teenage pregnancies: responsibility, accountability, and consequence:

[Guest guest]

Hello, pl read this with open mind and judge for ur self. Teenage

pregnancies are higher in UK; at the end of the article can we answer who

is responsible? People work in relevant specialties in UK may appreciate

this far better. Mind you UK population is only 60 million (US 300, India

1000 million). I am sure it is a global problem, (?problem of plenty) more

so in developed countries. Absolute figures may not be much, still there

many young who are not affected. This is seen everywhere in different

degrees I suppose. What a way to spend resource human, financial etc. Mental

trauma etc.

Original link is

http://women.timesonline.co.uk/tol/life_and_style/women/families/article3136

501.ece

LP

From The Sunday Times

January 6, 2008

It’s simple – no benefits, no teenage mums

New figures show more than 20 schoolgirls get pregnant every day. Nothing

will change until we stop subsidising them

Neil Lyndon

The news about teenage pregnancies just got even more grim. It always does.

Last week the Department for Children, Schools and Families announced that

pregnancies among girls under 16 rose to 7,462 in 2005 – the latest year for

which figures are available.

It follows that more than 20 schoolgirls were – and presumably still are –

getting pregnant every day. As a result, despite the government’s campaigns

to reduce teenage pregnancies (including £150m spent on televi-sion

advertisements) – England and Wales have the highest pregnancy rates for

under16s in western Europe.

Just over half the total number of girls who got pregnant had abortions; so

in the three years from 2003, 13,474 girls aged under 16 had abortions. No

parent would wish that experience for their young daughter – but what might

be even more disturbing is that approximately the same number of girls who

are not yet old enough to vote, drink in pubs or drive a car decided to give

birth to their babies and become mothers.

So another 13,000 or so children will have been added to that alarming horde

of Britain’s young who will almost certainly be brought up on benefits,

knowing nothing of a secure family life or a father’s love and who will soon

be beyond the control of the poor young girl who has chosen to bring them

into the world.

The picture for under18s is equally distressing. The government claims that

the pregnancy rate among under18s has fallen but this is a work of

statistical jiggery-pokery: it is possible to advance that claim only

because the overall number of teenagers in the population as a whole has

risen and so the rate of pregnancy among them can be alleged to have fallen.

However, the true number of such pregnancies has actually risen from 46,655

in 1999 to 47,277 in 2005.

Two conclusions can be drawn from these figures: the government’s policies

plainly are not working and its declared aims self-evidently will not be

achieved. Throughout this decade, Labour’s target has been to halve the

number of pregnancies among 16 and 17-year-olds by 2010.

To that end it has intensified the provision of sex education in schools,

raised spending on propaganda programmes and liberalised the availability of

chemical abortion and of contraceptives. With what result? More teenage

pregnancies. More abortions. More miserable single mothers. More poverty.

Perhaps it is time to look at this issue from another angle and apply a

straightforward cost/benefit analysis to our policies. Supporting single

mothers is a significant expense for the state. The government itself says

that “benefit payments to a teenage mother who does not enter employment in

the three years following birth can total between £19,000 and £25,000 over

three years”.

About 20,000 teenage mothers give birth every year and go on to draw such

benefits.

Overall state expenditure on abortion is not an immense sum compared with,

say, the education budget but, even allowing for the fact that most

abortions are chemically induced by morning-after pills, the cost of 200,000

abortions for all women (including significant numbers of operations in

hospitals) runs into many tens of millions of pounds.

Perhaps we should simply ask ourselves why the state is required to cough up

when a teenage girl gets pregnant. Clearly, a significant financial saving

could be made if the state stopped subsidising pregnant teenagers. Beyond

the mere bookkeeping, however, lies the possibility of social improvement.

Arguments over abortion, for instance, have been polarised for the past 40

years between those, on one side, who are primarily concerned with the

individual rights of the woman/mother and those on the other side who are

more interested in the individual rights of the foetus/baby.

As far as I can remember, in all that time nobody has ever considered the

position of a powerful but abjectly silent third party. I can’t remember

anybody asking how it suits the interest of the state to pay for 200,000

abortions of healthy foetuses a year.

In the same light, we should ask how the interests of the state are served

by extending indefinite subsidy – at an annual cost of many billions – to

those tens of thousands of single young women who decide to give birth to

babies whom they cannot otherwise afford to maintain.

Withdrawing state subsidy would not, in any way, remove the right of a woman

to have an abortion or to keep a child if she so chooses (and abortions for

medical reasons should arguably continue to be provided by the National

Health Service in the same way as any other medical operation). It would

simply mean she would have to find some other source of funding.

That money will probably be hard to find; and if young women knew that they

would face the severe problem of getting money for abortions or for child

maintenance from the father and from his or her own family or, in the last

resort, from charities or adoption agencies, they would surely be less

blithe about getting pregnant.

They might start taking responsibility for their actions. At present, the

fact that a girl or woman can look to the state for automatic, unqualified

provision of funds for abortion or for childcare means that she need feel no

sense of personal responsibility for the act of getting pregnant and the

subsequent decision over what to do with the baby.

Such a shift in personal responsibility might immediately lead to a

reduction in the numbers of abortions and the numbers of single young women

having babies. That, after all, is what everybody wants.

Nobody – not even the most ardent advocate of women’s rights – is cheerful

about that melancholy figure of 200,000 abortions, which rises every year.

Nobody claims that ours would be a more shining civilisation if even more

abortions took place.

Nobody believes we need even more single mothers looking after children –

especially teenage boys – whom they cannot afford to support and cannot

begin to control. In other words, there is general agreement that the

interests of society are not being best served by these unchecked

developments.

Yet still we go on forking out for them. And still the numbers rise every

year. It is obvious and undeniable that many tens of thousands of young

girls get pregnant every year because they actively choose to do so. And one

of the most obvious reasons they make that choice is because the rest of us

– through the state – make it worth their while. So perhaps we should stop

doing that.