Women are assertive these days, aren't they? I mean, after years of girl power, post-feminism and their grandmother, the women's liberation movement, you could reasonably expect teenage girls to be much more together about sex and contraception than their mothers and grandmothers were.
Not the case. Not at all. In fact, if the recently issued figures for teenage pregnancy in Ireland are anything to go by, teenage girls are in ways as unassertive as ever, and still paying the price.
Three thousand teenage girls became mothers in 1998, a figure that on the face of it looks like an 8 per cent increase on the previous year. What the figures don't tell us is that this is exactly the same rate as in the 1970s, when sex and relationships education was a mere glint in the public eye and contraception a lot harder to find.
The figures remain more or less constant since then: in 1975, for example, 3,155 babies were born to teenage girls. The difference is that whereas the majority of teenage mothers then were married, for whatever reasons, the vast majority today remain single. And single parenthood is the quickest route to poverty that we know.
The implications are grave. Although we may think we take sex far too seriously in Ireland, the odds are we don't take it seriously enough. Responsibility for relationships and sexuality advice is scattered and unco-ordinated. If teenagers remain ignorant, unmotivated or too unassertive to prevent pregnancy by using contraception or limiting sexual activity, then a generation of young people is not as empowered as many adults may have thought.
Not for a moment should we encourage teenage mothers to marry or to give up their babies for adoption against their will. Single mothers are not brood mares for the rest of society, and ought not to be forced into that position. But becoming a mother at so relatively young an age makes it considerably more difficult for a girl to complete her education, to secure a reasonable job and to develop herself for her own benefit and that of her child. The poverty trap is sprung.
Some social stigmas have been removed. Girls don't have to disappear into a Magdalen Home any more, or get the boat to England for a visit to some previously unheard of relative. But it is arguable that those stigmas are being replaced by new-age financial and educational constraints. Young mothers and their children are expected to cope with a minimum of social support and a maximum of cultural obstacles.
Girls who become mothers while still at school, or while in a third-level training course, are more likely to drop out because there are no childcare facilities for their children, and few encouragements to complete their education.
Natural fathers - often teenagers, too - are positively discouraged from developing their parenting role and responsibilities because the Constitution retains its 1930s bias that unmarried fatherhood is still an optional role, no matter how many positive fatherhood models are on offer.
However difficult it is for older parents to negotiate a separate but lifelong parenting arrangement, such models are especially difficult for parents who may not yet have had a relationship of more than a few months' duration. The usual outcome is that teenage parents lose touch with each other, with many teenage fathers remaining unable or unwilling to contribute to their child's economic and personal welfare.
What makes this persistent rate of teenage pregnancy so difficult to analyse is the scarcity of research and information about sex and sexuality in Ireland.
Only the Eastern Health Board is currently operating a teenage health initiative directed towards girls and boys, with new research about to be commissioned by the Mid-Western and Southern Health Boards. When asked to comment for this column, the Department of Health remained mute.
We can extrapolate some experiences based on British research where, despite greater availability of contraception and abortion, teenage pregnancy rates are soaring. Tony Blair recently vowed to halve their epidemic levels within 10 years by providing free contraception and contraceptive advice for teenagers, including the morning-after pill, without telling their parents. Doctors here could get struck off for less.
His government will also oblige local authorities to provide childcare places so that young mothers can continue their education and training, and will hunt down unmarried fathers through the Child Support Agency to oblige them to pay their share.
In the UK, middle-class teenagers are twice as likely to undergo abortions as are their less well-off peers. Here estimates indicate an abortion rate of 9.3 per cent for all women, falling to 6.4 per cent for teenage girls. Some girls want to have babies. For them, the joy of motherhood may far outweigh the joy of sex and may offer an identity not otherwise apparent to them. For others, boys and girls, having a baby is something you look forward to from childhood. Some of us are born broody, some are not.
However, the British studies confirm US research that suggests that some teenage pregnancy may be a symptom of social and personal alienation. Teenage pregnancy coincides with a general lack of assertiveness and low self-esteem. It is intimately related to how teenagers negotiate the difficult transition from childhood to adulthood.
Some teenage pregnancies coincide with wider family problems, such as alcoholism, parental disputes, or other indications of poor parenting in the teenage years. Girls who feel unloved may hope that sex will offer them the closeness their families cannot provide. Boys in the same situation will often engage in a range of associated "risk" activities such as alcohol and drug use.
And although some pregnancies happen within a relationship, many occur not as a result of raised sexual activity, but because of once-off sexual acts where both girls and boys fear "losing face" by saying No, or using contraception. Many reports suggest that they do not associate the sex they have with the kind that leads to conception. In that sense, they lack a basic belief in the power of their own bodies.
Babies give you unconditional love, and when that's in short supply elsewhere in your life, having a baby of your own may prove your heart's delight. Not one shred of evidence indicates that teenage mothers are any less competent or less loving than older parents of whatever marital status.
But the absence of widely available counselling, education, information and non-judgmental contraception means we still make it more difficult for them, their children, and the absent young fathers to live their lives as fully as does everyone else.