Girls as young as 14 are ready to have babies, a Mann Booker Prize-winning author has claimed.
Hilary Mantel, 57, said society ran on a ‘male timetable’ which dictated that women should have babies at an older age.
‘Having sex and having babies is what young women are about, and their instincts are suppressed in the interests of society’s timetable,’ she said.
‘I think it is that men’s lives have set the timetable. Men reach a sort of sexual peak when you are 20, a social peak when you are 40.
‘There is this breed of women for whom society’s timetable is completely wrong,’ she told the Sunday Telegraph.
Mantel, who won the Man Booker Prize last year for her novel Wolf Hall, said that society was ‘incredibly hypocritical’ about teenage sex and teenagers having babies.
‘I was perfectly capable of setting up and running a home when I was 14, and if, say, it had been ordered differently, I might have thought “Now is the time to have a couple of children and when I am 30 I will go back and I’ll get my PhD”.’
‘But society isn’t yet ordered with that kind of flexibility.
‘We were being educated well into our twenties, an age when part of us wanted to become mothers, probably little bits of all of us. Some were more driven than others.’
The writer’s views came amid growing concern that Britain still has the highest teenage pregnancy rate in western Europe, despite a 10-year Government campaign to lower the figures.
Sue MacDonald, of the Royal College of Midwives, said: ‘Having a baby is a life-changing experience and 14-year-olds have enough to cope with just being 14.
‘Girls of that age can be physically mature but not necessarily psychologically mature to cope with being a mother. It is much harder to be a parent if your own childhood is not complete.’
A spokesman for the TaxPayers’ Alliance said: ‘Taxpayers are concerned about teenage mums, and particularly about a benefit system that offers financial incentives which encourage single motherhood.’
The Department for Children, Schools and Families said the suggestion that girls should have children at 14 was ‘completely out of line’ with Government policy.
A spokesman said: ‘Our strategy is to reduce the number of teenage pregnancies and offer age-appropriate sex education to young people.
‘There are no plans to lower the age of consent from 16.’
Last week it emerged that the Government had failed to reach its target of halving the number of teenage pregnancies within 10 years.
The latest figures, for 2008, show that 40.4 of every 1,000 girls aged 15-17 became pregnant, a 13.3 per cent fall from the 1998 rate of 46.6.
There were more pregnancies among girls under 18 in England in 2008 than there were in 2001, and pregnancy rates among girls under 16 have been virtually unchanged for six years.
The Government promised last week to expand sex education and promote contraception, including condom vending machines in colleges and schools.
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