A teenage girl's passport to womanhood

ONE OF the spectres who stalked my adolescence was an old woman with as few teeth in her mouth as she had buttons on her coat, who stopped me in the street and issued this ultimatum: 'Watch out, lass, don't get left with a burden.' Everyone in my generation of teenagers would have known what she meant. Motherhood. Ruin. A baby.

In the Sixties a girl became a woman not through motherhood but through employment: adulthood was achieved by autonomy, work and a wage, a place, peers, and then planned parenthood.

Moral panic among lawmakers has not prevented the dramatic rise in teenage pregnancy that has occurred during the Conservative reign since 1979. This rise is a reversal of the post-war trend. Britain has now discovered that, like anywhere else, it is a highly sexualised society. Between a quarter and a third of girls claim to have had 'sexual intercourse' by the age of 16, compared with 2 per cent in 1964. The rate of teenage conceptions increased during the Eighties from 56 to nearly 68 per 1,000.

Despite the lawmakers' protestations, people care less and less whether babies have married mothers, teenage mothers or mothers without fathers. This is not to say that 'family values' are not popular virtues. On the contrary, families today are less likely to throw out their poor, pregnant daughters, and they are more enthusiastic in their embrace of their children's children than they were during the frightened Fifties when the ideology of respectability ruled.

Nevertheless, last summer the Government resolved to do something about teenage pregnancies. Virginia Bottomley, Secretary of State for Health, suddenly introduced into the 1992 White Paper, The Health of Nation, a commitment to halve the rate of teenage pregnancy by the year 2000.

The plan was not preceded by consumer consultation among the constituency concerned - teenagers. It was propelled by the fantasy that unplanned means unwanted. But is this a sensible deduction? The latest research, prompted by Mrs Bottomley's White Paper, reveals class and neighbourhood factors that suggest the rise in the birthrate among teenagers has more to do with economics than enlightenment.

A socio-economic study of teenage pregnancy in Tayside, Scotland, published last week, shows that conception is higher in the most deprived areas and that the rate of abortion in those areas is also much lower. Dr Trevor Smith's study also found that two thirds of teenage mothers remained at home with their own mothers after their babies were born - these days, family values mean standing by your daughters.

Tayside girls from affluent areas had no greater access to NHS abortions or sex education at school than did girls from deprived neighbourhoods. And yet two thirds of girls from affluent areas had abortions, compared to only a quarter from deprived areas.

The strongest correlation is not between teenage pregnancy and education, rather between teenage pregnancy and a locale's economy. The research confirms what is already apparent in Britain's poorest places:young women are making a rational choice to become mothers.

The adolescent ambitions of Virginia Bottomley's generation were formed in an era of full employment and randy permissiveness that was none the less panicked by unplanned pregnancy. That may explain why they place such a premium on curbing teenage pregnancy. Today's teenagers, by contrast, live in a different time: a time of mass unemployment and unmarried motherhood. Like the Princess of Wales before them, unqualified girls among both the very rich and the very poor want to work with children because, apart from marrying a prince, there may be nothing else for them to do.

Even if they live in the areas (revealed by Incomes Data services this week) where more women are in waged work than men, teenage girls see that despite being breadwinners, their mothers are still poor.

'How do girls get to be grown-ups if there is no employment?' wonders a teacher in a school that has several pregnant pupils every year. The school's guide for student choices at 16 includes as one of their options a section on 'remaining unemployed'.

'They leave school still a child, and don't get a chance to be anything else but a child - unless they become a mother. Then they'll be a grown-up, they'll have somebody to love and somebody who will love them uncritically,' she says.

In regions starved of waged work, young people are eternally infantilised. Teenage motherhood guarantees the metamorphosis from childhood to adulthood; it is a girl's passport into the community of women.

Teenage pregnancy is most likely to be reduced by creating employment. It is clear that teenage motherhood is a rational choice propelled by economic crisis, as much, if not more, than by the revolution in sexual manners. The revolt against respectability may leave teenage mothers deprived, but not disgraced.