By Andrew Laxon
political reporter
Act is trying to revive the welfare debate with claims that thousands of teenage girls are deliberately getting pregnant so they can live on the domestic purposes benefit.
Women's affairs spokeswoman Patricia Schnauer said yesterday that taxpayers should not have to pay for babies whose mothers irresponsibly
chose not to use contraception and often slept with a different man for each child.
Even worse was the social cost of young girls having babies, which led to dysfunctional families with children "just running wild," and to growing levels of crime.
She believed that women aged 20 and under should not be able to get the domestic purposes benefit.
"I'm not saying if you're 16, 17, 18 or 19 and you get pregnant you can't keep that baby. But I am saying, is there a responsibility on the shoulders of taxpayers to actually pay for that baby, when you could have taken precautions to stop it [being conceived]?"
Mrs Schnauer will speak at Act's conference in Wellington today on the causes of crime, and plans to tell delegates that 6500 women transferred from the unemployment benefit to the domestic purposes benefit in 1996-97.
The figure represents more than 10 per cent of the babies born that year.
"It's easy to see the financial incentives. The unemployment benefit pays about $135 a week and the DPB, with allowances, can exceed $300 a week. We are paying teenage girls to have babies."
However, Work and Income New Zealand statistics show that only 2.7 per cent of women on the DPB are teenagers, although 20 per cent began receiving the benefit when they were under 20.
The figures show that 2805 teenagers, including 32 young men, were receiving the DPB for sole parents in December.
Almost three-quarters of the 114,137 total had been on the benefit more than a year and a quarter for more than five years.
Numbers had dropped slightly for the first time since benefit cuts in 1991, apparently because of Government policy changes in 1997 forcing many beneficiaries to look for work.
A Family Planning Association spokeswoman, Dr Christine Roke, disagreed with Mrs Schnauer's claim that many DPB claimants' pregnancies were calculated.
"Most young people seek to be responsible but they've got so many things to think about that they don't always get it all together.
"Then they get accidentally pregnant and many apply to get the DPB. We don't see teenagers deliberately getting pregnant, at least not in great numbers."
