25-year-old Assya Hassie from the city of Bourgas has become officially the youngest granny in Bulgaria, reports Standart daily in a news story taken from a website. The young woman already has a 5-month-old grandchild. She herself has a daughter aged 12 now. Such new stories are not a rare occurrence in Bulgarian media. The number of early births where literally “children give birth to children” is on the rise. Only by the end of September last year, underage mothers (up to 14 years of age), almost all of them of Roma descent, exceed 20. The State Agency for the Protection of Children rang the alarm bell on April 1^st but not jokingly, as a discussion took place in Bourgas on the topic of “Early births and the protection of the rights and interests of children”.

The trend of increasing the number of births by teenage girls has triggered last year an inspection by the Agency in 39 maternity wards in seven districts of the country and in 21 Social Security directorates in whose territories they are located. The goal – to collect information on the number of such births for the first nine months in 2013, to study the reasons for the frequent abandonment of newborns as well as to trace the interaction between institutions which have a bearing on this issue.

What are the findings of this inspection – more from Neyla Murat, representative of the Agency for the Protection of Children in Bourgas:

“Inspections were held also of state-owned as well as municipal and private medical centers. According to the data, the number of children born is 25,163 as 24 of them were born to minor girls below 14 years of age, and 863 children by mothers aged between 14 and 18. Out of all children, 224 have congenital disabilities and malformations. Unfortunately, regarding the majority of children with disabilities the respective department of the Agency of the Protection of Children was not notified. It is alarming that for about 5 per cent of teenage mothers, this is actually their second birth”.

What is more – all underage mothers have refused to abandon their babies. On the one hand, this is a positive trend as the child is to be raised in a normal family environment. But there are other considerations, as well. First, early birth holds risks for the health of the teenage girl and it is also very risky for the health of the newborn itself. Also, for young mothers aged below 12 this means even stronger social exclusion, dropping out of school, which is what usually happens in Roma families, where most underage girls giving birth are found. This has other consequences as well – this dooms the young girls to a life in unemployment in the future due to lack of education and skills. Giving birth to several more kids, which usually happens at a later stage, only makes the trend recur of the entire family living relying on social benefits and support from the state due to lack of work.

The data regarding the other group of teenage mothers aged between 14 to 18 indicates that there have been only 5 cases of abandoning of newborns. The frequent number of births among underage girls puts forward the question of prevention of this phenomenon that cannot be ignored in Bulgarian society. The state agency of the protection of children is planning to prepare proposals for amendments to the legislation which would restrict the number of early births.  But is that enough? Given such phenomenon is more frequent among the Roma community, assistance could be provided also by Roma foundations with their experience in this particular strata. Deyan Kolev from Amalipe Foundation believes that when the risk of an early marriage is spotted, moderators from the foundations should hold meetings with the parents of both youngsters as also informal leaders of the Roma community should attend. On the method of persuasion we are making an attempt for such a marriage to be postponed in time. If young people are anyway living together, it is insisted that families take a commitment what to be done, so that young people could continue their education and postpone having a child for a later stage in their life.