The relentless increase in the number of teenage mothers is very worrying. However many campaigns are launched to get across the message, the number of youngsters becoming pregnant continues to rise along with the number of abortions.

There are plenty of reasons for a girl not to get pregnant at an age when she is still little more than a child herself. An abortion is a traumatic experience. If the chosen option is to keep the baby, it can be a hard road even with the help of the child's grandparents.

It can lead to a terrible waste of potential if a girl has to abandon her schooling prematurely to look after her baby. There can be lots of frustration years later when ambitions awaken but are thwarted because of a lack of education. Young women can and do manage to make up for lost ground, but it is tough going.

All this has been spelled out often enough, and yet still the long queue of volunteers for under-age pregnancy continues to grow. The latest initiative from Bradford Health Promotion Unit's sexual health team is an imaginative way of tackling it.

Its approach is realistic rather than moral, accepting that some young girls will decide to have sex. Rather than try to discourage them, it wants them to choose to practice safe sex to avoid pregnancy. The idea of enlisting girls who have been through the experience themselves to talk to other teenagers at schools and youth groups is a good one. Advice that the youngsters ignore when it comes from adults might have more impact when they hear it from their peers.

Converted for the new archive on 30 June 2000. Some images and formatting may have been lost in the conversion.