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Teenage Pregnancies
11 am
Mrs. Teresa Gorman (Billericay): I am grateful for the opportunity to open a debate on this subject.
The Government have just published a report on teenage pregnancy prepared by their social exclusion unit. The standard of the document makes it easy to read, and it has lots of useful diagrams and heartfelt comments from concerned adults, like the Prime Minister, who talks about our shameful record--rather like a Victorian parson pontificating in the pulpit. The best bits are the quotations from teenagers themselves, which illustrate the reality of their predicament. I fear that the rest of the report is much of the same: it refers to more task forces, more focus groups and more concerned adults who will minister to those teenagers, while studiously avoiding some of the simple remedies offered by the pharmaceutical industry, most essentially, emergency contraception and possibly easier terminations. There are one or two novel bits, such as punishment for teenage fathers, including losing their car or having their benefit cheques docked by £5 a week.
If we are to discuss a subject as serious as this, we must put it into perspective. When devising solutions for perceived problems, it is important to look, first, at the comparison between this country and other parts of the world and, secondly, at the number of people involved. Although it has often been said that we have the worst record in Europe, we do not have the worst record in the world. Other English-speaking countries, particularly the United States, New Zealand and Canada, have higher numbers than ours. In England, there are some 1.7 million teenage girls in the 14 to 18 age group. The report says that 90,000 of them become pregnant each year; it does not say that they are all unmarried or not in partnerships. However, that is only 5 per cent. of that age group. If we take the 14 to 16 age group, about which there is a great deal of concern, the figures are 880,000--under 1 million--and 8,000 live births, which is less than 1 per cent.
I am not sure that I agree with the Prime Minister that that is an altogether shameful record. I agree that it is 8,000 too many births to girls in that age group, but the fact remains that 99 per cent. of our young girls are not getting pregnant each year. It is important to bear those facts in mind because we sometimes become quite hysterical and get things out of proportion, which does no good.
The experience of pregnancy and birth for those very young girls may be extremely traumatic. No one would pretend that, at that age, they are ready to raise children: they are hardly more than children themselves. However, we cannot marry them off or expect them to set up partnerships with the fathers of their children, who are usually just as young as they are. Nor can we simply walk away from the problem.
I am not altogether scornful about or averse to the Government's suggestion that hostels may have a role to play in helping those young people to get their act together, get back into education and begin to pick up the threads of their young lives so that they do not find themselves stuck in the groove of early and continuous maternity until it is almost too late.
Lorna Fitzsimons (Rochdale):
First, may I congratulate the hon. Lady on securing this debate? Does
Mrs. Gorman:
Yes, I agree with the hon. Lady. I am sure that she is aware that many of those young children are in care homes to begin with, so the prospect of their being in an institution--I hate that word--or some kind of accommodation where they can be looked after and which specifically caters for their new maternal condition has merit.
The very best solution would be for those young girls to stay with their own families--with mum. It would certainly be much cheaper. According to the Joseph Rowntree Foundation, a single parent raising a child alone will cost the taxpayer at least £83,000 in benefits from the child's birth to when it reaches the age of 18. That is without the cost of housing benefit, if that person lives alone, is unable to work and therefore cannot support herself as she might like to.
A child raised in a conventional family costs some £50,000 from birth to the age of 18. About a fifth of that--£10,000--is met by child benefit, so it seems perfectly obvious, from a financial perspective, that the best policy would be to support and encourage the families of those young girls to keep them at home instead of paying the teenagers to tough it out on their own. The plans that the Chancellor devises should take that into account.
I should like a pound for every time that I have been to a Chancellor in the run-up to a Budget to try to make that point to him. I say "him" because it is always a him. We are yet to have a woman Chancellor, who might be more sympathetic to that point of view. The best place to raise children is within the existing family, and that is also the most cost-effective course.
Mr. John Healey (Wentworth):
Although it is true that we have a male Chancellor, does the hon. Lady not concede that for the first time we have three female Ministers in the Treasury team? That must be a step forward.
Mrs. Gorman:
Yes. The hon. Gentleman makes my point for me: we are always the bridesmaids, never the bride. I shall wait to see the outcome.
How do teenagers view these matters? Girls who find themselves pregnant are often obliged to leave their family home, simply because, in that way, the welfare system will pick up the bills. Why should parents who live in crowded accommodation encourage their daughter to stay at home, with the extra costs, the inconvenience and a noisy mouth to feed--the new baby--when the welfare state dictates otherwise? When Governments do more, people do less, and when something is subsidised we tend to get more of it.
I do not believe that young women have babies to get flats. That is a calumny; it is not true, and we should stop saying it. I certainly do not support the tabloid press, which often makes that extremely chauvinistic point. However, we must stop subsidising teenage sex so much
and must promote the role of the conventional family both in dealing with their own teenage children and in taking in their children's children wherever possible.
That is what used to happen--perhaps before the welfare state began. Although the welfare state means well, it does not always produce the right solutions to the problems that it perceives. We should not take the line that because the welfare state has not achieved its goals, we need more of it. Sometimes we need to stand back and ask ourselves whether we can do things better. There are other options.
Shona McIsaac (Cleethorpes):
Does the hon. Lady agree that we should not just stand back, but take a step back? Is not the most cost-effective solution ensuring that young women do not become pregnant in the first place? Really good contraception education would give them the self-confidence to say "No" or "Not yet".
Mrs. Gorman:
I could not agree more, but I feel like saying "I wish". In fact, there is a great deal of education of this kind, but it seems to go over the heads of school children. One teenager is quoted as saying, more or less, "Our religious education teacher gave us the facts. She was shaking with nerves, and I felt embarrassed for her." That, I imagine, was the end of the lesson.
Not all girls who become pregnant come from conventional homes. Some, possibly quite a large number, are already in care, and we should consider the nature of the places where they are in care. I recently visited a very nice, very modern care home for children from difficult backgrounds, which contained one young teenage girl and six boys. They all slept in the same corridor; admittedly, the girl's room was at one end and the boys' room was at the other. The staff told me how much "teasing" the girl received from the boys, and expressed doubts about the merits of the arrangement. Their solution was to admit a few more girls to balance things out. Mine would have been to take the girl out of the hostel and put her with other girls.
I am a great advocate of allowing girls to grow up together. I went to a girls' school, and I do not think that it did me much harm. Girls often thrive when they have the support of their own sex. Politically correct ideas about modelling care on the orthodox, traditional family mix of the sexes are not always right. Young girls and boys in care are being brought up by people who are basically strangers, and who work on a rota basis, coming in for eight hours and then disappearing again. We should ask ourselves whether the social services have got it right, given the inordinately large number of children who come from disturbed, dysfunctional or broken homes.
The report quotes one young woman as saying:
Our abortion rates are much higher than those of other European countries. They are particularly high in the leafy suburbs of the southern counties, where families are more
clued up and girls are more ambitious. When a girl becomes pregnant accidentally, her family ensures that she is given treatment so that she can get on with her young life and develop her career and prospects, rather than having to raise young children before she has completed her own preparation for adult life.
The cheapest contraception of all--if it is made available quickly enough--is emergency contraception, which costs just £1.35. Some girls, however, wait much too long before drawing attention to their pregnancies. Some go through with it, give birth and then dump the baby.
Pontificating on its high horse the other day, theDaily Mail observed that at the beginning of the last century about 5 per cent. of young women were becoming pregnant, whereas 40 per cent. more were becoming pregnant nowadays--although 40 per cent. of a relatively small number is not a huge amount. Girls today, however, do not face the prospect of the workhouse. They do not smother their children at birth, as they frequently did in those barmy early Victorian days, or dump their babies on the steps of workhouses. If the numbers have risen, that is partly because girls are no longer intimidated and made to feel desperately ashamed, as if becoming pregnant was all their own fault. They are more open about it. We should welcome that, and not prate too much about the high incidence of pregnancy.
"It sometimes seems as if sex is compulsory but contraception is illegal".
Quite. Young people have more than enough exposure to sex as a supposedly jolly pastime, but, as the hon. Member for Cleethorpes (Shona McIsaac) pointed out, an obstacle course awaits them when they need access to contraception in emergencies.
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