Sharpe's Opinion
Thursday, 5th Mar, 2009
Liberal Conspiracy Going for the Lowest Common Denominator
Trust Liberal Conspiracy to rub me up the wrong way. Today, Don Paskini is being an apologist for for the welfare state that Tom Harris rightly decried in a controversial blog post the other day.
There are several words for powerful, middle-aged men who choose to pick on teenage girls, but the one which best sums up Tom Harris is bully. You will never, ever read him really slag off anyone who has any kind of power or influence, it’s always those weaker than him upon whom he chooses to heap abuse.
…
Perhaps even more depressingly, there’s no evidence that he’s taken even a moment to look at any of the research and evidence on teenage pregnancy. Five minutes with Google would reveal that Tony Blair was talking about teenage pregnancies being ‘a shameful record’ ten years ago, that most teenage parents stay at home rather than getting a council flat and that most have little or no knowledge about the benefits that they’ll be entitled to when they get pregnant.
Well that’s all right then. If Tony Blair was talking about it 10 years ago, everything must be perfectly fine, and Tom Harris’s points are completely invalid. Never mind that in those ten years the teenage pregnancy rate has continued to climb exponentially the amount of teenagers having children has continued to increase1. Never mind that Tony Blair talking about something rarely ever amounted to Tony Blair doing anything about it. Never mind that the negative effects on the whole of society of having a large amount of lone teenage parents are well documented by studies on all sides of the political divide2.
No, we’ll just call Tom Harris a bully instead, appeal to the lowest common denominator, and continue to do absolutely bugger all about the problem. That’ll really bloody help, won’t it.
- _*UPDATE:*_ See comments thread for full discussion of the stats [↩]
- Genuinely Interested: can anyone find a contradicting study which suggests that a high teenage pregnancy rate is good for a society? [↩]
Comments
I stand corrected by measure of reading the stats on total conceptions, rather than weighted by population. So I do apologise for that. Such a minor change, however, has not brought us closer in line with the rest of the Eurozone.
Your attack on Tom Harris is still utterly unjustified and misses his point entirely. There should be radically fewer teenage pregnancies that there are – that doesn’t mean that we should ignore or shun young mothers, it means we should be working to radically reduce the amount of young people who are going to become young parents. Different, you see.
Tom Harris does deserve a beating. Not because of this, just in general.
Having said that, Don Paskini is hardly my best mate.
>> In 1998 it was 46.6 per 1000, in 2007 it was 41.9.
Not exactly an impressive reduction. How much have we spent to achieve that?
>> No, we’ll just call Tom Harris a bully instead,
>> appeal to the lowest common denominator, and
>> continue to do absolutely bugger all about the
>> problem.
That’s about all Liberal Conspiracy are capable fo doing, based on my recent foray there. Argue? Debate? Fat chance!
Stu, can you clarify whether the stats you and Dan are looking at result in live births, since that is the issue in hand, not pregnancy or abortion rates.
I can’t say for certain what stats Dan is using. There’s these ones from ONS, though (Excel file) which are the provisional 2007 stats. Table 4.1 shows pregnancy rates among different age groups since 1990
An interesting point about the 1998 stat in particular is that it just happens to be the year with the highest rate of teen pregnancy in the past 18 years. I’m sure it’s a pure coincidence that this was the year Dan mentioned. The period from ’96-‘99 appears to be brief bump in an otherwise downward trend over the past 20 years.
In ’95 the rate was 41.7; 1997’s rate was 45.9; whilst 1998’s was actually 47.1. I’m not certain where Dan’s 46.6 comes from.
Over that time the percentage of pregnancies ending in abortion amongst under-18s has risen, so the number of children born to mothers under 18 will have fallen accordingly.
Last time I checked, 19yo’s are teenagers, but the Stats people have decided the cut-off age is 18. Doubt if we’ll ever get the true figures for teens.
I think 18 is a reasonable cut-off. Under 18 and you could still be in school. Over 18 and you’re expected to be working or in university. There’s a marked difference.
Ellie was 19 when Kayleigh was born (admittedly she turned 20 about 5 days later) and we’d both been through ‘Further Education’, travelled around the world, and begun studying towards degrees by then. If we’d had Kayleigh a year earlier, uni wouldn’t have been so much of an option, we wouldn’t have been able to travel, and we wouldn’t have experienced life where we have to take responsibility for ourselves. Well, I wouldn’t have. But that’s a different story.
I appreciate that everyone’s different, but essentially an 18yo cut-off is saying ‘pregnancies amongst people who are still probably in school’, which I think is a pretty useful way of looking at the issue.
Stu: “I’m sure it’s a pure coincidence that this was the year Dan mentioned.”
A Socialist? Fudging the statistics? Whatever gave you that idea?
Hi guys,
1998 is the baseline date for the Teenage Pregnancy Strategy, and it is ten years ago, which was why I used it. As for the 46.6 figure, that was reported as the figure in the BBC, Daily Telegraph, Daily Mail. Fair enough if it is in fact 47.1 according to the ONS.
In any case, as Stu said, it doesn’t matter whether you use a different year as the baseline, the trend is not that teenage pregnancies have been increasing expotentially, but in fact have been declining for 20 years.
Hi Don,
I’m amazed by how the debate on whether benefits culture is acceptable has bee sidelined and this comments thread has turned into a discussion of teenage pregnancy statistics, but nevermind. You seem very pleased that there’s been a fall in the rate of teenage pregnancy but the rate has only been falling because the population has been growing rapidly. The numerical amount of teenagers getting pregnant has barely changed – a fall of 1.5% over a decade (that’s an actual decade – ’97-‘07. the fall from ’98 is 2.5%. I still wonder why the government chose that year as their baseline). Considering there has been a ‘Teen Pregnancy Strategy’ all that time with a huge amount of money spent, that’s a terrible result.
Tom Harris, to get back to the point, is absolutely right to criticise his party for their lack of thinking in regard to benefits. Even if they don’t know about it, there should not be a financial incentive for school children to have babies. That’s not because anyone has any wish to ‘bully’ the girls who are becoming mothers – it’s because we worry about the future of the babies. Nobody has yet come up with a report suggesting that teenage pregnancy is a good thing for society, after all.
Is this a discussion about the morality of teenagers, or their lack of education/aspirations, or the benefits that any single female can obtain regardless of age?
“Never mind that in those ten years the teenage pregnancy rate has continued to climb exponentially”
No it hasn’t. It’s fallen. In 1998 it was 46.6 per 1000, in 2007 it was 41.9.
donpaskini
March 5, 2009 at 10:41 am