Sorry - I, alongside most of the national press, seem mildly obsessed about this topic at the moment. Will try to blog about something else over the weekend, but for the time being, this is all you’re getting.

Madeleine Bunting has a fascinating article over at the Guardian ( well, I would say that, as we filled in some of the details for the article, but the spin is all her own!) Basically, her pov is that young women who have babies as teenagers have poorer life chances, but that as they’d been growing up in areas where their chances wouldn’t have been all that great anyway, the answer is not to treat teenage pregnancy as a tragedy, but to try to sort out disadvantage. It’s a thought-provoking article, and should be required reading for new ministers.

A few other bloggers are talking about this - makes a change from Iraq, ID cards and PR, I suppose! - Tim Worstall and Volsunga, in a fabulous blog about why abstinence education has precisely the wrong effect, in that it doesn’t stop kids having sex, it stops them having PROTECTED sex.

If you don’t believe me or her, look at the summary of “Teenage Pregnancy and Parenthood: a Review of Reviews” put otgether by the Health Development Agency. This evidence briefing pulls together learning from review-level data about effective interventions to reduce the rates of teenage pregnancy, and it’s properly thorough. I would link directly to it here if the TPU’s website weren’t so fucking useless - as it is, I can’t even open it currently, probably because the site can’t deal with Firefox, so you’ll have to put up with a link to the page it’s on here.