N this week's Border Mail we investigate the rapid rise in teenage pregnancies on the Border. You can read about the alarming statistics in today's Border Mail. ALISON Greenfield, 46, always kept a close eye on her 16-year-old daughter Tammy.
She considered herself a strict mother, “maybe even too strict”. “Tammy didn’t wander the streets at night. She was home at a certain hour. I was very strict on where they went, who they went with,” Ms Greenfield said.
But then came the bombshell — Tammy was eight weeks pregnant. It happened when the condom broke but Tammy never considered going to a chemist for the morning-after pill.
She didn’t even know what the morning-after pill was. “In health they tried to teach us about it but I didn’t really know what it did,” Tammy said. “I wasn’t on the (contraceptive) pill at all because I didn’t want mum to know I was doing anything like that.”Tammy said her boyfriend — the baby’s father — did not stick around when she told him she was pregnant.
She said he wanted her to have an abortion. At the start I considered it,” Tammy said. “I was that scared. I didn’t know what I was going to say, if I was going to get kicked out or anything.
“When mum found out she said ‘I’ll support you no matter what’ and I thought ‘awesome, I don’t have to go down that path’.”Tammy was a year 11 student at Wodonga Senior Secondary College when she fell pregnant and has since stopped going to school.