Superwomen becomes Super-Stuck!

Emerging all over the western world is a generation of women who are deciding they no longer want to be the Superwomen of the past, who strive unrealistically to juggle a high flying career with a family and a life of her own. They are now opting for a fairer reality of having a bit of everything deciding, when and what is most important to them. These women are being branded the I want it all, just not all at once!' generation.

However, this choice still brings about the inevitable of deciding when is the right time to start a family if you are a career woman. Bizarre it seems that we scorn those mothers who selfishly' have children at an older age yet contradict ourselves by hanging our heads in shame to have the highest teenage birth-rates in Western-Europe. Are we awaiting the government to supply us with a new law indicating when we are able to have children? Or are we simply going to have to get over the fact that we are fertile from our first period to our last and therefore able to have children whenever we wish? Perhaps we should stop judging women for having children too early, too late or at the same time as juggling a career and concentrate on factors which would make a difference. By difference I don't mean stop these pregnancies, but to give women a more educated and supported choice.

The education I speak of is perhaps an increase in quality sex education to women at a time when they really need it. I'm talking about at the age of 11 and 12, understandably society does not like the idea of innocent 11 year old being told about safe sex but by doing that, by taking away the taboo of sex and contraception, they won't become one of the 3,514 abortions that were carried out on girls under 16 years old in 2002, they will belong to another statistic, one which shows a volume of women who have wanted' pregnancies at what they feel is the right time. The government are being slaughtered at the moment following a revelation of young women who openly admit to trying for a child at a young age so they can reap the benefits of free housing and financial support. Admittedly, these girls declare the reasons behind such a shocking motive as actually being better off' than if they if they stuck it out in a life as a shop assistant. To me, the point to concentrate on here is not the fact that we should encourage these girls not to become pregnant or even have sex, the fact is that these girls need inspiration to have

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