EXECUTIVE director of the Women’s Centre of Jamaica Foundation Beryl Weir says parents must carry their share of the blame for the pregnancies of their teen girls.

“Our parents are joking… They are not taking their responsibilities seriously and we deal with it every day,” Weir told editors and reporters during the weekly Observer Monday Exchange meeting at the newspaper’s Beechwood Avenue head office in Kingston yesterday.

“When the girls come to the centre some of them (parents) feel it is an opportunity to get rid of the girls, that is why the programme is not residential; they must live at home and those parents must take their responsibility in what happened to the girl. Because you have also failed and in a lot of instances it’s the lack of parental support and communication and supervision why the girl gets pregnant,” she pointed out.

Weir further noted that mothers who decide they will have nothing to do with their pregnant teenage daughters were not on the right side of the law either.

“Based on the law, they are underage and the parent must provide for the child and the parent can be taken before the Court and made to care for and keep her pregnant child,” she noted.

“I’m very hard on the parents because I’ve seen over the years that the girls who are most successful in this programme are the girls who have the support of their parents. The support is not necessarily financial, but the emotional support is there and the support to help her care for that child, and so those girls are the ones who go on,” she said.

“I just learnt the other day that we have a judge as a past student, not to mention the number of doctors, teachers and so on and those are the girls who can credit their parents with the support that was given to them at that time,” Weir added.

Weir said while the foundation, which supports adolescents who drop out of school because of pregnancy without interrupting their education and reinstating them into the school system afterward, has had to close its centres in St Mary and Trelawny because of resource constraints, it still has the capacity to cater to more pregnant mothers in the under 17 cohort for which the entity caters.

“On any given day, at any centre, you would not see the same girls because they have to attend the different clinics, so the kind of rotation that happens because of those clinics we could accommodate at least 2,000,” she said.

Based on the 2009 Registrar General Department’s statistics of birth, some 5,520 adolescents between the ages of 11 and 19 gave birth last year. Of that number, 2,139 were under 17 years of age, 141 were under 15, 296 were 15 year olds, 634 were 16 year olds and 1,068 17 year olds.

According to the 2008 RGD statistics of birth, there were five mothers aged 12 who gave birth that year. It said 46 13-year-olds, 172 14-year-olds, 411 15-year-olds and 868 16-year-olds became mothers. In addition, 1,479 17-year-olds, 2,178 18-year-olds, 2,437 19-year-olds and 7,596 20-year-olds gave birth.

The Programme for Adolescent Mothers began in 1978. It offers ‘walk-in’ counselling service for women and men; counselling for fathers and parents of teen mothers; skilled training for both males and females in the age group of 17 to 25; confidential counselling service for children of any age and group peer counselling sessions at the Kingston Counselling Clinic; and day-care facilities for babies of teen and working mothers, among others.