Don’t often find myself on the same side as Tim Worstall, but he has a point here, about the difference between numbers of teenage pregnancies, which vary according to the number of teenagers at any one time (two pregnancies in a cohort of ten 15 year-old girls is high, two in a cohort of 100 is not) and the rate of teenage pregnancy (as expressed by pregnancies per one thousand young women). I made a similar point about the teenage pregnancy doom-mongers a few years ago. The important figure - the rate - is falling. Now is not the time to give up on the teenage pregnancy strategy.

I groaned at the front page of this week’s Sunday Times magazine, emblazoned with a picture of a naked pregnant woman, and the the text:

This is Aimee, eight months pregnant and only 15 years old. She is part of Britain’s epidemic of gymslip mothers. Underage sex, teenage motherhood and welfare dependent lifestyles are a national scandal. Are we right to be so outraged?

But Lesley White, who went and spent time with several young mums and their families in London and Reading, delivers a thoughtful and balanced article, which acknowledges that motherhood isn’t the worst thing to happen to many young women, without glossing over the real difficulties. Definitely worth a read in full.

From Gordon Brown’s pre-budget report speech yesterday:

I have received powerful representations that in the last months of pregnancy when nutrition is most important and in the first weeks after birth, the extra costs borne by parents could be better recognised if we did more to help through our universal benefit, child benefit paid to all.
Maternity grants are available to low income mothers from the 29th week of pregnancy.
Help should be available to all mothers expecting a child. So child benefit will be paid on that basis for every mother - additional child benefit that recognises the important role at this critical moment that child benefit can play.

About time too. In 2004, the sadly now-defunct Maternity Alliance published a paper looking at how much money pregnant young women got a week, and how much it cost to eat a healthy diet. (sadly no longer online) They found that you needed to spend £20.25 a week to eat a healthy diet, but the vast majority of young pregnant teenagers living away from home couldn’t afford that. The project had young women living in a hostel keeping food diaries for a week; it was shocking to read these young women were surviving on tea, chips, biscuits and toast for the most part. Hopefully this scheme will make a real difference to pregnant women and the health and lifechances of their children.

Remember last year’s Christmas greetings from me to you? Well, forgive me a chuckle that the actress playing Mary in the latest Christian blockbuster “The Nativity Story” is pregnant at the age of - yes you guessed it - 16! Nothing like the touch of authenticity!

On the latest data available (that from 2004), the rate of teenage pregnancy in Oxfordshire has risen by 9.3% since the introduction of the teenage pregnancy strategy (here’s the link: it only works in IE as the webmaster at the TPU is a numpty), bucking the national trend, a decline of 11.1% (link here - yes, only in IE too). (NB: the rate per thousand young women is how you measure falls and rises in teenage pregnancy; talking about more and fewer teenage pregnancies without acknowledging that there aren’t precisely the same number of teenage girls in each age year group is a bit silly, but it doesn’t stop the newspapers doing it. Anyway, that’s a rant for another day.)

In this climate, the decision to close two of the evening sessions of the Alec Turnbull Clinic, the main (only) family planning clinic in Oxford, is indefensible. It follows a several setbacks to contraceptive provision over the last few years in Oxford, including the closure of the outreach clinics on estates such as Rose Hill eighteen months ago, and the move of the clinic from east Oxford, on a good bus route and close to the teenage pregnancy hotspots of the city, to the much less accessible Racliffe Infirmary, in central north Oxford. Now, the sessions on a Thursday and Friday night are to close, because staff shortages mean they can’t be run safely and effectively. On top of this, infuriatingly, when the Radcliffe Infirmary finally closes at Christmas, the clinic will move temporarily to Blackbird Leys - incredibly inaccessible to anyone not from the Leys or without a car - before relocating permanently to Temple Cowley, rather than returning to the newly-rebuilt East Oxford health centre. Really makes you wonder quite how the new Oxfordshire primary care trust proposes to meet that target of halving teenage conceptions by 2010, doesn’t it?

Andrew wrote a post earlier today about serious case reviews when children have been hurt or killed. He includes a fascinating comment on the difference between generalisations made by professionals and the facts. The speaker is a senior manager in charge of case reviews, interspersed with results from this survey of 40 cases printed in italics:

I have done four of these reviews and the same things keep coming up. It’s young mothers (9 of the 40 main carers were aged under 21 when the child was born) who are depressed (18 of the 40 had mental health problems) and simply cannot cope (for 16 children no concerns about their welfare had ever been expressed) with their babies (19 of the 40 children were aged less than 12 months) in poor living circumstances (in 23 cases there was no significant poverty or accommodation problems), especially when their situation is compounded by a violent partner (22 of the 31 current partners were known to be violent).

Thought this gem deserved a wider audience. I’ve changed nothing.

DUDE The teenatge mums are slags. they decide O IM NOT DOING WELL IN SCHOOL ILL HAVE A BABY AND LIVE OFF THE COUNCIL YES… ONE THEING LUV PPLE LIKE MY NAN AND OTHER OAPS NEED THAT BENFIT MONEY TO LIVE ON COS THEYVE WORKED ALL THEIR LIVES.. RESPECT TEENAGE MUMS !!!!??? RESPECT THEM… ILL RESPECT THEM WHEN THEY JUMP OFF A CLIFF THERE THE LOWEST THINGS ON EARTH MY UNCLE LIVES OF £70 A WEEK WHEREAS A SLUTTY TEENAGE MUM GETS A HOUSE FOR LIFE AND £200 A WEEK THATS SELFISH BECAUDSE MY UNCLE HAS NO LEGS AND LIVES IN SQUALLOR I HATE ALL TEENAGE MUMS AND THEY CAN DIE FOR ALL I CARE ITS MORE MONEY FOR THE DISABLED WHO PHYSICLY CANT GET A JOB AND WHO ACTUALLY NEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEED IT .. SO DONT RESPECT THEM SELFISH SLAGS HATE THEM ….I REST MY CASE !!!!!

(Originally posted on Thursday night, then lost until just now when I worked out how to retrieve it)

Interesting to see the Prime Minister putting so much emphasis on teenage mums producing problem children in his first interview since returning from holiday. The interview on Thursday night seems to have been about trailing the speech on social inclusion he’s giving on Tuesday, in which we know he’ll announce new measures to support families with disabled children, people with persistent mental health problems, looked after children and yes, new plans to tackle teenage pregnancy. All groups of people with particularly difficult circumstances who need extra help - so far so good.

But I have alarm bells ringing at the thought that benefits may be withdrawn from families who don’t attend the parenting support offered to them. In the oral interview (video link at the side of the BBC piece), Mr Blair even floats the idea that if families with children who are likely to grow up to cause problems don’t co-operate, they may have their children taken away from them. Dreadful idea, using threats like that to coerce families to take up support, especially as consultations like Get Heard point out time and time again how terrified low income families are that they might lose their children. Counterproductive, too, when services like Sure Start are almost universally appreciated by low-income families, and when the hardest-to-reach families could be reached with just a bit more effort and investment in getting to them.

Interesting research from the JRF today about young women with few prospects choosing to become teenage parents. You can understand it, really. Many young women growing up in deprived areas see getting pregnant as the option that demonstrates that they are adults in a world where the usual trappings of adulthood such as getting a car, moving out of home and earning a decent wage are unavailable to them; a baby provides unconditional love to young women who may never have had that before; and being a mother is a real impetus to make a go of your life, to get an education or a job, and to get your own place.

But there is a flaw in the research, one that Beverley Hughes picks up:

But Beverley Hughes, minister for children, families and young people said: “This is an unfortunate study which, on the basis of a very small and carefully selected sample, suggests that teenage pregnancy can be a positive option for some young people. We reject that view completely.
“There is overwhelming evidence that, overall, teenage parenthood leads to poorer outcomes both for teenage mothers and their children.
“Our Teenage Pregnancy Strategy focuses on preventing teenage pregnancies and since its introduction conception rates for under-18s have fallen to their lowest level in 20 years.”

The way that you access teenage parents to do research like this is through the agencies that support them (e.g. LEA specialist teenage mums’ schools, Sure Start Plus, voluntary organisations like YWCA and Barnardo’s). If these agencies are doing their jobs, then the young women have more confidence and better self-esteem as a result of that intervention, and by getting pregnant have accessed a far greater level of support than they would have when they were just any old young women growing up in a deprived area. With this greater level of support and increased motivation now they have someone to care about besides themselves, is it any wonder they feel positive about being a teenage mum? And as Beverley Hughes correctly identifies, the priority is to reduce teenage pregnancy as the long-term results are profound and expensive, whatever the immediate positive effects for individual young women and men.

I also have a problem with the discourse of planned/unplanned pregnancy in this context. Planned/unplanned assumes young women have agency, that they can choose what happens to them, that pregnancies are either accidents or overtly desired. In fact, for these young women, pregnancy will be one more in a string of things that just happens to them, over which they have little control.

One woman’s story about how she made the right decision for her, over at Second child syndrome (via the britblog roundup) Rings lots of bells for me with how the teenage mums I’ve met through work were treated by medical professionals, particularly the section about leafing through the phonebook in a panic…