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Teenage mums 'obeying nature's law'

Teenage girls who get pregnant "behind the bikesheds" are only obeying nature's law and should not be condemned out of hand, an expert said today.

Dr Laurence Shaw said female humans had been programmed by two million years of evolution to have babies in their late teens and early 20s, when fertility is at its peak.

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 (Eshre) 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 two 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 in order to have babies, he added.

"Before we criticise 62-year-old women who want to have babies, we should remember that it was not so long ago that women would only have had about 20 or 30 years to care for their offspring and help with the next generation," said Dr Shaw.

"Nowadays 60-year old women in many industrialised countries, have a life expectancy of 80 or 90, so there is no difference in terms of the length of their survival after the birth of a baby than there would have been for most of human existence."

Increased longevity

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. Today's increased longevity was incompatible with that evolutionary strategy and raised three serious issues for society, said Dr Shaw.

The first was that a woman's natural time to have children coincided with the peak of her fertility in her late teens and early 20s. Yet Western society regarded teenage pregnancy as a 'problem' that was difficult to cope with.

Secondly, childbearing was being delayed until the acquisition of wealth and stability in later life, when women's fertility was in decline. This necessitated medical assistance that was often poorly funded by governments.

The final issue was that women now expected to spend more than a third of their life in an "unnaturally prolonged hormone-deficient state" associated with problems such as osteoporosis.

Worry about the dangers of hormone replacement therapy was still seen by some as more relevant than the risk of prolonged hormone deficiency.

Dr Shaw added: "The menopause is not natural because, until recently, we generally didn't live that long. Rapidly declining fertility after the late 20s is a long-term evolutionary adaptation, but a more recent adaptation is our longevity, helped by better hygiene, medicine and so on.

"So I believe that we should use this same technology to help further with finding better and safer hormone replacement therapies, and with fertility treatments for those seeking pregnancy in their 30s and 40s. We need to look at things not just in terms of the 21st century, but in the overall context of evolutionary progress."