[Madstrider]

Britain's teenage pregnancy rate is the highest in Europe. In 2002 there were 39,286 teen pregnancies recorded. The government has spent more than £60 million to tackle the problem but so far failed to halt the rise.

Idiots. UK is also the only European nation with a birth rate anywhere near "replacement" level of 2.1 lifetimes births per woman. Other European countries have birth rates so low that they are on the highway to extinction.

You cannot have fertility high enough to sustain or grow the population unless you have relatively high levels of teenage pregnancy. This is true everywhere and in every era. It is a universal law, and anyone who studies demographics understands this.

The problem is not teenage pregnancy per se, it's unwed motherhood without regard to the age of the mother.

[litany_of_lies]

Y'know, we all missed that point. Thanks for bringing it up; very good catch, since we're all essentially assuming, thanks to the article's silence, that the 39,000 are all unmarried and don't plan marriage to the father. The article doesn't state how many of the pregnant teens were already married or about to be married (the old shotgun wedding). We could conceivably (pun intended) be looking at a non-problem. Certain segments of Britain may still marry quite young.

We could argue all day about whether marrying young is a good idea, but objective studies on balance would certainly show that if the kid isn't given up for adoption, being born to ANY married couple works out better than being born to a single mom.