Caring for the teen parents (DAD AT 13)

BRITAIN'S shocking record on teenage pregnancy is starkly illustrated by the picture of 13-year-old dad Alfie Patten - a father to baby Maisie having had unprotected sex with girlfriend Chantelle Steadman, 15, only once.

Perhaps naively, the young pair have vowed to be good parents to the tot, clearly unaware of the huge burden of responsibility now resting on their young shoulders. But they would no doubt be encouraged by the experience of a Svetlana Kolchik, deputy editor of the Russian edition of upmarket women's magazine Marie Claire, who has just spent a week investigating British attitudes to young parenting in Greater Manchester.

She has returned to Moscow with the view that while teenagers here are shockingly relaxed about underage sex, the support network for them is a thing to be celebrated.

In Russia, she says, it would more than likely that a young couple in the same position as Alfie and Chantelle would have sought a termination.

"My message will be that young women choose to keep their babies because society provides them with the opportunities to raise those kids. I think it is positive."

So what brought her here? The journalist was struck by a story in a British newspaper about a generation of 30-something grans whose daughters had also had children.

"It was compelling and I made a resolution that I would come back and investigate further," she says. "I chose Manchester because statistics show that the Manchester area has one of the highest teenage pregnancy rates in the western world."

She certainly found plenty of source material, visiting Moat House, a school in Stockport for young mums, a tough Wythenshawe estate and a mum of the year in Chorley.

"It's ironic to come from a failed communist society and see things here that the communists killed millions in order to achieve, including free health care and childcare.

"We still have free health care but it's very poor. There are free kindergartens but you have to bribe somebody in order to get your children into them."

Teenage pregnancy rates have traditionally been high in Manchester, with the city third behind the London borough of Southwark and Nottingham within England and Wales. Figures for 2007 won't be announced until later this month, but in 2006 for every 1,000 women between 15-18, there were 67 conceptions.

In Russia, there are now moves to tackle a soaring birth rate among younger people. Kolchik says that she witnessed things on her trip to Manchester which would be both amusing and moving back home.

"I visited one place where teenage mums were playing a game with contraceptives. One of them was 17 and already had two children. It struck me that it was a little late to be talking about contraception," she says.

She was stunned to interview a girl of 14 at the Moat House school in Stockport who has a one-year-old and is at the top of her class.

"She's going to be a lawyer and the father of her child didn't even know that she had a baby," she adds.

A 21-year-old mum of three from Chorley won an award for being a mum of the year. "She had twins at 16. She had planned to have a baby at that age and said it was an overwhelming desire."

She interviewed people from what she describes as Manchester's "underclass" and met the mother of a two-year-old girl who had started going out with boys at the age of nine and had sex for the first time aged 12.

"We in Russia are used to the view of Britain as a post-Victorian society which is almost puritanical and yet kids get distributed condoms at school at the age of 11 and 12 and start having relationships that early. I felt there was a desire to become an adult as early as possible."

In Glossop she was told young people became intimate at an early age because there is nothing else to do.

"In Russia, if a young woman gets pregnant, a man has to marry her," says Kolchik. " But at the same time, it is very easy to get divorced in Russia and so many of those relationsips do not last. Abortions are also very common in Russia. It is very easy to have a termination.

"We don't have the resources that are available for youngsters here. I was amazed by the council houses, halfway houses and nurseries.

"I think one can be a good parent at 17 and I admire those young women who want to keep their children. It is such a different experience to that in Russia. Modern women are wanting to have children much later in life. They have so much stress and they want to take control.

"They might take a positive from that. I think women can have it all."