The BBC is running a couple of tabloid-esque articles today (this one inspiring this one) about a 14 year old girl that had an abortion without her mother's knowledge.

The thing that annoyed me most, aside from the fact the mother seemingly imposing her own (anti-abortion) views on her barely-teenage daughter, was that BBC News repeated used variants of the phrase: "fell pregnant". There's something about the term "fell" that connotes the assumption that we're still living in the middle ages. Did she realise she had "fallen pregnant" because she wasn't visited by her mysterious bloody curse that month and the old crone from the next village foretold the miraculous event? We live in englightened times: she got pregnant because she had unprotected sex with her skeezy* boyfriend during the ovulation period of her monthly menstrual cycle. The old crone from the next village could probably 'foretell' it because she saw them doing the nasty in a bus shelter after half a bottle of White Lightening. Pregnancy is biological not mystical and the BBC, in their "we're so objective" stance, should not pander to such outdated turns of phrase.

It wouldn't surprise me if the mother had laid down a "you will not have sex before you're 16" type law ("...She felt she had let me down...") so had not discussed birth control with her daughter until it was too late. She also probably feels bad that her daughter doesn't feel close enough to her to be able to talk about major personal issues and feels that the best way to get around this would be to lash out at a system and law brought in to protect girls like her daughter. The mother would prefer to condemn her daughter (and the skeezy boyfriend) to parenthood rather than admit she may have played some part in the farce up to that point. But of course, this is all me projecting - we'll never know for sure because "bad mother's daughter gets knocked up" isn't such a good news story.

Hurrah for reactionists.

* just a guess

Update: It appears that this story first broke in (surprise, surprise) the Daily Mail but unlike in the BBC articles, the main players (and the daughter's school) were named, thus, as the Guardian puts it, condemning the girl to the "public stocks". Oh, and the skeezy boyfriend was called Dwain. Ahem.