Hi Everyone, I like current affairs, politics, unusual news items, witty jokes, womens issues and interesting chat. Talk to me.
For my first post I'd like to talk about Lucy.
She had her first abortion when she was 12.'I didn't understand what was going on,' she says.
'My mum organised the termination and I went along with it, but it was the right thing to do.’
The second termination, aged 13, was again organised by her mother - a mental health nurse - who was this time furious with her wayward daughter for ignoring her lectures, and sat by her side in stony silence at the clinic.
When Lucy fell pregnant again, aged 15, she was too frightened to tell her mother, so it was her grandmother who took her to the clinic, unaware of the previous two abortions. Lucy organised her fourth termination, aged 16, without telling anyone. Now, aged 18, and engaged to 20-year-old Jack, a landscape gardener, Lucy, who left school at 15 works as a promotional model.
Each year, more than 1,000 teenagers have an abortion, and the number of terminations performed on under-14s rocketed by 20 per cent last year. The Government’s answer to this disturbing problem is to provide sex education to children at a younger age.
But hearing Lucy’s history, you can’t help but wonder if the best sex education in the world would have made any difference. After her first termination she was given a contraceptive injection and taught everything she ever needed to know about safe sex. Yet she simply ignored follow-up appointments at the family planning clinic when her three-monthly contraceptive injection ran out. Why?
'I had more important things to do,' she says. 'When you are 13 you don't want to waste time going to the doctor when you can be having fun with your friends.'
Until Lucy was 11 she was brought up by her 66 year old grandmother Frances. This sad story could have had a happy ending. Lucy's mother Shelly had proved she was a responsible, intellegent woman.
At age 11, Lucy finally went to live with her mother. She had completed six years of nursing study and had reached the top of her profession, managing a care home for patients with Alzheimer's and dementia.
She had a four-bedroomed house in a 'posh' part of town, a sports car and designer clothes. She wanted Lucy to attend a high-achieving secondary school and mix with more suitable peers than the ones in her primary school in the more deprived part of town. 'I think she thought it would be enough for me to go to a nice school and live in a nice house, but it wasn't. She was very easy going, too easy going.'
Before long she was running with an older crowd from her previous neighbourhood. Then her mother got married and had a second daughter and plunged into post-natal depression. She started drinking heavily, lost her job and her marriage broke up.
It fell on Lucy to look after her younger sister when her mother was too ill or depressed, or had been drinking. 'Mum tried time and time again to stop drinking. Once she checked into a rehab clinic and spent £2,000 to try to stop, but it didn't work.
'I felt sorry for her and guilty that I might have been the cause of it. For the last year of her life I became her parent rather than the other way round. 'She used to apologise to me all the time, saying what a bad mother she was, and tried to commit suicide twice.'
Lucy’s mother died last September, aged 39 from a gastrointestinal haemorrhage. Lucy shares a house with her fiance in Doncaster and is bringing up her six year old sister who lives with them.I don’t know what the answer is to this terrible problem of young girls having multiple abortions. I wish someone would find out why.
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