Three schoolgirl sisters have given birth aged 12, 14 and 16.
The Williams sisters, who live with their mother in a council house in Derby, feature in a BBC3 documentary called Desperate Midwives.
Natasha, the oldest, Jade and Jemma, the youngest, are reported to receive £600 a week in benefits.
Their mother Julie Atkins, 38, who said the girls were too young and had ruined their lives, blamed schools for providing poor quality sex education.
The 12 year old mother wrote:"He [the 14 year old boyfriend] was my first love but now I'm gutted because he doesn't want to have anything to do with me or T-Jay."
"Their mother Julie Atkins, 38, who said the girls were too young and had ruined their lives, blamed schools for providing poor quality sex education. "
Tell us something.: This is the first sentence. This is the second of the recommended sentences intended to thwart spam its. This is a third, bonus sentence!
I was just reading this terrible tale on the BBC news page when I thought "enough of this...".I hit the chiff board and the first thread I hit on is .....strange.
Horrible story.The mother of the teenage girls has some neck blaming the school.
I should have gone straight to Martins thread about humour.
Slan,
D.
And many a poor man that has roved,
Loved and thought himself beloved,
From a glad kindness cannot take his eyes.
It is awful. Quite a while ago I read something about a study of very young poor unmarried mothers here. The girls did know the facts of life and they did have access to birth control, but they had children anyway. Apparently these girls were trying to create something for themselves, they wanted someone to love them (their baby), they felt they were achieving something. I don't know if those results were accurate or if I've remembered them right, but there is something that these girls are missing in their lives and they, unfortunately, think that having a child will fill the gap. They aren't old enough to understand how wrong their thinking is. And then their children will be missing something and on it goes. I do think there are people trying to break this cycle and convince these poor girls that there is something else they can do to achieve and be loved.
In India, the government, under Ghandi's son, attempted mass sterilization to break the cycle. The cycle is natural. It is meddling with the cycle that is unnatural.
djm
I'd rather be atop the foothills than beneath them.
Actually, just across the street a 14 year old girl announced she was pregnant. 2 years ago her 16 year old sister had a baby. Lovely family by the way. :roll:
I do remember reading about the mass sterilization attempt of the poor in India. I think a writer named Rohinton Mistry, in one of his books, has an episode relating to this and it is indeed horrifying.
But I was talking about trying to interrupt the cycle of hopelessness that causes young girls (and boys too) in my culture to feel that there is nothing they could do to live maybe a happier life in the long run. So that they wouldn't feel that having children when they are so young was the only thing they could do to be loved and respected by their peers.
I know the odds are stacked against people in these situations and I'm certainly not saying I would be able to deal with them any better. I'm certainly not talking about interfering with the right to reproduce, just about encouraging people to finish high school and get out on their own before they have children.
Bizarre. But brings to mind a case from my time doing nursing student clinicals in Baltimore. (A career path off which I veered sharply as it became less academic and more practice.)
A young man, age 16, was in long-term care at the pediatric hospital where I was working. He'd been shot before, in the course of his drug-dealing career, but recovered. This time he was comatose and on a feeding tube with no real hope of recovery.
His mother (in her 30's,) and girlfriend (14) visited often, and shared the notion that they might be able to arrange to have the young girlfriend impregnated via artificial insemination using the comatose boy's sperm.
Why?? Because in that culture--a very matriarchal one in many ways--that's what girls do. Get pregnant by boys with no future, a high probability of being killed young, and then the women live together raising babies on welfare.
This is where the fault of the state comes in. While everyone agrees it is nice to help out the less fortunate, single mothers included, the unintended consequence of having a vast government safety net for them is that it encourages such irresponsibility as has been discussed through out this thread. I don't know what the solution is, but it seems we are making new problems by trying to solve old ones.
If it were not for welfare, I suspect that I myself would have starved to death during many parts of my childhood. Welfare is not bad. Abuse of welfare is.
This is where the fault of the state comes in. While everyone agrees it is nice to help out the less fortunate, single mothers included, the unintended consequence of having a vast government safety net for them is that it encourages such irresponsibility as has been discussed through out this thread. I don't know what the solution is, but it seems we are making new problems by trying to solve old ones.
of course Welfare has a time and place, I don't think anyone would argue that. What is wrong is the perpetuation of welfare as a lifestyle. Many states have put steps into place to stop this - but to even have to impliment such steps shows how rampantly BAD the abuse had gotten.
I just cannot begin to comprehend a child of 12 having a child. I really can't comprehend a child of 12 RAISING a child - it was hard enough at age 29!
I honestly cannot comprehend anyone in this day and age (not just because of pregnancy, but because of AIDS and STD's) willing to take the chance of unprotected sex.
"It might be a bit better to tune to one of my fiddle's open strings, like A, rather than asking me for an F#." - Martin Milner
