One factor that hasn’t been addressed is the impact of the lack of a father. Or do the fathers stick around? Would be interesting to see some statistics on this. A great deal of concern about teenage mums revolves around the fact that they are (I believe) mostly single. Perhaps I’m biased coming from a two parent family but I’m glad I was brought up by two parents rather than one.

Amen to that Neil

One way to stop boys ‘impregnating’ is to confiscate their roofies and take away their turkey-basters. Your language suggests that girls are entirely passive in this (e.g, Claire ‘was pregnant at by the age of sixteen’)

Other than that, I see little to argue with here.

Butbutbut, big government, welfare state, broken britain, taxpayer’s money, teenage moochers off the Neu Zanulabur teat, tax is theft, when I was a lad, too young to stop dying in a gutter, nappies aren’t that expensive anyway, what about the FATHERS?, etc etc…

There are too many anecdotes in this debate. I believe the figures demonstrate that the high rates of teenage pregnancies persist in areas of deprivation. I think there’s much to be said for viewing these teenage pregnancies as rational decisions: not only in terms of the short-term material benefits (literally the benefits!) that make going through with the pregnancy attractive, but also the more subtle implications of motherhood (a demonstration of adulthood and independence).

From a rational choice perspective, the easiest solution might seem to cut those economic benefits. I think this is immoral because it will punish the baby. Much better IMO to increase the education standards, the job opportunities, the quality of life in the community…all factors that the evidence suggests will lower teenage pregnancy rates. Unfortunately more difficult for governments to do, especially in the short term (and especially when the whole economy is going down the toilet) so it’s easy to see why politicians are tempted to play a simple Daily Mail-style blame game.

I don’t think ‘right’ and ‘wrong’ should be removed from the debate completely. Presumably we all agree there is a reason why the legal system is supposed to uphold an age of consent (even if it fails miserably much of the time)? Do we not think it is wrong to deliberately bring a child into the world if you have no means of supporting that child?

But yes, of course there are too many disapproving fingers being wagged and not enough heads being banged together to come up with practical, socially just policy-suggestions to deal with this issue

@Shatterface (3)

I’d hazard a guess that Neil was using deliberately passive imagery to highlight how it’s normally the teenage mums who get all the blame – with much less ire aimed at the teenage daddies. Was this your aim, Neil (if you’re out there…)?

It’s a two way street, of course.

I agree with Jako (@5), though. There are far too many anecdotes and not enough evidence.

Was this your aim, Neil (if you’re out there…)?

Yeah, pretty much. The first time I wrote that paragraph, it came out as “how do we stop girls from getting pregnant?” But then, mostly for the reasons you gave, I decided to switch it around. I take Shatterface’s point, though.

I’d also agree with Jako that anecdotes aren’t useful, and one of the points of this piece was to demonstrate why that’s so – you can use them to ‘prove’ whatever you like and exclude everything else.

There’s possibly more I could add to this, but I’m a bit knackered, so I’ll try to return to it tomorrow.

Thanks for the clarification Neil, it’s just that the idea of boys going round impregnating unsuspecting girls like teenage incubi sounded like a chapter from ‘The Midwich Cuckoos’ that the 50′s censors didn’t let us see.

Will we ever learn that nature is evil and bad and must be controlled if it costs the state too much?

Or… will we ever learn that the state is evil and bad and must be controlled if it represses our instinctive behaviour too much?

…or perhaps we might decide one day instead that education is the only way to learn what is better and get away from all this negativity. Some chance!

Another good article on this subject.

Neil

You say that lives of teenage mothers could follow the set of anecdotes you describe or they could follow those of Tom Harris.

I agree.

The problem with the argument you set out is that Tom Harris only seems to be criticising teenage mothers who live off the state. Claire is not one of those criticised. So to a large extent your arguments that follow are missing the point. He is criticising something different to what you think he is.

He isn’t demonising teenage mothers, he’s critiquing a system that rewards them for becoming pregnant by doling out housing and cash. We can argue the relative merits of different strategies for discouraging teenagers from becoming pregnant – education seems a popular choice – but this still misses the point. Once we have a well-educated set of teenagers – they know about every form of contraception under the sun, they know exactly that motherhood will be like – will this be enough to overcome the financial incentive to become pregnant? I would say that for the majority it will not.

The financial incentive is very powerful, and needs to be addressed.

Bishop Hill,

Some fair points here. The first thing I’d say is that I am aware of the argument Harris tried to make. There’s a little too much vainglorious posturing to it, he indulges in several unhelpful detours into sanctimony, and he wasn’t particularly great at either identifying the problem or pondering the solution, but his argument does survive – just.

You, me & Tom Harris all agree on one basic point: we don’t want to see kids giving birth at fourteen and spending the rest of their lives on welfare: it’s not good for them, their kids, their community or their country. There’s nothing quarrelsome or controversial about that statement; it’s something all parties and ideologies could agree with

So why, then, has it provoked so much debate in Blogland, with the author described as everything from brave to a bully? There are a number of reasons, but there’s two I’d identify here. First, because it’s more concerned with moralising politics than interrogating/critiquing policy, and second, because it carries the implication that the welfare state is at the root of such social problems.

Now, the welfare state isn’t a solution to very much at all; the most it can do is put a roof over your head and provide you with a bit of money to survive on. But to identify the welfare state as the problem – as happens so often in debates of this kind – is, for me, a mistake.

So we’re left with the question of alternative solutions, and yes, I think education is foremost, but also Early Intervention in the lives of families and kids who are seen to be ‘at risk’. The problem with this is that you’d only get an accurate picture of whether it’s working or not after about 10 years, and I think the inevitable slowness of social change is what puts a lot of people off. So when you write this:

Once we have a well-educated set of teenagers – they know about every form of contraception under the sun, they know exactly that motherhood will be like – will this be enough to overcome the financial incentive to become pregnant? I would say that for the majority it will not.

And I would say yes. Maybe I’m right, maybe I’m wrong, but I think it’s in this area where the debate is most needed, and not the rather bloated declaratives Tom Harris foists upon us.

I think we’re in agreement – the blogospheric kerfuffle is a distraction from the real point which is what do we want to do about it. There is an interesting moral question of whether it’s right or wrong of a teenage mother to get pregnant in order to receive financial and other benefits, but I’m not sure that expecting a saintly detachment from the temptations dangled in front of them is something that we can reasonably expect. As you say, though, the issue is not the rights and wrongs so much as the “why the hell are we doing anything so stupid as to induce people to do have children they can’t afford”.

In my simple mind, the solution is to stop doing this. I fear though that this is not an idea that will meet with much favour here. Anything that comes from the left will involve leaving the financial inducement in place. Am I right?

I think the queston we should be asking is, ” Is it morally right for a woman – whatever her age – to have a baby without having means to feed it?” To my mind that is the question at hand – “Why do we have such a large proportion of women of whatever age comfortable with the idea of having children the rest of society have to pay for. I believe it lies in the entitlement benefits culture – obviously missing anywhere else in the world. Even though there are European countries that offer greater benefits – they don’t have an entitlement culture. It is still shamefull to be state supported. I feel it is this shame that needs to be brought back into British society – as I don’t believe that all shame is bad.

In my simple mind, the solution is to stop doing this. I fear though that this is not an idea that will meet with much favour here. Anything that comes from the left will involve leaving the financial inducement in place. Am I right?

Well, I obviously can’t speak for the entire left, but you’re correct in my case, and for the following reason: the same JSA/child support/housing benefits which you see as an inducement to idleness are the same JSA and child support payments which will offer some meagre protection to a single mum, single dad or a couple who’ve been made unemployed during a recession. That said, I don’t know of anyone on the left who believes that people who are capable of working shouldn’t have an obligation to try to get themselves work. If you don’t have compulsion then you don’t have the responsibilities which accompany rights, and then you don’t have much of a society. The criticism of Purnell’s welfare reforms is that they’re crap, not because we think the long-term unemployed should just be left alone.

I think we’re in agreement – the blogospheric kerfuffle is a distraction from the real point which is what do we want to do about it. There is an interesting moral question of whether it’s right or wrong of a teenage mother to get pregnant in order to receive financial and other benefits, but I’m not sure that expecting a saintly detachment from the temptations dangled in front of them is something that we can reasonably expect. As you say, though, the issue is not the rights and wrongs so much as the “why the hell are we doing anything so stupid as to induce people to do have children they can’t afford”.

I’m sorry, but show me the smoking gun.

I’ve never heard or read anyone actually state “Yeah, the whole skull-through-the-vagina, having to leave school, spending all day looking all after a new human being who is entirely my responsibility, facing up to the prejudice of numerous national newspapers and their readers who enjoy nothing more than treating me as a demon stuff was totally worth it, thanks to the state giving me enough money for baby food.

And why would I have? Who the fuck thinks like that?

In my simple mind, the solution is to stop doing this. I fear though that this is not an idea that will meet with much favour here. Anything that comes from the left will involve leaving the financial inducement in place. Am I right?

How much does a week’s worth of nappies for a newborn infant cost, Bishop?

James

I don’t like to be rude but are you drunk?

I think I get the gist of what you are saying. The point is that the welfare state hands out flats as well as nappy money. Bit of a financial difference I would have thought.

Children take up room…?

Bishop Hill,

It’s not that James’s drunk. It’s just that he’s a dumbo with nothing to say -

“I’ve never heard or read anyone actually state “Yeah, the whole skull-through-the-vagina, having to leave school, spending all day looking all after a new human being who is entirely my responsibility, facing up to the prejudice of numerous national newspapers and their readers who enjoy nothing more than treating me as a demon stuff was totally worth it, thanks to the state giving me enough money for baby food.

And why would I have? Who the fuck thinks like that?”

But why would he have heard anyone utter such a stupid sentence? Look how he twists the facts to suit his prejudices. Do underclass single mums really care about what the Daily Express might write about them? Do they necessarily care about having to leave school? A lot of baseless assumptions are made here.

Many British girls get pregnant because Britian is one of the most amoral, non-judgemental societies in the western world with the most generous benefits for unmarried mothers. Even this might not be a huge incentive for single motherhood but it is hardly any disincentive. That is why there are so many scrounging single mothers about. In most other European countries there are far fewer. In Spain for instance single mothers receive negligable benefits and unsurprisingly there are not many single mothers.

Burberry – You’re snobbery is showing, dear.

Another anecdote: daughter’s schoolfriend’s older sister gets preggers at age 15. Her mum goes off to the council expecting them to hand over a flat for the young mum once she hits 16, cos it’s her right, innit?
But no, she has to live with her own parents until her name came up in the waiting list (and the council do have the ‘sons and daughters’ policy so it may happen – in many years’ time). They could, of course, throw her out and force the council’s hand. The alternative would be a Cathy come home scenario. Don’t know if that’s what’s wanted here. BTW, I have since noticed (this was about 7 years ago) that the daughter is still living with her parents and has got herself work, with parents acting as childminders.

I don’t believe that you get extra housing points simply by being a single parent, it’s the lack of accommodation that does it. It was the threat of eviction that got me housed as a single parent (albeit not a teenage one) not the fact there was a child on the way. Oh that and domestic violence…

My point is that it’s generally assumed that benefits are supremely generous (I mean, I was always jetting off to the Maldives when I was a single parent living on benefits!) and that you automatically get a free flat! Whilst the media continuously baldly states these ‘facts’, is it any surprise that some people fall for them?

These so-called ‘facts’ need redressing. Someone to state, I was a teen single mum and it’s a hard life, don’t do it!

Hooray for Claire @ 21 for actually stating real cases, rather than fact-free bullshit – something that’s consistently missing from the ‘oooh, but they get free houses, no really they do, even though they don’t’ brigade.

Actually John, it sounds from her description that you can indeed get a flat if you are prepared to finesse the situation a bit. It sounds like in Claire’s example, that the woman was punished for being honest about the lack of immediate problems with her situation. This is part of the problem: the system encourages to play up and increase their needs and disadvantages those that refuse to play the game.

And while I am sure it is a true case, it still just one anecdote, one to compare against the advice rendered on several occasions to my girlfriend (now struggling to pay a mortgage), that she should have lost the job, had a child, and claimed a flat and benefits. That advice was offered by people who have done exactly that. It is not as if you are somehow benefiting those in genuine need by defending or denying the existence of the more cynical claimants.

Another point often missed. Single parents (like couples ) get given flats if they qualify – but often the ones no-one else wants, especially if it’s urgent. And, in London at least, it’s the smallest councils can get away with. It’s unlikely a single parent with one baby will get any larger than a one bedroomed flat.

Which is where myself, partner and 15 year-old are still. Because the larger flats are mostly now in private hands. Despite being ‘affordable’ they really aren’t, even though we earn above average earnings.