A mother in England has three daughters, age 16 and under, who have all given birth within the last few months. Three of them. So of course, when asked why this has happened, she blamed. . . the schools, and later still, the government as a whole.

Julie Atkins' three daughters fell pregnant within a few short months of one another. Natasha recently gave birth to a girl, just around her 16th birthday. Her sister Jade, 14, also gave birth to a girl.

However, the first of the three sisters to deliver a baby was 12-year old Gemma, who gave birth to a boy. She named him T-Jay, which presumably means something in 12-year-old circles, and was chosen, of necessity, without consultation with the 14-year old father, who has made himself scarce.

Nor does 14-year old Jade seem to have any great expectations of seeing the father of her baby any time soon either, noting off-handedly that she became pregnant as a result of "a one-night stand".

Their twice-divorced mother, who lives with her daughters and their babies in a free three-bedroom council house told the papers, "Frankly, I blame the schools."

When the neighbors, reading this, lost no time in calling the papers to report that Mrs. Atkins had been allowing her then-11-year old daughter to have sex with her 13 year old boy friend in the family home, Mrs. Atkins widened her sphere of culpability for her daughters' pregnancies to include "the government."

Now let me get this straight. She couldn't control her horny little daughters -- even the eleven-year-old who she permitted to have sex in her house -- and therefore it is not her fault. Really? What a load of crap. And what's more, the new grandmother now wants more help from social services, given the increased family size!

Currently, including the council-provided house, the Atkins family is estimated to be costing British taxpayers around £650 -- $1,178 -- a week, or around $60,000 a year. Mrs. Atkins, though, has expressed herself dissatisfied with current arrangements, complaining to the papers that now her three daughters have babies, she is finding her three-bedroom house "cramped", and is requesting larger accommodation from the local council.

Holy shit! What nerve!

Of course, Ms. Atkins never married the fathers of her daughters. Nor did she particularly try to police their behavior.

Where are the three babies' fathers, and their families, in all this? Jade's "one-night stand" appears to have no compelling interest in his daughter Lita as he hasn't been round to have a look. Twelve-year-old Gemma expresses surprise and hurt that her 14-year-old inamorata has shown an identical lack of interest in the well-being of either her or his child. "He was my first love," she says. But she has heard that he now has another girlfriend and, in the unlovely vernacular of her milieu declares herself "gutted".

Sixteen-year-old Natasha is marginally luckier. The father of her child is a 38-year-old "Asian" (British media code for Pakistani), who is a professional gambler with whom this teenage girl has been in a "long term relationship". Although he may have thrown the dice once too often with regard to Natasha, he has at least dropped by a few times to see his daughter. However, despite being a gambler, he seems curiously risk averse, living as he does, at home with his mother and father, to whom he has not mentioned his daughter.

Frankly, such things are all too familiar to me. We had three sisters at our school this year who were all pregnant at the same time, and who all gave birth within six months. I recall a couple telling me that the reason for their pregnancy wa that they had nothing to do for two weeks during Christmas break but have sex, since there was nothing good on television. I even had one girl whose mother, upon being informed that she was pregnant and didn't know whether it was the child of her 20-year old boyfriend, the 26-year-old married guy in the next apartment, or the 31-year-old married guy upstairs, expressed joy -- "It will be so nice to have another baby around the house now that your little brother is starting school!"

And then there was the girl I'll call Laura, who I taught nearly a decade ago during summer school. At age 18, she was seven months pregnant with her THIRD baby. On the last day of school, she asked and I were talking during lunch, when she told me that it was all the fault of the state of Texas that she was pregnant. I was stunned, but managed to ask for her explanation of this remarkable statement.

"Well, I got pregnant in eighth grade, and had my little boy freshman year right before Thanksgiving. His father didn't come around after that, so I started seening someone else the next summer and got pregnant that spring, and had my daughter in the fall of junior year. I wanted my tubes tied then, but if you are under 21 Medicaid will only pay for it if you have three or more babies. My parents threw me out of the house and my boyfriends parents let me move in and gave us the master bedroom so that there would be room for the babies, and its not like I wasn't going to have sex since we were living together, so I got pregnant this year. So you see, it really is the fault of the state of Texas -- if they would have let me get my tubes tied I wouldn't be pregnant now."

I nearly lost it at that point, but kept my cool as I explained that unless she could tell me that Texas Rangers had kicked down her door and held her down while Gov. Bush personally impregnated her, I didn't see how it was the state's fault.

And maybe that is part of the problem. We accommodate the bad behavior, giving a sense of entitlement. My district provided a sheltered school setting for this girl while pregnant (there is even a waiting list to get in), in-home tutors for her after delivery, free day-care (staffed by the early-childhood development students from the career education program) after the kids were born -- and free summer school classes to help her graduate because she was considered "at-risk" for dropping out. To what degree did all the freebies make her behavior possible?

Maybe it is the fault of the schools -- and the government as a whole -- after all.

Posted by: Greg at 01:52 PM | Comments (5) | Add Comment
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