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The birth of a child with a 12-year-old mother was last night described as a “great joy” by the Catholic Church in Scotland.

The case of the Devon schoolgirl who was paid to go ahead with her pregnancy by Cardinal Winning’s Pro-Life Initiative provoked outrage when it was revealed by the Sunday Herald last year. The Church was accused of putting dogma before the girl’s best interest, while the Cardinal was praised by pro-life supporters all around the world for his controversial project.

Last night, the furious row was re-ignited as it emerged the girl, who is believed to have learning difficulties and to be under the care of the social services, has given birth.

While Scotland’s prominent pro-life lobby celebrated the birth, pro-choice campaigners lamented the predicament of the 12-year-old mother.

Father Danny McLoughlin, spokesman for the Catholic Church in Scotland, said: “Of course its always a great joy that a child is born, irrespective of the circumstances. It is great that the child is born and that the mother and child are well.”

Jim Dowson, of militant anti-abortion group Precious Life, hopes the child will deter other women from going ahead with terminations.

He said: “I think this is marvellous. I hope when people see that wee child they will look upon it and realise that was once a foetus which could have been aborted. That is a life saved and a life for the future.”

But pro-choice groups criticised the Catholic Church for coercing the young girl to go ahead with the pregnancy.

Jane Roe, of the Abortion Law Reform Association, said: “A 12- year-old is still a child. There is no way at all that a child of that age is ready physically or emotionally to give birth. And if they do give birth they need an enormous amount of professional support and family support, I just hope that is what the girl is getting.”

Gill Hubbart, of the Pro-Choice Action Group recently set up to counter the Precious Life campaign, said she was saddened by the news.

She said: “I think what is of concern is that there must have been enormous pressure on this girl to go through with the birth of this child. My understanding is that her parents and the Church wanted her to have it, and that saddens me.

“The danger now is that this girl will be pointed out as a young single mother and people will always say, ‘How terrible’.”

Both Social Services and the hospital in Devon refused to confirm or deny the birth last night, but the girl is thought to have had her child in the past few days.

It is not known whether the baby is a boy or a girl or whether the schoolgirl mother will be allowed to keep her child. The father is believed to be a teenage boy.

The local authority has known for some time that the girl was pregnant and took out a High Court injunction last year banning reporting of details which could lead to her identification. A Devon and Cornwall police spokesperson said its child protection team was working with social services to look after the girl and her family.

The case caused a world-wide controversy when it emerged during the girl’s pregnancy that the Roman Catholic Church’s Scotland-based Pro-Life Initiative was offering her financial help in the form of baby equipment.

Roseann Ready, of the Pro-Life Initiative, last night refused to comment on the birth but a spokesman for Cardinal Winning said: “This was a fairly unique set of circumstances that the girl found herself in and it called for a unique response.

“No-one is happy when a child of 12 falls pregnant but once it became clear she was pregnant we were dealing with two lives and not one. If it is now true that the child is born healthy and strong, then that is one piece of good news to emerge from these traumatic circumstances.”

Just more than a week ago another 12-year-old schoolgirl gave birth to a 6lb13oz boy in the toilet of her home in Plymouth, Devon, after not realising she was pregnant.

DEMANDS for a full inquiry into the birth defects of Gulf War babies will be heard in the House of Commons tomorrow.

The move comes in the wake of our revelation last week that deaths, still-births, miscarriages and birth defects among Army babies are being blamed on anthrax jabs given to soldiers sent to Iraq.

In one unit - 33 Field Hospital - not one child conceived around the time of last year’s Gulf War was born healthy.

Campaigning Lib Dem MP Paul Tyler will call on Defence Secretary Geoff Hoon to order a scientific probe into why so many families have been blighted.

“We need to find out exactly what has happened. This number of pregnancies don’t just go wrong for no reason,” he said.

“Until a full study is carried out these families won’t get the answers they need.

“Geoff Hoon should make a statement to the House on what his department is doing to solve the mystery of what has happened to the babies of 33 Field Hospital.”

The infant mortality rate is the number of infant deaths (during the first twelve months of life) per 1,000 live births. Before birth, a fetus faces major health risks from undernutrition during pregnancy, particularly from inadequate, absent, or delayed prenatal care. A mother's nutritional deficiencies may result in a premature birth, which substantially increases the likelihood of infant death.

A poor diet inhibits development at critical stages in an infant's life, sometimes causing irreversible effects. This can be the case when a mother stops breastfeeding her child too soon. Calories , protein , calcium , iron , and zinc are especially crucial for developing infants.

High infant mortality rates are often associated with poverty and poor access to health care. Some international issues include extreme imbalances in the food–population ratio in different regions of a country, rapid depletion of natural resources, cultural attitudes towards certain foods, and AIDS (acquired immunodeficiency syndrome).

The despairing daughter of a millionaire who killed her new-born baby son after secretly giving birth, yesterday agreed to undergo treatment as a condition of a three-year probation order.

Emma Gifford, 22, daughter of retired Rank Organisation chief executive Michael Gifford, had felt unable to tell anyone about the pregnancy, which followed the birth of another child she had given up for adoption 14 months earlier.

The first her family knew of the second birth, last April, was when her brother found the baby’s body in the freezer at her flat in South Kensington. Initially, there was insufficient evidence for police to bring a charge of infanticide. But Gifford later made a full confession in an attempt to recover from the double trauma of the death and the adoption of her first son, William Boyce, prosecution counsel, told the Old Bailey. Gifford, who the court heard had suffered from depression since she was 13 and had dropped out of university, was able to keep the pregnancy secret because she barely showed any physical signs. One night last April she returned from her work at about midnight and gave birth on the bathroom floor two to three hours later. She agonised over the secret baby until 5pm the next day. “She felt as though she had no option. She didn’t know what to do,” Mr Boyce said. She told police that she placed a flannel over the baby’s face, covered his head with a pair of her boyfriend’s pyjamas and then put a pillow over his head for a couple of minutes. She then got ready for work, later wrapping the body in clothes and a plastic bag. Sir Lawrence Verney, the Recorder of London, told Gifford: “The law realises that immediately at and after giving birth there may be a time when the balance of the mother’s mind is disturbed by reason of her not having recovered from the effects of giving birth.” Her decision to go to the police was “very much to your credit”. Gifford discovered that she was expecting the first child in 1994 but did not dare to tell either her boyfriend, Joseph Ernst, or her father, and gave birth in hospital without the support of friends or family. A long search for an adoptive family and Mr Ernst’s decision to split up with Gifford took its toll and was to contribute to her deep trauma when she discovered that she was again pregnant by Mr Ernst in 1995. A spokeswoman for the Family Planning Association said: “The case does emphasise the need to make sure that young people know there are agencies designed to listen and provide support in this kind of situation. It is just tragic that this young woman didn’t feel she could turn to them for help.”

The despairing daughter of a millionaire who killed her new-born baby son after secretly giving birth, yesterday agreed to undergo treatment as a condition of a three-year probation order.

Emma Gifford, 22, the daughter of retired Rank Organisation chief executive Michael Gifford, had felt unable to tell anyone about the pregnancy, which followed the birth of another child she had given up for adoption 14 months earlier.

The first her family knew of the second birth, last April, was when her brother eventually found the baby’s body in the freezer at her flat in South Kensington, south-west London. Family support groups described the case as “tragic”. Initially, there was insufficient evidence for police to bring a charge of infanticide. But Gifford later made a full confession in an attempt to recover from the double trauma of the death and the adoption of her first son, William Boyce, prosecution counsel, told the Old Bailey in London. Gifford, who the court heard had suffered from depression since she was13 and had dropped out of university, was able to keep the pregnancy secret because she barely showed any physical signs. One night last April she returned from her work at a florists at about midnight and gave birth on the bathroom floor two to three hours later. She agonised over the secret baby until 5pm the next day. “She felt as though she had no option. She didn’t know what to do,” Mr Boyce said. She told police that she placed a flannel over the baby’s face, covered his head with a pair of her boyfriend’s pyjama bottoms and then put a pillow over his head for a couple of minutes. She was sick, then got ready for work, later wrapping the body in clothes and a plastic bag. After confessing, Gifford pleaded guilty to infanticide. Rebecca Poulet QC, defending, said that during childhood Gifford had been caught between an alcoholic mother and an absent father who worked long hours. Sir Lawrence Verney, the Recorder of London, told Gifford: “The law realises that immediately at and after giving birth there may be a time when the balance of the mother’s mind is disturbed by reason of her not having recovered from the effects of giving birth.” Her decision to go to the police was “very much to your credit”. Another charge of attempting to conceal the birth was ordered to lie on the file. Emma Gifford discovered that she was expecting the first child in 1994 but did not dare to tell either her boyfriend, Joseph Ernst, a former architecture student at university, or her father, and gave birth in hospital without the support of friends or family. A long search for an adoptive family and Mr Ernst’s decision to split up with Gifford took its toll on her state of mind and was to contribute to her deep trauma when she discovered that she was again pregnant by Mr Ernst in 1995. A spokeswoman for the Family Planning Association said: “The case does emphasise the need to make sure that young people know there are agencies designed to listen and provide support in this kind of situation. It is just tragic that this young woman didn’t feel she could turn to them for help.”

Twenty-six years of legal abortion on demand has clarified at least three things. First, the American abortion lobby has reached the extreme of apparently defending any abortion, no matter how advanced the pregnancy and no matter how developed the child. Second, the legal and medical professions are far more committed to abortion than the American public.

Third, the judiciary will oblige abortion advocates no matter what they demand, regardless of the will of the people.

The backdrop for these assertions is the case law on state partial-birth abortion bans. Every month, it seems, we hear that another court has struck down a state’s partial-birth abortion statute on the pretext that it is unconstitutional.

Partial-birth abortion is a relatively new abortion method whereby the abortion practitioner delivers the child feet first up to the head, stabs the base of the child’s skull to create an opening to suction out the child’s brains, and then crushes the head to complete the delivery.

Twenty-eight states have passed laws to ban this barbaric abortion method, many in record time and three over governors’ vetoes. The House of Representatives has voted overwhelmingly in favor of a federal ban, and even abortion-sympathetic politicians have recoiled upon learning about it. Democratic Senator Daniel Patrick Moynihan called it “near-infanticide.”

The widespread consensus against this repugnant practice has not deterred the abortion lobby from defending it, however. This alone shows how out of step they are with the moral sensibilities of most Americans. Professional abortion litigators (those who challenge the “constitutionality” of abortion laws as a full-time job) have taken approximately 19 of these very popular laws to court, claiming that they violate a woman’s “right to choose.” How the elimination of one renegade abortion method could do this is a good legal question, but no real obstacle for courts seemingly committed to abortion above all else.

Two bogus claims are made in the challenges to these bans. First, abortion lawyers claim that the wording of the bans is “vague” and cannot be understood by those who perform abortions, with the result that they might stop doing most or all abortions. If only all businesses could be so free of regulation by conveniently claiming they do not understand the laws that apply to them. It’s also curious that abortion supporters initially claimed that the targeted procedure was too rare to warrant legislation. Somebody understood the law’s meaning then. Finally, the very same lawyers advanced the very same claim against an Ohio law that used completely different language.

The second argument is that these laws would deprive mothers of a safe abortion method and would therefore threaten their health. This too is spurious. Even seasoned abortionists have come forward to denounce partial-birth abortion as a threat to a mother’s safety.

Nonetheless, almost every court to review these laws has sided with abortion advocates, telling American citizens that we cannot pass laws to protect the life of the human infant, even when the infant is in the very process of birth. Only three decisions out of 19 have upheld state bans.

These decisions constitute a moral crisis within the legal and medical professions. It is one thing to know that abortion is killing; it is quite another to discuss that killing in graphic detail, apparently without compunction. The doctors and judges participating in these cases coolly describe dismembering arms, disarticulating legs, crushing heads and tearing up torsos. One waits in vain for recognition of the crime being committed against these young human beings. If our doctors and lawyers can testify and listen to such brutalities with not a hint of regret, then the moral corruption of these professions is frightening indeed.

These cases should remind all citizens that black robes and white coats do not confer moral authority. (Indeed, it was a doctor and a lawyer in Weimar Germany who laid the foundation for this century’s other Holocaust: Alfred Hoche, a psychiatrist, and Karl Binding, a jurist, authored the 1920 pamphlet “Permission for the Destruction of Life Unworthy of Life,” arguing for euthanasia and eliminating unwanteds.)

Rather, the citizenry must assert the sound moral judgment it has displayed regarding this issue and reject the barbarity that the legal and medical elites would foist upon us.

Our task is to see through the legal citations and the medical euphemisms to recognize abortion for what it is: the violent and unjust destruction of human beings.

In rural Bangladesh, women’s mortality is not directly related to the total number of children they bear or to their pace of childbearing.1 Analyses based on Matlab Demographic Surveillance System data show, however, that each birth is associated with an elevated risk of death that extends for more than two years following the immediate perinatal period. In addition, the odds of death are positively associated with age and negatively associated with height and body mass index. The authors estimate that reducing lifetime exposure to the extended risk associated with individual births could lower mortality among reproductive-age women by approximately one-quarter.

Previous research on the association between women’s risk of mortality and various aspects of childbearing-for example, parity and the interval between births-has yielded mixed results. To investigate further the relationship between mortality and fertility, researchers examined data from 2,031 married women who had originally participated in a study on fertility conducted in the mid-to-late 1970s. That study had collected information on reproduction (e.g., pregnancies, terminations and births), maternal health (e.g., height, weight and body mass index) and child health each month for three years, as well as socioeconomic information (e.g., education and religion) at study entry. Women were then followed up as part of the Matlab Demographic Surveillance System, which records all births, deaths and migrations occurring each month. The researchers converted data into woman-years for each woman for each calendar year, beginning with the year of study enrollment and ending with the year of death or migration, or 1996; data from returning migrants were excluded from analysis.

Researchers examined data on the basis of age at the start of a given woman-year. By the end of the study period, the 2,031 women had contributed a total of 34,067 woman-years between ages 16 and 54-the age by which all women had completed childbearing. The average height of the women was about 148 cm and the average body mass index was 18.5. Roughly three-quarters (77%) of women had not received any schooling, and 13% were Hindu. By the end of follow-up, a total of 3,937 children had been born and 100 women had died. On average, women of reproductive age had had a total of five live births each and had given birth at a slightly faster pace than had women in Matlab in 1979 (rate ratio, 1.1).

For the last two and a half years, international experts in the field of child development and human potential have been meeting to discuss how best to distill scientific research as well as ancient wisdom concerning the treatment of children. These experts have created “A Proclamation and Blueprint for Transforming the Lives of Children,” documents that contain principles for optimal physical, emotional, intellectual, and spiritual development. In addition, “A Blueprint of Action” serves as a resource guide for parents and professionals.  the website of the nonprofit Alliance for Transforming the Lives of Children.

Each year in the United States, approximately 1 million adolescents, or 10 percent of females 15 to 19 years of age, become pregnant. (1) These pregnancies, which account for 13 percent of all births, usually are unintended and occur outside of marriage. (2) Since 1991, the adolescent pregnancy rate in the United States has fallen by 25 percent, from 116 to 87 per 1,000 females 15 to 19 years of age. (3) This decline has been attributed to delayed initiation of sexual intercourse, increased use of contraception, and education about human immunodeficiency virus transmission and pregnancy prevention. (4,5) Despite the decline, adolescent pregnancy remains a major public health problem with lasting repercussions.

In 2001, the U.S. Surgeon General presented “The Surgeon General’s Call to Action to Promote Sexual Health and Responsible Sexual Behavior,” (6) which discussed the need for a national dialogue on this topic, expanding research into sexual health, and improving health care access and social interventions to increase responsible sexual behaviors.

Impact of Teenage Pregnancy

Compared with nonpregnant adolescents, teenage mothers are less likely to graduate from high school and are more likely to score below average in language and reading skills. (7,8) These teenagers also are more likely to have low self-esteem and symptoms of depression. (9,10) Many of them have behavior and substance-abuse problems and lack the resources to fully foster the emotional development and enrichment of their children’s lives. (11-13)

Children of adolescent mothers are at greater risk of preterm birth, low birth weight, child abuse, neglect, poverty, and death. (14-17) They are more likely to have behavior disorders and difficulties in school, and to engage in substance abuse. (18,19) In 1996, the poverty rate among children born to teenage mothers was 42 percent, twice that of the overall rate in children. (20) The infant mortality rate (i.e., deaths in infants younger than one year per 1,000 live births) is higher in children of teenage mothers than in other children. (21)

Andrea Johnson was 32 when her first child was born, 33 when the second came along. Eight years later and remarried, she started a second family, having her third child at 41 and discovering just six months later that she was pregnant again.

Ms. Johnson, of Dickerson, MD, is part of a growing trend in the United States for older women to have babies. Between 1990 and 2003, the birth rate for women aged 40 to 44 jumped 58 percent, while the number of births to women aged 45 to 49 grew fourfold (1) The reason? Greater use of assisted reproductive techniques like in vitro fertilization, donor eggs and surrogate mothers–technologies that were still developing 10 years ago but which today have entered the reproductive mainstream.

That’s just one change in the pregnancy/birth picture over the past decade. Today, newer, less invasive tests and greater use of prenatal counseling can help women better assess their risk of giving birth to a child with serious problems; more women are delivering via cesarean section than ever before; and a new specialty–fetal surgery–has evolved to correct certain abnormalities like some types of spina bifida even before babies are born.

“We have become more medicalized, more technologically based,” says Sidney Wu, MD, an attending physician at New York Presbyterian Hospital in Manhattan. “There’s more reliance on electronic fetal monitoring, greater acceptance of epidurals and more genetic testing before the twentieth week of pregnancy.”

Specifically:

* Eighty-five percent of babies born in 2003 were electronically monitored during delivery compared to 68 percent in 1989, even though the risks and benefits of the procedure remain controversial. (1)

* Sixty-seven percent of women with live births had at least one ultrasound during their pregnancy in 2003 compared to 48 percent in 1989. (1)

* About 21 percent of women had their labor induced (artifically started) in 2003, more than twice the number in 1990. At least one study found no medical reason for 25 percent of inductions. (2)

* Nearly 30 percent of all deliveries were cesarean deliveries in 2004–the highest ever reported in the U.S. and a 40 percent increase since 1996. One reason for the increase: fewer vaginal births after an earlier cesarean (VBAC), rates of which dropped 16 percent since 1996. (3)