turn back time'
Says there is 'no shame', 'we're not scroungers' and 'I’ll support the baby'
He didn't know couple were having sex, and says boyfriend is 'a great kid'
Girl's 'father' phones LBC Radio and admits he 'broke down with emotion'
Britain's previous youngest parents were 14-year-olds from Caerphilly

By MARK DUELL and JOHN STEVENS FOR THE DAILY MAIL and LEON WATSON

The 'proud' father of a 12-year-old girl who has become Britain’s youngest mother insisted yesterday that he would rather she had fallen pregnant than 'find she is on drugs'.

The schoolgirl, who became pregnant by her 13-year-old ‘boyfriend’ when she was still in primary school at the age of 11, gave birth to a 7lb 4oz girl on Sunday.

At 12 years and three months, she is five months younger than the previous youngest UK mother.

New record: A couple have become Britain's youngest parents after a girl aged 12 gave birth. Their faces have been pixellated to protect their identities

The Year 7 pupil and the baby’s father, who are said to be ‘totally in love’ and who have been going out for a year, are believed to be Britain’s youngest parents.

Yesterday, her 'father' said that he would stand by his daughter - but admitted that he 'broke down with emotion' when discovering only four weeks ago that his eldest daughter was about to give birth.

Last night her father, who found out she was pregnant only a month ago, said: ‘I would rather have come home and had this than find out she was on drugs at 11 or 12.

'There's plenty of routes kids this age can go down. She's brought something beautiful into the world... That little girl does not bring shame to me at all, I’m so proud of her. Shame doesn’t even come into it. We didn’t know this was happening.

'Unfortunately kids this age are going to grow up to have boyfriends and partners or whatever. If they do things behind their parents’ back that’s something we’re never going to be able to find out.’

Front page: Their child weighed 7lbs - close to the UK average for a girl of 7lb 4oz, The Sun reported

The man, from North London, no longer lives with the girl’s mother, who has become a grandmother at 27.

Describing himself as a ‘proud grandad’ and using a false name to protect the identity of the girl, he told LBC radio that both sets of parents were supporting the youngsters.

He described the 13-year-old boy, whose identity has also been withheld, as a ‘great kid’.

The girl's father told Nick Ferrari on LBC: ‘We only found out she was pregnant a month ago. That means she was eight months pregnant. The baby is going to come into the world no matter what.

‘You can just be supportive about it. The families on both sides are going to be very supportive about it. It is heartbreaking, but you can't turn back time. You can only go forwards.

‘We don't know where it happened. What you're implying is that we knew they were having sexual intercourse in bedrooms. No.'

He said he would not let his three-year-old daughter and nine-year-old son make the same mistake but denied that he could have prevented it.

He added: 'We cannot keep her wrapped up her whole life. I cannot keep her wrapped up all her life. You know, she goes to school, they spend time together. You can’t stop this.

'I cannot go out and watch my little girl 24 hours a day, seven days a week. It’s not possible.

‘It won’t be happening again, what’s happened has happened because you give your children a bit of slack. So now we will be keeping an eye on people. Maybe we could of [sic] done more.

‘They made a mistake and that’s the thing we’ve got to deal with now and just be proud of what we’ve got.’

The pair have the lowest combined age of any British parents on record. She, at 12 years and three months, is five months younger than Britain’s previous youngest mother, Tressa Middleton.

Their child weighed 7lbs - close to the UK average for a girl of 7lb 4oz, The Sun reported. At 27, the girl's mother, who was a teenage mother herself, is also now one of Britain's youngest grandmothers.

The parents, from North London, have been in a relationship for a year and say they are 'totally in love'. They met over Christmas 2012 in a park when she was ten and he was 12, it was reported.

The girl’s 'father' added: 'I can't keep a watch on her 24 hours a day, seven days a week. You don't know what has gone on and once the mistake has been made, you can only support them.’

Newborn: The child weighed 7lbs, which is close to the British average for a girl of 7lbs 4oz (file picture)

On Tuesday, the new mother - who has a three-year-old sister and a nine-year-old brother - reportedly went to a register office to register the birth with her own mother and another woman.

'The families on both sides are going to be very supportive about it… it is heart-breaking, but you can't turn back time. You can only go forwards'

Girl's 'father'

Her grandmother, aged 56, is now a great grand-mother - and was shocked by the news. The girl’s 'father' said that he cried when learning of the pregnancy four weeks before the birth - and she apologised to him.

The girl's father insisted his grandchild will not be brought up on benefits.

He told LBC: ‘I come from a working background. We’re not scrounging off the social, like other people are suggesting. I work, I own my own business.

THE TWO 14-YEAR-OLDS WHO WERE BRITAIN'S YOUNGEST PARENTS

Britain's previous youngest parents were April Webster and Nathan Fishbourne, from Caerphilly, south Wales. April became pregnant by her boyfriend when she was 13.

Jamie Fishbourne with his mother, April Webster

The couple started seeing each other when they were aged 13 and in the same year at St Cenydd School in Caerphilly.

They started having unprotected sex shortly after their relationship began in September 2009, but April said she did not tell her parents because she was 'too embarrassed'.

She discovered she was pregnant a day before her 14th birthday and gave birth to Jamie by pre-arranged caesarean section on November 15, 2010.

Jamie was born with a malformed oesophagus which initially hindered his feeding, but he was declared healthy after an operation and 11 days in hospital.

'I'm fully going to support them with my own money. We’re not scroungers. I will sit there and I will support this baby as best I can with my own money.

He said his other children, a boy of nine and a girl of three, do not fully understand what has happened, adding: ‘It’s shocking at first but I don’t think they understand the fact that she’s a mum.

'It won’t be happening again. Now we will be keeping an eye on people. I don’t want this to happen again. Maybe we could have done more.’

It is thought that social services will now be giving the couple support, although a health visitor could suffice unless the child is seen as being at risk.

A source told The Sun: 'Both sets of grandparents are incredibly supportive. It's a very difficult situation because the parents are both so young - but their families are right behind them.

'The baby's mum and dad have been in a relationship for more than year, so this isn't a fleeting romance. They intend to stick together and bring their daughter up together.

'They're very into each other, totally in love. She is obsessed with him. She sees this as true love. They want to get married.'

The source told how classmates at the mother's school have been left shocked. The girl only left classes last month and, it was said, did not look pregnant.

On claims that the couple want to marry, the girl's 'father' said: 'They're not going to get married [but] I couldn't say that in six years, I'd like to think they're going to turn out to be one happy family.'

He added: 'We've spoken to them, kids at this age when they have boyfriends, they sometimes become besotted with people.

'What's happened has happened. We can't bury our kids forever - they do need a life.'

Britain's youngest mother, Tressa Middleton, became pregnant at 11 and gave birth aged 12 in Edinburgh in 2006.

The youngest father on record is Sean Stewart, of Bedford, who became a father aged 12 in 1998.

TEENAGE PREGNANCY IN BRITAIN

Office for National Statistics figures released in February showed that the UK under-18 conception rate remains the lowest since 1969 at 27.9 per 1,000 women aged 15 to 17.

The number of pregnancies in those under 18 fell to 27,834 in 2012 compared with 31,051 in 2011 - a 10 per cent drop. Some 5,432 under-16s fell pregnant in 2012, compared with 5,991 in 2011, a fall of 9.3 per cent.

Among under-16s, some 3,251 pregnancies resulted in abortion - 59.8 per cent of the total. This is down on 60.2 per cent the previous year and 62.5 per cent the year before that.

Roughly two-fifths of underage conceptions resulted in births. The figures also revealed that 253 girls under 14 fell pregnant in 2012, fewer than the previous year, with almost three-quarters having an abortion.

Famously in 2009, Alfie Patten from Eastbourne, East Sussex, told a newspaper that he believed he had made his 15-year-old girlfriend pregnant when he was just 12.

DNA tests then established that a 15-year-old boy was the father of Chantelle Stedman's baby, leaving Alfie ‘distressed’. But two years later Chantelle insisted that Alfie was indeed the father.

Hilary Pannack, chief executive of teenage pregnancy charity Straight Talking, told MailOnline: 'I know girls who've been pregnant at 13 and have had the baby, and I've heard of 12-year-olds before.

‘Girls are going into puberty earlier. Certainly there are health implications of girls having babies quite so young. We know that the health statistics for teenage parents are not good.

'Certainly it robs young people of their childhood. The chances of them staying together are very, very low - and the benefits system doesn't encourage it.’

She added: ‘It's not the end of their life, but they will be dependent on others, both financially and emotionally. I would [tell them] what my teenage parents [working for us] tell me.

'It's not the end of their life, but they will be dependent on others, both financially and emotionally'

Hilary Pannack, Straight Talking

‘They tell me that they love their children, they don’t regret having their children, but they wish they had waited until they were in a financial position to support their child.

‘We know that teenage parents are more likely to have children who have teenage children.

'They are going to live on the state, unless the parents are wealthy enough to support them.’

Thursday, 16 October 2014

Daily Mail article on teenage pregnancies in the UK

UK still has the highest rate of teen pregnancies in Western Europe despite 25% fall in the last decade

19.7 births per 1,000 women aged 15-19 in the UK in 2012, study shows
Figure is much higher than the EU average of only 12.6 births per 1,000
Worldwide figures show Switzerland had the lowest rate at 3.4 births
The highest teen pregnancy rate was in Azerbaijan at 50.0 births

By Matt Chorley

Published: 16:19, 15 October 2014 | Updated: 19:11, 15 October 2014

Britain has the highest teen pregnancy rate in Western Europe, new figures showed today.

Only Bulgaria, Romania and Slovakia have a bigger problem with girls aged 15-19 giving birth, the Office for National Statistics said.

Tackling high levels of teenage pregnancies is linked to the struggle to break the cycle of ill-health and poverty, the ONS said.

The UK has one of the highest rates of pregnancies among 15-19-year-olds in Europe, the new figures from the Office for National Statistics show

According to the study into how European countries compare, the UK birth rate among women aged 15-19 was higher than the average across the whole of the 28 countries in the European Union.

For every 1,000 women in the age bracket in the UK, there were 19.7 births, compared to only 12.6 births across the EU.

The UK figure is significantly higher than other major European countries like Germany (8 births per 1,000), France (10.7) and Spain (9.1).

Europe's lowest teenage birth rate was in Denmark (4.4), Slovenia (4.5) and the Netherlands (4.5).

The long-term trend shows that teenage pregnancy rates are falling, and faster in countries where it is a bigger problem.

The UK teenage birth rate is down by more than a quarter (26.8 per cent) since 2004 compared to a fall of almost one fifth (18.2 per cent) across the EU as a whole.

A Department of Health spokesperson said: 'Teenage pregnancy rates in the UK are now at their lowest level for over 40 years – but we need to keep up the momentum to achieve the levels seen by our Western European counterparts.

'We know that teenage pregnancy is strongly associated with our most deprived and socially excluded young people, and together with the NHS and local authorities we must continue to make progress.'

While the teen pregnancy rate has fallen sharply in the UK, it is still much higher than the EU as a whole

Among countries outside the EU, Switzerland had the lowest birth rate with 3.4 births per 1,000 women aged 15-19 in 2012.

Azerbaijan, which borders Russia and Iran, had the highest rate at 50.0 births per thousand.

In 2012, the birth rate among young women was 16.1 per 1,000 women aged 15-19 in Australia, 24.9 in New Zealand and 29.4 in the United States, the ONS said.

The ONS said: 'There is a great deal of interest in teenage pregnancy levels in the UK and how these levels compare to other countries within Europe and the world.

'Globally, adolescent pregnancy and childbirth is regarded as a major contributor to maternal and child mortality and to the cycle of ill-health and poverty.

'This is largely as a result of the associated socio-economic factors before and after pregnancy as opposed to the biological effects of young maternal age.'