Here in the UK we have seen an explosion in recent years of children born to young single girls.

Most will almost certainly be brought up on benefits, knowing nothing of a secure family life or a father's love and many will soon be beyond the control of the young girl who has chosen to bring them into the world.

A report published by the Prince's Trust revealed single teenage girls who baby sit for young single mothers at weekend's seem to admire their peers who have given birth and often seek to copy their status to acquire the free house having a baby brings.

All that is required, is to contact an estate agent, find the home you like, go to the Social Security office and they set up a direct payment to them.


The government waffle on saying that welfare benefits to single teenage mothers will be curtailed, bullocks. Britain has long had the highest teen pregnancy rates in the EU. The initiatives introduced to tackle the problem are not working. But this is shrugged off by the Government, which claims the situation will improve.

My daughter showed me this blog she found on the web. "Girls, do you want to know how to get a free house and a weekly wage without working ? OK. First, get pregnant by some random guy. Quite possibly you will both be drunk at the time, but this is not mandatory. Make sure you never see him again, except maybe outside the chip shop and once downtown on a Saturday night.

However, you are not bothered about him. Especially nine months later when you have your own lovely little baby. Congratulations. With one bound you have become a single teenage mum with the sole ambition of living off the State for the rest of your life.

Aim for three kids, don't worry about multiple-father pregnancies, the government never chase up on the guys. Why worry, the taxpayers will take care of the inevitable fallout. "


Living on Benefits in the UK has become a lifestyle choice. In fact, some see it as a pretty good option once the bore of a patchy but compulsory education is out of the way.

Was it really 12 years ago that Tony Blair decreed that the number of under-18s becoming pregnant in England and Wales would be halved by now? Yes. And that was the beginning of Labour's £286million campaign of sex education lessons, free contraceptives, pats on the head and a nice cup of sugary tea with which to wash down the morning-after pill. What a joke! Look at what has happened. The Government's morally lax teenage pregnancy strategy has been utterly hopeless. In this parallel universe, deterrent has become a dirty word.


Perhaps it is time to look at this issue from another angle and apply a straightforward cost/benefit analysis to our policies. Supporting single mothers is a significant expense for the state. The government itself says that "benefit payments to a teenage mother who does not enter employment in the three years following birth can total between £23,000 and £28,000 over three years".

About 26,000 teenage mothers give birth every year and go on to draw such benefits.

Perhaps we should simply ask ourselves why the state is required to cough up when a teenage girl gets pregnant. Clearly, a significant financial saving could be made if the state stopped subsidising pregnant teenagers. Beyond the mere bookkeeping, however, lies the possibility of social improvement.

Such a shift in personal responsibility might immediately lead to a reduction in the numbers of single young women having babies. That, after all, is what everybody wants.


Yet still we go on forking out for them. And still the numbers rise every year. It is obvious and undeniable that many tens of thousands of young girls get pregnant every year because they actively choose to do so. And one of the most obvious reasons they make that choice is because the rest of us – through the state – make it worth their while.