THE GOVERNMENT has been preoccupied with teenage pregnancy ever since it took power. Illegitimacy was identified as one of the causes of crime and Labour was going to be tough on it. In 1999 the Teenage Pregnancy Strategy was announced and a flotilla of task forces set about the Sisyphean task of stopping teenagers having unprotected sex.

According to official figures, out of every thousand British women aged between 15 and 19, 30.8 are mothers. About a fifth of the mothers will have two children by the time they are 19.

We have 39,000 unwanted births a year, unwanted by the Government, that is — no one is speaking for the mums. The reasons given for the determination to halve this number by 2010 are truly lame. “Teenage pregnancy is a serious social problem,” we read in the latest guidance document issued by Beverley Hughes, the Children’s Minister, last week. “Having children at a young age can damage young women’s health and wellbeing”.

Child-bearing “can” damage health and wellbeing at any age. The associated risk of childbearing is certainly higher for adolescent mums than for mums over 20, but nowhere near as high as it is for women on IVF, but we haven’t decided to halve the number of them by 2010.

Being a mum, the statement goes on, can also “severely limit [the young women’s] education and career prospects”. This, we could fix. To make sure that young mothers get an education and some kind of financial and moral support should be easy — especially when there are so few of them.

About the only strategy available to any quango that aims to reduce teenage pregnancy is to increase sex and relationship education in schools and elsewhere; this is what is assumed to have kept the rate in Sweden and Holland down to a fifth of ours. But children in Cuba have been given such education from the time they are four for the past 30 years and Cuban women are still having their first and second babies very early. Sixty-seven out of every thousand births in Cuba are to a teenage mum. In Latin American countries, between a quarter to a half of all 18-year-olds are mothers.

What the global view of teenage pregnancy suggests is that, in particular communities, teenage motherhood is a way of life; rather than trying to stamp it out, we should be making sure that communities are not harmed by it. Poverty and disadvantage are thought to accrue from juvenile motherhood, when they actually proceed from the failure of the social system to recognise reality, and organise education and employment appropriately.

Beverley Hughes prefers to “target” BME girls. A BME girl is a “black minority ethnic” girl; women of Asian descent, who have the lowest rate of unmarried pregnancy of any ethnic group in the UK, are included under this condescending and misleading acronym. (Islam has very effective ways of curbing sexual activity outside marriage, but it has no quarrel with teenage pregnancy; the average age of mothers at first birth in Bangladesh is 15.)

If the minister understood the word “ethnic”, she might realise that the phenomenon of teenage pregnancy among certain BME groups is an aspect of their shared culture. The pundits have noticed, as they could hardly fail to, that the best predictor of whether a teenager will become pregnant is whether her mother was an unmarried teenage mother. But the pundits have failed to take into account what this tells them. Both women, mother and daughter, know what teenage motherhood is like, none better, yet they repeat the pattern, because it is their pattern and they are not ashamed of it. People whose lives follow this pattern will not apologise for it, no matter how much opprobrium the Prime Minister and his henchwomen heap upon them.

Often in these social groups there is a deep repugnance for abortion, which will be offered to the young woman repeatedly, from her first recourse to health professionals. If she gives in to the pressure and accepts abortion, denying her innermost feelings, her self-esteem will be damaged, possibly irrevocably. One in five gymslip mums will repeat the offence; 7 per cent of adolescents who have an abortion will present a second time; an unknown percentage of teen mums have become pregnant soon after an abortion, in a futile attempt to undo what should not have been done.

Since the bloodlines of bastards can be traced through English parish registers for many generations, regardless of stigma and social exclusion, we have to recognise bastardy as an attribute of a durable counter-culture. The woman who lives with her daughters, granddaughters and great-granddaughters is the head of a matrifocal, matrilocal household. We cannot be surprised to find some such pattern replicated among people of African descent, whether they have come via the Caribbean or no, because of the much greater importance of the maternal line among African peoples.

The teen pregnancy rate in Jamaica is more than three times that of Britain. For similar reasons, in New Zealand, with a teenage pregnancy rate of 40 per thousand, teenage pregnancy is encountered most often in the Maori community. The highest rate for any developed country is in the US with 48.8 per thousand, in which Latinas and Afro-Americans are both over- represented.

The authors of the government report Teenage Pregnancy Next Steps assume that, where the number of teenage pregnancies has fallen, it is their efforts that have made the difference. It is at least as likely that the ethnic composition of the areas in question is changing, and that aspirations too are changing. Already we need every baby we can get; a sound social policy would make sure that we don’t condemn the ones we have to poverty and marginalisation.

While the Government spends time, money and expertise trying to control sexually active teenagers, it leaves millions of children unsupported because it cannot organise an effective Child Support Agency. That is its business, after all.

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