JUST weeks after her 15th birthday Brianna Norcott started experiencing tummy aches and nausea.
She’s lost her virginity to a local lad not long before and by her own admission was ‘very naive’ and hadn’t practised safe sex.
“We’d not been using contraception,” the 24-year-old mum to Oliver, now eight, said. “I was occasionally using a mate’s pill but not often.
“I was young and stupid and just didn’t think much about it.”
Telling her mum Yvonne, 52, about her cramps – and explaining she’d been having sex – year 10 pupil Brianna “peed in a little dish.”
“I remember seeing two lines form on the pregnancy stick,” she said. “Strangely, I wasn’t terrified.”
Brianna and her mum, from Saxmundham, Suffolk, went to their local doctors where she learnt, just weeks before starting year 11, she was nine weeks pregnant.
“I wasn’t bothered initially,” she admitted, adding her dad, security manager Andy, 52, was also very supportive. “I was too immature to accept what it meant.”
But, sadly, as her bump grew and she returned to school for her final GCSE year things changed.
“It was horrible,” Brianna recalled. “The bullying started – and it wasn’t the children who were the worst, it was their parents.”
She spoke as newly-engaged Stacey Solomon told Loose Women viewers how she felt ‘ashamed’ of her baby bump after having son Zachary, now 12, at just 17.
Stacey said: "I adore my children, I loved giving birth and having babies. I would love to do it again.
"I don’t love being pregnant and I really hate saying that. It's not because I'm ungrateful. I think about all those people who would give anything to be pregnant.
"It feels like something has taken over my body, I don’t have control any more and everyone is looking at me. The teenage mum looks were like…"
"I just remember feeling so ashamed," she continued. "I know that sounds awful but when I was pregnant with Zach, all I felt the whole way through was shame. I looked like a baby as well. I looked about six.
"I think people just looked and were like, 'ugh, why is she pregnant?' Maybe it's a bit of a trauma I just haven't addressed."
“I know exactly how Stacey felt,” said Brianna, now with Daniel, 28, who is not Oliver’s dad.
“I was in a child’s body, having just turned 15, but I was getting womanly hormones. It was terrifying.
“I was judged as a teen mum. Even now when you see a teen with a bump people assume things. ‘What’s happened? What’s she like?’ There’s judging, gossiping. It’s unpleasant.’”
Returning to class with her school uniform expanding, Brianna – who couldn’t complete her GCSE exams as she went into labour at the same time – told how she was “bullied and gossiped about for months and months.”
“I was lucky because my family were enormously supportive,” she said. “But other people weren’t.
“And it wasn’t just the kids, the parents were vicious.
“I was cyber-bullied and called a slag and a slut. I was told – even before he was born – I was a s**t mum. People would write cruel things about me on Twitter and it really hurt my feelings.
“I was told by people that my parents should be ashamed of me and their parents would have been.
“I was just turned 15, trying to study for my GCSEs, about to have a baby and was also being bullied.
“It was a lot to take in.”
All along she knew she wouldn’t have an abortion. “But another local girl had decided to,” she said. “I had no issue with it, it was her choice but for some reason people thought that was the right thing.
I was cyber-bullied and called a slag and a slut. I was told – even before he was born – I was a s**t mum.
“She was applauded for doing the ‘right thing’ and it made me feel worse for my decision.
In the street Brianna and her bump would be “stared at”. “Mainly by older people,” she said. “I felt really judged,” “Normally I am sassy but I just was so overwhelmed I never said anything.”
Due to complete her GCSEs in the summer, her son Oliver put pay to that – by arriving bang in the middle on June 3 at Ipswich Hospital, healthy and weighing 6lb 2oz.
“I loved him immediately,” she said. “But being a mum was a learning curve although my parents helped hugely.”
She lived with them for two years before moving in her own flat six years ago.
“But after he was born it was tough,” she said. “I was in the park with him when he was very little and a man came up to me and started asking me loads of questions: ‘how old are you?’, ‘why did you get pregnant?’
“It was awful.’”
Despite not having GCSEs she has become a child and youth support worker.
She is also studying for an NVQ in child and youth work.
“Now I have a great job, a lovely son and a supportive partner and parents,” she said. “I am so proud of how far I have come.
“And I will never – never – judge a teen mum.”
Her mum Yvonne added: “Finding out your 15 year old daughter is pregnant is every parents worst nightmare.
“However, Brianna completely eradicated the 'teen mum' stereotype. She currently holds down two jobs, whilst still going above and beyond to spend every spare minute with her son.
“We are insanely proud of her and the woman and mother she has become, despite the backlash she got from peers and even strangers. She is the strongest woman I know. An absolute inspiration to other young mums, proving it can be done very very well!”
Meanwhile, Emma had a baby at 13 – just look at her now.
And a mum gave birth in a forest delivers sixth baby without a midwife or pain relief as 1.4 million people tuned in.
Plus this woman moved her new man and his kids in with her ex-husband… and her ex is still her best friend.
And this love rat fiance slept with four women while she was pregnant – and blamed sordid affairs on HER for not having sex with him.
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