Introduction

England has the highest teenage pregnancy rate in Western Europe, standing, in 2003, at 42.1 conceptions per 1,000 girls under the age of 18. England has been called a ‘baby factory’ by some sections of the media. The issue of teenage pregnancy was highlighted in May 2005 by the case of three sisters in Derby (North England). One sister became pregnant at the age of 12 and the other two at ages 14 and 16 respectively. The Minister for Children and Families, Beverley Hughes, described the case as ‘a tragic loss of opportunity’ (The Guardian, 26 May 2005).

Teenage pregnancy has been portrayed as a major social problem since the early 1980s. The Conservative government traditionally played on negative stereotypes towards lone parents in general and teenage mothers (aged 15-19) in particular. Public hostility towards early motherhood reached a peak in the mid-1990s but has become much more subtle in recent years, especially since Labour's return to power in 1997. Indeed, the Prime Minister Tony Blair himself raised the political profile of the issue when he commissioned the Social Exclusion Unit to produce a report on teenage pregnancy (SEU, 1999). Because the occurrence of teenage motherhood is strongly linked with educational, economic and social disadvantage, the government integrated prevention of early pregnancies and support to young parents in its overall pledge to improve the well-being of children. Thus, the Teenage Pregnancy Strategy introduced in 1999 as part of a wide range of policy programmes that aim to address the twin problems of social exclusion and child poverty. Moreover, the government has paid increased attention to the issue of youth access to contraceptive and reproductive health services. New Labour policies represent a radical break with previous practices in the sense that successive Conservative governments made very few attempts to address the issue. The Tories’ approach can be described by the paradoxical combination of an aggressive rhetoric regarding young mothers and the absence of any significant policy initiatives in this area.

In contrast to its predecessor, the current government no longer accuses young mothers of becoming become pregnant in order to obtain council housing. There is some recognition that teenage motherhood is a consequence of material and educational deprivation as well as poor access to confidential sexual health services.