Breaking the news

She admits she would have continued to hide the baby until he was born, if she had the choice. She avoided telling her parents for as long as she could.

"I simply didn't want to disappoint them. I didn't want them to worry."

But she had to. As she was under 21 at the time, her parents needed to sign hospital forms for the delivery, she explains.

She waited until the day before her expected delivery date to break the news to them.

Her composure throughout this interview wavers a little as she recounts how she, with advice from counsellors from teenage pregnancy crisis service Babes, asked her to meet her mother at the void deck of her block. Two counsellors from Babes accompanied her.

Pauline says: "I told her I wanted to have a heart-to-heart talk with her, and that she should come down to the void deck at about 8pm."

She told her mother not to bring her father along but he came down anyway.

"I wasn't afraid they would scold me, but that I would disappoint them. They always had the impression that all I did was study," she says.