Pregnant at thirteen

and not only being permitted to keep the baby but encouraged to do so?

In the last year of my initial teacher training we "special education" students were required to visit the then "girls' reformatory". There were about 70 girls there at the time. Some of them were pregnant. The reason for them being there was because they were pregnant. Some of them had been raped and otherwise abused but they were still being treated as if they were young criminals. It is something I have never forgotten, that I will never forget. It was wrong.

Their babies almost invariably went up for adoption. Occasionally their own family would take the baby.

Twenty years after that visit I met a young woman who was struggling with her first year at university. One of the reasons she was struggling was the trauma in her own life. She had just discovered that her "big sister" was actually her mother, that her "mother" was actually her grandmother. Her family was still in contact with social workers. Members of it were still in trouble with the law.

Somehow this girl had managed to scrape into university despite her dysfunctional family and their lack of support. Her tutor and I arranged for her to move in with a family and she did get her degree but it took a lot of work. She went teaching and then did Social Work part time.  She now works with young unmarried mothers and mothers to be.

She contacted me yesterday because one of her "clients" will soon be going to court and I will be her support person as she has special communication needs.  In the course of the conversation she was telling me that she had just been passed another case where a thirteen year old has been raped. The girl is pregnant. The girl is not sure who the father is because her mother's boyfriend had more than one male there at the time and "things got a bit wild". 

Her mother was an unmarried mother at sixteen. Since then she has lived with a succession of "boyfriends" and has had four more children, two of whom are already in trouble with the law. 

"And I am being pressured to encourage this child to keep in contact with the baby," she told me, "Pressured to do it even though she doesn't want the baby and has no ability to care for it. She has no understanding of what it means to have a child. The pendulum has swung too far the other way."

Adoption is now seen as the option of "last resort". The baby will go "into care" but the young mother will be encouraged to maintain contact.  It is an almighty mess.

But adoption can happen. I am only too happy to be involved in the other case. This young girl with special needs is going to be adopted by the couple who have cared for her since birth. When we were making sure she understood what was going to happen she told me,

"Best Christmas."  It will be.