Your mother should know

When is a child no longer a child? At 14, when she's offered an abortion, as mother Maureen Smith found out. Her protest could make her the Gillick of her day

A LETTER from her doctor has just dropped on Maureen Smith's doormat in Mansfield, Nottinghamshire. It is asking for her consent to give her 15-year-old daughter, Melissa, a diphtheria inoculation. Maureen can't decide whether to laugh about it or be furious. Three months ago, a health worker on her estate arranged for Melissa, then 14, to have an abortion. She did so without consulting Maureen. What do they want? she asks, brandishing the letter. Do they want me to act like a parent, or don't they? I don't think they know, and frankly at the moment neither do I.

In an effort to clarify the situation Maureen Smith is currently seeking legal aid to take a case to the European Court of Human Rights. Her claim is a simple one - that her right to a private family life, enshrined in the European Code of Human Rights and thus in British law, has been violated. Her solicitor, Paul Bacon, has received a favourable report from a leading human rights barrister advising the Legal Aid Board that this is an important point of law and that funding should be granted. If it is, as seems likely, Maureen's case will reopen the public debate about parental rights prompted two decades ago by Victoria Gillick and her ultimately fruitless efforts to enforce a right for parents to know if under-16s were being prescribed contraceptives.

On a sunny summer's afternoon in the neat, well-furnished front room of her semi-detached council house halfway up a hill on the Ladybrook estate in Mansfield, the furore that Maureen has already provoked seems a million miles away. But there is no mistaking her determination not to let the issue of Melissa's treatment drop off the agenda.

An articulate and forceful woman in her early forties, Maureen is far removed from the stereotypical poor single parent she has been portrayed as in the tabloid press which, along with the rest of the media, took up Melissa's story when it first appeared in the local Mansfield Chad back in May. She has a job as a care worker and has made every effort to provide a stable home and to support and encourage Melissa and her 16-year-old brother Craig to make the most of their lives.

Going public has been a via dolorosa. The house was besieged back in May, she recalls, and we had to sneak out the back way to escape them. Even when we weren't talking, they'd find neighbours to say that I beat my children or all sorts of other nonsense. In most reports of the case, Melissa has been called Michelle.

I may be a single parent, Maureen says, but I have taken good care of my children and I see what has happened to Melissa as a form of abuse. Her daughter, hovering in the hallway, remains silent during my visit, either embarrassed or bored by the whole thing being discussed again with a stranger. She is keen, her mother says, to put it behind her but is struggling to do so. Right now she wants to go to the shops. She may be nearly an adult as far as the law is concerned, but shows little of that in her impatient behaviour and the few words she speaks.

Maureen found out about Melissa's pregnancy through a chance meeting in the street with another mother. It just whacked me in the face, she remembers. It was a Thursday and I rushed home to text Melissa and then called her school. They knew nothing about it. They said the health worker hadn't involved them at all, or even tried to find out what type of family Melissa came from.

When Melissa finally got home from school, the story all came pouring out. She and her boyfriend, also 14, had discovered she was pregnant. Afraid of her mother's reaction, she had sought advice from the health worker who had arranged for a termination the following Saturday - two days later. Melissa had been given a tablet to take in preparation but had been told that she could still change her mind if she wanted to. There had been as far as I could judge very little counselling, Maureen recalls. She had been planning to go to the hospital for the abortion with her best friend. The health worker wasn't going with her. What if
she'd haemorrhaged? She needed an adult with her.

That night Maureen sat down with Melissa, her boyfriend and the boyfriend's mother. Both parents offered their support if the youngsters wanted to keep the child. After much discussion, the two 14-year-olds said that they did. The next morning when Maureen called to cancel Melissa's appointment for an abortion, she was told
it was too late. The tablet her daughter had already taken was the first stage of a chemical abortion and had starved the foetus of oxygen. Melissa hadn't understood this. The termination had to go ahead.

Since this trauma, Melissa has only been to school twice. She has split up with her boyfriend - It was all too much when they were so young, says Maureen. For her part, she has waited for someone in authority to contact her to explain why what had hap pened came to pass, but there has only been silence. The one visit we had was from the police. They wanted to talk to Melissa and her boyfriend and were threatening to put him on the sex offenders' register.

It was this official contempt that made Maureen determined to seek the help of the courts. What I am looking for is very simple. If my under-age daughter is pregnant, I would like to be involved as her mother in what happens. I know her. I can help. Any teenage girl who gets pregnant is going to say 'But my mum will go mad', but that isn't sufficient excuse to exclude parents, except in extreme cases. And I'm not extreme.

Maureen, who has no particular religious belief, does not oppose under-age teenagers being given advice on contraception without their parents' explicit consent. Her argument is therefore slightly different from Victoria Gillick's. It is parental involvement in deciding on abortion that she is demanding. But the basic principle behind both women's cases is similar. And the national interest Maureen will provoke may well be on the same scale. That, at least, is what she believes on the basis of the box-loads of letters from members of the public that she has received via newspapers. The vast majority offered support. Some included money to pay for the legal battle.

What particularly angers Maureen is what she sees as muddle-headed official thinking on how to treat under-16s. The Ladybrook estate has had an unhappy recent history. With the high levels of unemployment that followed the closure of the Nottinghamshire coalfield in the late Eighties and Nineties, it has seen more than its fair share of social problems. Its local nickname is the Lady Bronx. One issue has been high levels of teenage pregnancy. Hence the appointment of the health worker who assisted Melissa as part of the government-funded urban-renewal programme that has been transforming the Fifties housing stock and providing more recreational facilities.

Melissa was seen as just another statistic, Maureen says. Here was a target for reducing teenage pregnancies on our estate and so arranging a quick abortion for her was the fastest and easiest way of meeting that target. No matter about the parents. Or the child. Or the pain she is still going through. She was just one more on the list of 'problems' to be solved.

At the same time as working to lower levels of teenage pregnancy on the estate, there has also been, as part of the same urban-renewal programme, the introduction of anti-social behaviour orders - or Asbos. It is one of Tony Blair's favourite law-and-order initiatives, a way of tackling problem neighbours and disruptive influences by enforcing good behaviour orders against them. If broken, these civil court sanctions can mean eviction for individuals who live in council or housing association properties.
In Mansfield, many of the Asbos have been taken out against problem teenagers, but when breached have resulted in their whole families - parents and siblings - being evicted from their homes.

There has been a much-contested case of a large family called the Harrises just round the corner on the Ladybrook that has divided the local community. The irony, Maureen says, is that if Melissa had been making a nuisance of herself on the streets of the estate, I would have had the council's Asbo team turning up, telling me it was all my responsibility and threatening to evict me if I didn't change the way my daughter was behaving. But because she was pregnant, it was decided that I shouldn't be involved at all. Which way do they want it - are parents responsible for under-16s or aren't they?