Pregnant teenagers ‘obeying nature’s law’

TEENAGE girls who get pregnant “behind the bike sheds” are only obeying nature’s law and should not be condemned out of hand, an expert said yesterday.

Dr Laurence Shaw said women were programmed by 2 million years of evolution to have babies in their late teens and early twenties.

Nature intended women to become mothers when young, and for their fertility to decline while they raised their children, he said.

Only in the past 150 years had it become commonplace for women to live many years beyond the menopause, said Dr Shaw, deputy medical director of the Bridge Centre fertility clinic in London.

Addressing the annual meeting of the European Society of Human Reproduction and Embryology in Prague, he said: “Before we condemn our teenagers for having sex behind the bike sheds and becoming pregnant, we should remember that this is a natural response by these girls to their rising fertility levels.

“Society may ‘tut, tut’ about them, but their actions are part of an evolutionary process that goes back nearly 2 million years; whilst their behaviour may not fit with western society’s expectations, it is perhaps useful to consider it in the wider context.”

In the same way, it was wrong to be prejudiced against older women who sought fertility treatment to have babies, he added.

In the past, declining fertility and the menopause were positively useful, he said. They meant that after a certain age women were not likely to have more children of their own and could help their daughters tend their own babies.