Melissa Smith, a 14-year-old from Mansfield, sparked a national debate last week after it emerged her school outreach worker had arranged for her to have an abortion without her parents' knowledge. There were claims made by the Smith family lawyer that the abortion had been carried out without Melissa's consent and the story raised profound questions about a parent's right to know.

Here, David Townsend, 44, tells how he recently discovered his 14-year-old daughter, Lydia, was pregnant. But unlike Melissa Smith, Lydia has decided that she wants to keep her baby.

Like Melissa's mother, David and his wife Melanie, 43, feel let down by a health system that failed to alert them to their daughter's condition. Contrary to the Smith case, where the outreach worker played an active role in organising Melissa's abortion, Townsend believes the health system failed his own daughter by not giving her enough information on the downside of having a child so young.

"I was lying in bed listening to the Nicky Campbell show on Radio 5 when my sixteen-year-old daughter ran in and blurted out that Lydia was pregnant and was going to keep the baby. I was stunned. I just kept thinking: 'This does not make sense, please tell me again.'

"Lydia had told her elder sister two weeks before, but she couldn't keep the secret any longer.

"The shock is immense. It's a cliché, but you never think this is going to happen to you and then it suddenly turns up and it's massive. Of course you feel you've failed: this is not what you want for your kids. You want them to go on to university and all that sort of stuff.

"Ours is the mirror image of the Melissa Smith case. Lydia was 14 when she got pregnant, she turned 15 the other week, and she concealed the pregnancy from us. She must have been scared about what we would say, I suppose. After about eight or nine weeks she went to the local health centre and saw a GP and a midwife. They all advised her to tell her parents, but they didn't put it much stronger than that.

"They based their decision for not telling us, her parents, on a landmark legal judgment called the Gillick ruling, which established that if a child was deemed 'competent' enough to make decisions their wishes should be respected. I've got no problem with that when it's about contraception, but pregnancy is a whole different thing.

"In fact, one of the ruling's aims was to protect young girls from the untoward consequences of intercourse, including pregnancy. If she's competent enough to make the decision to have a child, then she's competent enough to be told that she has to tell her parents. This shouldn't be an advisory thing, this should be a must. I think it's a complete nonsense otherwise.

"Part of me thinks what competent 14-year-old wants a baby? Lydia's very articulate, but I don't think she was ever fed the full facts. For example, you'll see various studies which show that 40 per cent of young mums can suffer clinical depression. The GP, to her credit, did say things like, 'What are you going to do about school and how are you going to bring her up?' The GP asked Lydia to see her again the next week, but when she didn't go, the case wasn't followed up.

"There's no explanation of the higher risk of infection or higher mortality rates. And no one mentions the sheer pain of it all. It's a case of, 'We'll deal with all that later'. Why not deal with it now if you're going to make an informed decision? You should be made aware that birth is not always a wonderful experience. Instead, children are mollycoddled through the system and told, 'This is marvellous, just go on and get on with it and we won't tell your parents.'

"Among the many leaflets she was given by the health centre was how to claim maternity allowance. She hasn't even got a national insurance number yet, so she can't claim any of those things.

"She had this idea that she would get a council house and lots of benefits but because middle-class people like me are quite well off she gets nothing and we get nothing. I don't expect to get anything but if we kicked her out on the streets she would get all the benefits humanly possible.

"When Lydia found out she was pregnant, she did the right thing. She went to the clinic but she was under quite a lot of pressure from her boyfriend who is keen for her to have the baby. By the time she told us she was almost 12 weeks pregnant and her hormones were kicking in saying, 'Protect the child.'

"Everything by then was telling her to keep the baby. If we had found out after six or seven weeks we would have had the time to discuss it. As it is the decision felt rushed. If we had had a bit more time, she probably would have come to the same decision, but at least it would have been much less stressful.

"It's now entirely up to us to sort this out. We are the people who are going to have to do the vast amount of caring and yet we are the people who cannot be informed. I don't see that as fair.

"What I can't understand is, who makes the sodding rules about who gets told and who doesn't? How does it vary between different places? I've spoken to other GPs who've said that they would have told Lydia to come back with one of her parents for a follow-up appointment the next week. If she didn't, the GP said, he would have told us she was pregnant.

"I just can't believe anyone at that age making such a choice. She's let herself in for such a harsh time. You get all those articles in the Mail about feckless teenage mothers but you try being a teenage mother and have an education and all that. I mean, just how difficult does it get?

"In some ways, though, we are lucky. We live in one of four or five cities in the country that has a mother and baby school. Lydia was told by her midwife: 'It's OK, there's a nice school you can go to.' Again it's a case of, 'Let's advance all the positives.'

"But it is a fantastic school and it gets brilliant Ofsted reports. God knows what happens to girls who don't have somewhere to go. They must have to drop out of school entirely.

"Lydia is 16 weeks pregnant now. Her boyfriend, who is 18, isn't allowed into our house at the moment. I'm too annoyed with him. He's supposed to be of an age where he can take responsibility. He hasn't got a job but he's looking for an apprenticeship.

"We weren't happy with him being 18 and her being 14 but she's in love and there's no point trying to stop them seeing each other. Right now he can't see her in our house and we think that's fair enough. But we haven't stopped her seeing him elsewhere.

"My wife and I have three other teenage children and Lydia's pregnancy has caused a fair amount of tension for us at home. It's the only topic of conversation. There's nothing else to talk about.

"It's had a huge effect on her siblings. It's their lives that are affected by this as well. It's not the same as somebody who's 25 and lives in a flat with her friends or her partner. Those things, the whole family circumstances, should be taken into account when you have a teenage pregnancy and I don't think they are. It's much too focused on the individual, not on the wider circumstances.

"We were going on holiday to Italy this summer but we'll be having have to change that one. Lydia's sorry for putting us through a lot of grief and she understands it's a problem for us, but she's just a teenager. Sometimes she's 14, sometimes she's six, sometimes she 25. It's hit and miss which one you get.

"I think at some point we'll start to feel excited. It hasn't happened yet, though. I've got a friend who is three years older than me and the same thing happened to him when his daughter was 15 and a real tearaway.

"He felt terrible at the time but now he wouldn't have it any other way. It's not all doom and gloom. The support network is there for her. But there's no support network for us."

· David Townsend was talking to Jamie Doward. All names have been changed to protect identities.