JAN MOIR: ‘Deterrent’ is a dirty word for dealing with teen mothers

Being a single mother and living on benefits has become a lifestyle choice. In fact, some see it as a pretty good option once the bore of a patchy but compulsory education is out of the way.

Girls, do you want to know how to ruin your life in two easy stages? OK. First, get pregnant by some random spotty youth who is almost as irresponsible as you.

Quite possibly you will both be drunk at the time, but this is not mandatory. Make sure you never see him again, except maybe outside the chip shop and once downtown on a Saturday night.

However, you are not bothered about him. Especially nine months later when you have your own lovely little baby and no economic prospects to speak of. So what? You are happy, despite the fact that your own parents have failed you and so has the Government.

Congratulations. With one bound you have become a single teenage mum with the sole ambition of living off the State for the rest of your life.

For you, that’s it. You will never get on the career ladder or be independent, promoted or valued. There will be scant opportunities for fulfilment and excitement or travel.

For you, a gap year is lying fallow between your multiple-father pregnancies. You will never, as the song says, ride through Paris in a sports car with the warm wind in your hair.

You might not even want to, but listen – you don’t even have the luxury of choice. From now until the grave, it is you and the kids in a council house papered with State handouts and increasing despair.

One might hope that every young girl in the country would see this bleak scenario as a self-defeating dead end to be avoided at all costs.

Yet to thousands, it is nothing of the sort. Being a single mother and living on benefits has become a lifestyle choice. In fact, some see it as a pretty good option once the bore of a patchy but compulsory education is out of the way.

They believe that for them – and this is a national shame – there really is not much more to do than become another depressing, baby-popping statistic. And the thing is, they might be right.

Figures released this week show that, despite a ten-year campaign that has cost us millions, Britain still has the highest teenage pregnancy rate in Europe.

Forty-thousand underage girls became pregnant in 2008 – a modest decline from the 1998 figure of 46,000, but a scant return on the massive investment of time, money and effort made.

Was it really 11 years ago that Tony Blair decreed that the number of under-18s becoming pregnant in England and Wales would be halved by now? Yes. And that was the beginning of Labour’s £286million campaign of sex education lessons, free contraceptives, pats on the head and a nice cup of sugary tea with which to wash down the morning-after pill.

What a joke! Look at what has happened. The Government’s morally lax teenage pregnancy strategy has been utterly hopeless. In this parallel universe, deterrent has become a dirty word.

Clearly, at no point did anyone say: ‘Look, young lady, just don’t have sex. It is not appropriate. At your age, it will have awful repercussions and it may wreck your life.’

The emphasis instead has been on the freedom to do what the hell you want, while taxpayers will take care of the inevitable fallout. The national sex education curriculum has meant liberally dishing out contraceptives like lollipops to schoolchildren both under and over the age of consent.

Yet it hasn’t worked. By dint of tacit approval, it seems to have given young people the go-ahead to have sex. And the controversial expansion of confidential contraceptive services for girls under the age of 16 -children, I would call them – has not helped, either.

Indeed, in the increasingly sexualised real world, it must make it more difficult to resist the advances of boys. And surely it must lead to some becoming sexually active when they might not otherwise have done so?

Yet nowhere is the message that having sex at such a young age is just plain wrong. No one ever turns around and says: ‘Danger ahead. Desist.’

After all, that might be infringing their teenage rights. Yet it should be a matter of sorrow more than rage that so many teenage girls think that being a parent is an opportunity for an easy life, complete with someone at their side who will love them unconditionally.

No, not a husband; a baby. Many of these girls have poor family support, and the feckless boys they meet have no sense of responsibility.

So it is not more sex education they need, it is a proper education. They know exactly how to get pregnant, that is why they get pregnant.

Yet despite this, the Government is to continue on its path, with even more one-to-one sexual health and contraception consultations for 16-year-olds.

Why repeat the mistakes of the past? It is clear the teenage pregnancy strategy has been a disaster for young people.

Meanwhile, the public see the generous provision of free benefits and housing as the primary cause of the continued high number of teen mums.

But now that we have got ourselves into such a big mess, what is the alternative?

We can’t just throw these young mums onto the streets and tell them to sell matches.

Yet it is the Government and the policy-makers who have enabled this State-funded, benefit-rich bog to flourish. And the funny thing is that, ultimately, it is to no one’s benefit at all.

Read more: http://www.dailymail.co.uk/debate/article-1253904/Deterrent-dirty-word-dealing-teen-mothers.html#ixzz0gv0cZ4x8