To wonder why teenage pregnancy rates have gone down

[Reallytired17]

here

Anecdotally, I remember four girls having babies in Year 11 in 1999.

Is it to do with better access to contraception, or are more pregnancies being terminated?

Ready to get shouted at for this, but me and ds1 are talking about this thread, and he reminded of this, which is an example for my 'older parent post':-

Ds1 came to me about a year ago and asked would I take his friend for the MAP. The condom had split. I text his friend and said no problem but could she try talking to mum. She said no, she was told she wasn't allowed to go on the pill until 18. We went through the options:- Gp- had a relation who worked there so was afraid they would talk (apparently they talk about patients at home, that's a whole new thread), pharmacy- she was afraid someone would see her in there and tell her parents, or family planning- which we decided on, but as we are rural it is a 34 mile round trip.

So I took her to the family planning clinic. We talked in the car, and she said her parents have never had the sex or period talk with her. The only thing ever mentioned was the pill, and that was because they were watching the news and something came on, and mum turned to her and said 'and you young lady won't be gong on her pill until you are at least 18'.

I find that really sad in this day and age. Do parents expect schools and the internet to do all the teaching?

tbh I think Bertie is right: the "easy route to benefits" was always a bit of a myth, and as such it is still working in the poorer parts of the population (as evidenced by some of dc's friends)

I suspect it's because it's not actually about a real calculation about actual money: it's about feeling life is without purpose and desperately wanting to add some purpose to it- and only being able to think of one way of doing that. For the record, dc's impression is that the girls involved have made very good parents. But they will, of course, remain poor ones.

I was, just, a teen Mum 11 years ago. I fell pregnant in 2006 aged 17, but I didn’t give birth until I was 18, so I fit the statistics but at the time I wasn’t treated as a teen/‘young’ mum by anybody professionally. I was too old to access teen Mum support groups, I didn’t get a council flat/house and even then it was seen as a shock/scandal by almost all of my school friends. I lost contact with all but 3/4 of them.

I suspect that this trend of disapproval has increased and that there is probably a huge stigma in being a teen Mum once again. I still get the when people realise I have a soon to be 11 year old at 29 years of age. Nobody blinks at the fact that I have a 4 year old.

Coupled with much better contraception access, hugely improved sex education and also a shift in teen aspiration it’s no wonder it’s at an all time low.

I wouldn’t change having my DSs (I had my second only a year after my first) I certainly make it very clear that I don’t recommend early parenthood. It was incredibly difficult, way more difficult than my having my younger two, who I had in my twenties. Mums like me were used in sex education recently telling our stories to teens.

Thanks Pointless. Very interesting.

Teenage pregnancy strategy, vtechnically failed to meet target nationally but a huge success story.
A book has just been published about it

Ooh I worked on the strategy, will have to check out

Rather depressingly I spent 2 years working on preventing teens from getting the clap / upduffed and turns out I'm infertile. Ha fucking ha.

YY cory - and from experience when you're poor five years of guaranteed money sounds like a goldmine, it doesn't have to be twelve. Hell even a year would have been tempting to me. But I don't believe that young parents tend to get pregnant for the money - although they might well decide it's less risky than somebody living in a country with no welfare state, because they think there is money and support available. However mainly it's about that sense of purpose, it is a very MC thing IME to think about whether you can afford a child before they are conceived, a lot of poorer people don't have the ability to budget into the future like that because they live hand to mouth anyway, so the attitude is more "We'll just make it work".

And people from chaotic backgrounds who have had unstable families themselves (who are more likely to be poor although this is not the case for all families in poverty) tend to have an extremely strong drive to "rewrite history" for the next generation by having a family of their own ASAP and this is extremely difficult to fight, to the point it's probably some kind of biological urge.

When I worked on the sexual health and teen pregnancy strategy we'd spent a year doing a big push on chlamydia testing availability - that it was widely available at high St chemists and it was 'pee in a pot' (ie no one will stick anything up anywhere). Chlamydia testing took off but also the realisation that it was really easy to get diagnosed and treated with antibiotics so no big deal really. Law of unintended consequences

For most of the time I'd worked on it, we'd been focusing primarily on condom usage - but latterly this became very much on LARCs. I remember being in focus groups with teens with tongue piercings saying about the depot jab or implant 'urrrggghh I don't like needles'

The last thing I did before I left my job was a ministerial submission about a trial we had done to promote condom usage and how we had managed to change behaviour in a measurable and statistically significant way. That's 8 years ago but probably one of the things in my career I'm most proud of.

During the labour years, benefits were much more generous.

The timings don't add up on that at all.

1997-2007 teen pregnancy was no higher than it had been for the previous 20 years (when the Conservatives were in power), so you can't say that high benefits from a Labour government encourage teen pregnancy.

The current decline started in 2008, and in 2009 was already "lower than ever recorded", and Labour were in power until 2010.

I agree with the above, but think that mass immigration since the 90’s has affected these statistics positively too.

The area I’m originally from is now mainly Black African, and this began to happen quite quickly about 12 years ago. It used to be mainly white British and working class. As a result, many churches have sprung up, and whole families frequent them. The families seem very religious, and whilst there are many young people, I can’t imagine many of them having teenage sex, or becoming teenage parents.

There are also many more young people of other faiths in the UK now compared to in the early to mid 90’s when teenage pregnancy was rife. Due to a combination of religion, and often very close knit communities and the idea of ‘shame,’ there do not seem to be many teenage pregnancies involving Muslim teenagers for example.

I used to be a Secondary school Teacher in recent years, and have worked in schools with students of vastly different ethnic and social backgrounds. In those schools, there were still students getting pregnant and sharing their pregnancy/STD scares with us. The ones who became pregnant were all white British.

I say the above as a white British person who is merely saying what she sees and has experienced.

The implant, non-drinking culture and social media leading to not hanging out in person as much.

I think girls strive for more now. My teenage dds would be horrified st the thought of a baby and would abort if caught. Girls have s hell of a lot more sense now I think.

"it is a very MC thing IME to think about whether you can afford a child before they are conceived, a lot of poorer people don't have the ability to budget into the future like that because they live hand to mouth anyway, so the attitude is more "We'll just make it work"."

That is so sad and disturbing, and not something I can say I've ever noticed before (so not sure if it's been proven in any research?). I can kinda see why if you think your future is always gonna be financially bleak you might believe there's no point waiting for a more secure time that'll never come, so why wait. On the other hand I strongly believe the "more MC approach" of considering carefully whether or not you're in the position to support a child is the right one and one to be encouraged. I'm 29 with no kids yet, I plan to at some point I hope. But one of the reasons I've not had them yet is I knew full well there was no chance I could support me and a child on the NMW zero hour jobs I've had for much of my adult life. So I didn't. To have kids knowing your financial situation means you can't afford them is grossly irresponsible imo and if if is a lower class way of thinking we should be working to change that (I say this as someone working class from a council estate btw).

Argeles

When I was a teen the girls from religious families were the ones that got pregnant (and stayed it).

Many of their parents believed in abstinence, tried to keep them away from sex-ed classes etc... the imo most awful one was probably a 15 yo mother that got pregnant by a man in his 30. They moved together and she was pregnant again 1-2 years later. Her parents encouraged that.... :(

Idk, abstinence education doesn’t seem to work. I think there are some interesting stats about US states and abstinence education.

Totally agree with @formerbabe - if you were a teenage girl with no decent job prospects you could make a career out of having babies and claiming benefits and a free council house. Starting at 16 and repeatedly producing babies could reliably keep the money rolling in until you were well over 40. It isn't so easy nowadays due to the shortage of council houses and the fact they push you to get a job as soon as your child goes to school.

I could be very wrong here and hopefully teen girls are smarter than I'm giving them credit for, but I have wondered if/when Kylie Jenner (Kardashian ss, for those who don't know) confirms her pregnancy and begins to post bump/baby pictures will it (how do I phrase this)? make pregnancy and having a baby seem an attractive option, could they copy her?
I have teen nieces and they idolise her.

I remember when the UK pregnancy rates were very high and the pregnancy rates from my old country (Sweden) were very low, trying to make some sense of it all. The one big difference I could put my finger on (and that one still holds true) is that the Swedish teenagers, even the ones from poorer areas and with WC parents, seemed to expect so much fun out of life. They seemed to take it for granted that there would be a job there for them, even if they weren't very high achievers, and that that job would provide them not only with a decent standard of living but with the opportunity to have fun: to go out, to travel, to have hobbies and interests. They were no more abstemious or chaste than their British counterparts, but they took precautions because they didn't want to spoil all that fun.

It's not about being virtuous and forward-thinking. In a sense it was the complete opposite. What kept them from early pregnancies and dropping off the school/job ladder was sheer hedonism. It was not that the British teenagers were spoilt, it was that their Swedish counterparts were.

In Sweden they found that the number one correlation between teens and pregnancy was a lack of optimism about the future.
So the link and the conclusion was kinder than ''they want income til they can't have kids anymore'' but it boils down to a similar lack of faith in their own power to earn.

Cross post with corythatwas.

Lots of reasons, some that are specific to a particular area. Where my dad lives first generation immigrants with Pakistani parents used to get married at 16, second and third generation are going to uni.

A student I taught did a (very small) research project on dowries in Asian culture, her conclusion was that money dowries have gone out but a woman's education is a form or dowry.

Annabelle4, I know what you mean, I had to say to my daughter who is interested in the K-family, ''even though none of them need to work now, their father was a lawyer and they presumably have good brains so they've chosen the tinsel path of celebrity endorsements when they could have proven themselves''. I felt like I needed to have that discussion with her. The K-girls don't need the money that comes from a career but despite being far from underprivileged they are racing in to pregnancies at a v young age. It surprised me. I hope I don't sound too harsh.

Good to hear girls have ambition and want more from life

LemonShark Plenty of people if they took the approach you advocate, would never have kids. If you are poorer and likely to remain so, you do just need to take the approach of, we will make it work.

Better access to contraception and the MAP.
Less social acceptability in having a much older boyfriend and the pressures that came with that.
Less hanging about drinking in the woods or wherever teens go in their locality.

Also definitely agree with PP about openness within families

British policy very much looked to the Netherlands, as a country with an exceptionally low teen pregnancy rate

Yes there is a stigma and lack of financial support for teen mothers, but actually the research shows one of the biggest contributing factors is talking openly about sex within and outside the family. Good communication makes for SUCH a difference.

*Stigma and lack of resources in the Netherlands as compared to the UK that is

When I was working on the sexual health and teen pregnancy strategy the policy unit followed the Dutch research very intently