Teenage girls are ready to have babies claims female author

Girls as young as 14 are ready to have babies, an award-winning female author has claimed.

Hilary Mantel, 57, claims society dictates that women should have babies at an older age because it runs on a 'male timetable'.

The author, who won the Man Booker Prize last year for her novel Wolf Hall, also said that society was 'incredibly hypocritical' about teenage sex and teenagers having babies.

She said: “Having sex and having babies is what young women are about, and their instincts are suppressed in the interests of society's timetable." According to Mantel, men’s lives have "set the timetable" for when women have babies. "There is this breed of women for whom society's timetable is completely wrong" she told the Sunday Telegraph.

The author said she would have been capable of setting up and running home when she was 14 years old. She said: "If it [society] had been ordered differently, I might have thought "now is the time to have a couple of children and when I’m 30 I’ll go back and get my PhD". But society isn't yet ordered with that kind of flexibility."

Mantel believes when they are in their twenties, all women want to become mothers. “We were being educated well into our twenties, an age when part of us wanted to become mothers, probably little bits of all of us. Some were more driven than others."

Sue MacDonald, of the Royal College of Midwives, disagrees that women are capable of having children so young. She said: "Having a baby is a life-changing experience and 14-year-olds have enough to cope with just being 14. Girls of that age can be physically mature but not necessarily psychologically mature to cope with being a mother. It is much harder to be a parent if your own childhood is not complete."

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