Motherhood hits primary schools

Four 10-year-old primary school girls have become the youngest ever to get pregnant and have babies in Britain, according to the latest figures released by the Office of National Statistics.

The figures, which cover three years, showed another 23 children aged 11 have also become pregnant and about 400 girls under 14 also conceived.

While Britain already has the worst teenage pregnancy rates in Europe, the increasing numbers of under-age pregnancies are due in part to earlier puberty.

The average age at which a girl matures has fallen from about 14 in the Fifties to between 12 and 13 and recent studies have shown that one in six girls is showing signs of puberty by the age of eight.

The Government has recently attracted criticism for its sponsorship of permissive sex education and its programme of distributing condoms, the contraceptive pill and the morning after pill through secondary schools, in a bid to halve the rate of teenage pregnancy by 2010.

Robert Whelan, from the pressure group Family and Youth Concern, said: "It is possible - as it was not in the past - for girls to get pregnant at the age of 10.

But the problem is not that they can get pregnant, but that they are sexually active at that age.

"Children are not being protected from sexual relationships at very young ages. These case probably involve paedophile activity or certainly very much older teenage boys. You do not often find sexual relationships between two primary school children.

"Each case is a tragedy for the girl involved, who will be damaged mentally, physically and emotionally."

While there are signs that Government programmes to cut teenage motherhood has led to a decline in conceptions among older teens, the rate of pregnancies involving girls under 16 went up last year, from 7.9 girls per 1,000 to 8.1. According to the figures, four girls of 11 became pregnant in 1998, six in 1999 and 13 in 2000.

In 2000, the most recent year for which the full figures are available, 395 girls under 14 became pregnant. About six out of 10 of these had abortions.

Despite government confidence that wider sex education and use of contraceptives can cut pregnancy rates, there is increasing evidence that this is not the case.

Research by economist Dr David Paton, of the Nottingham University Business School, showed that while family planning clinic prescriptions to under-16s for the morning-after Pill went up by 284 per cent between 1992 and 2000, the overall under-16 pregnancy rate in that period was fairly static.

Another recent study found that a third of girls under 16 are having sex and that in a generation, the number of sexually active girls under the age of consent has risen from one in 20 to one in three.

The average age for boys and girls to lose their virginity has fallen to 16. Forty years ago, it was 20 for men and 21 for women.

The statistics emerged in a report by the Commons Health Select Committee into the nation's sexual health carried out by the Medical Research Council and the Public Health Laboratory Service.

The research on the age of first sexual intercourse was gleaned from anonymous interviews with more than 11,000 16-year-olds to 44-year-olds in the National Survey of Sexual Attitudes and Lifestyles, funded by the Medical Research Council.