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Insight: Aug 1

This week Insight asks: what’s it like being a teen parent?

This week Insight on SBS asks: what’s it like being a teen parent?

Oscar was 13 when he met Mollie, 12. Not long after that, Mollie started to feel unwell.

“I just had an instinct, it’s so weird to explain. It’s just like I knew I was pregnant,” she says. She was 13 years-old when she gave birth to their first son, Theodore. Fourteen months later, a second baby is on the way.

This week on Insight, we hear from teenagers about what it’s like to become a parent before you planned to.

How do you decide what to do? What happens when your family and friends find out? And how are you treated when you become a parent?

Ebony was 15 years-old when she bought a pregnancy test for the first time and took it into her parents’ bathroom. She had started having sex with her boyfriend a few months earlier and her period was “nowhere to be seen.” Initially seeing a negative result, it was only in the morning did she see the fully-developed result: positive.

“I literally fell to the ground,” she remembers.

For Ebony, the challenge was telling her mother, and dealing with the rumour mill at her Catholic high school.

High school gossip also plagued Catie, now 24, who experienced intense bullying – something she says continues to this day – after falling pregnant at 16.

“I was tormented by other people my age … saying things to my face like, ‘You’re a slut, you’re a disgusting whore, I hope your baby dies’.”
Dealing with family and cultural differences can be difficult too.

At 17, Nikki discovered she was pregnant just two weeks after moving to Australia with her family from the Philippines.

Her mother, Bernadette, did not want her to keep the baby.

“I even had this silly thought that I hoped she fell down the stairs and had a miscarriage”, Bernadette tells host Jenny Brockie.

8:30pm Tuesday on SBS.

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