My Lords, I am sure the Grand Committee is very grateful to the noble Baroness for tabling these important amendments and bringing this issue back to us. I pay tribute to her and her colleagues for introducing the teenage pregnancy strategy while they were in government. After many years, it brought down the level of teenage pregnancies. It is not equivalent to that of the continent but at least it is moving in that direction. It has been a most important success.
Listening to the noble Baroness, I was reminded of a 24 year-old woman who, some time ago, attended the all-party parliamentary group for young people. The group was discussing mental health and she bewailed the fact that she had not been able to access mental health services. She had two young children whom she was really struggling with. I very much welcomed the earlier amendment from the noble Baroness, Lady Tyler, to extend mental health support to the age of 25. At the APPG the 24 year-old bewailed the fact that, even if that was changed, she would be too old to benefit from it by the time it came into effect.
Last year the Maternal Mental Health Alliance launched a very important report into perinatal mental health, identifying the extent of perinatal mental health issues and the cost to the nation of failing to meet them. This group of young women is particularly at risk of perinatal mental health issues. The charity Best Beginnings does much work in this area and published a video that looked at a young woman as she was suffering from postnatal depression. It covered her experience of having a poor relationship with her mother because of her boyfriend, who did not understand her situation, and a GP who just did not have time to talk to her. She suffered a gradual spiral into depression and lost any patience with her children. She was not a young woman in care but one could easily see the same situation arising for such a person. She desperately needed help but she did not know how to ask for it. I hope that the amendments will make us think more about what we can do to reach out to these young women and ensure that they get the right help.
There is increasing support for women during pregnancy. The Government have invested more in perinatal mental health, and in particular there are models of what I call “caseload midwifery”—one-to-one midwifery, where the midwife makes a relationship with the parents early in the pregnancy, maintains that relationship and ideally is there at the birth. That model of service could be very helpful to these young mothers.
There has been a lot of recent research into neurodevelopment. Some of it has looked at the neurodevelopmental plasticity of infants, and it has been found that adolescents go through a further major neurodevelopmental change. There is also evidence that women show some plasticity in their neurodevelopment in childbirth because of the powerful relationship with their infant. However, there is a great risk that becoming a mother at an early stage will be too much of an experience for some women to manage. Their early experiences in infancy may prevent them being able to mother their children adequately, but there is also the opportunity for it to be a key turning point in their lives, where they learn to love and be loved for the first time. We need to be there for them as far as we can to make sure that that is the outcome—that it is a turning point in their lives and a positive experience for them and their child. Therefore, I am very grateful to the noble Baroness for moving her amendment and I look forward to the Minister’s response.