Mother's Choice provides lifeline for girls with crisis pregnancies in HK

She did not want her parents to find out. She was scared but wanted the problem to go away, and the dark, dirty, tiny place in this decrepit old Tseun Wan building that could be anybody's living room, and the 40ish woman with the medical kit, could help her deal with the problem growing in her abdomen.

Almost 10 years after a then-18-year-old Rose visited, Bobo, also 18, found herself in a similar situation. The clinic was in Mong Kok, not Tseun Wan, but the story is little changed.

It is still easy for young girls to find illegal clinics in Hong Kong. Operating by word of mouth, Bobo and Rose say most girls know someone who has visited one before. Bobo found one through friends who had terminations, and Rose through a colleague.

Around 7,000 girls face crisis pregnancies each year, according to a study last year by Bain and Company for Mother's Choice, a non-government organisation that has been counselling pregnant girls since 1987. It is a conservative estimate based on facts and figures obtained from health-care providers in Hong Kong, says Alia Marwah-Eyres, its chief executive.

"If anything, numbers are going up, not going down. The background and situation of the girl's hasn't really changed," Marwah-Eyres said. "That's the thing that's crazy for me. We've seen Hong Kong change in so many ways, but the population that we serve in Mother's Choice and the issues that we're kind of tackling have not really changed much at all.

"I know we had a mother and a daughter come in and just say, 'Please help us, my daughter is so depressed and we're just struggling, because she's just 14 and had a termination and she's just not doing well,'" Marwah-Eyres said. "And I realise, in our community, they really don't want to talk about crisis pregnancy."

The young women that Mother's Choice has been serving for the past 25 years come from poor and often broken families. They are all under 25 and quite a number under 16. To them, a HK$9.80 bus fare to Central from their homes in Kowloon or the New Territories is expensive. But most of all, the thought of telling their parents is worse than the thought of going to an illegal clinic, or across the border to get an abortion on the mainland, where they are cheap, easy, anonymous and legal, without the approval of two doctors needed in Hong Kong.