Me, a mother at 15? No way!

Looking after a computerised 'living doll' is making teenage girls in Lincolnshire think twice about unprotected sex.

Not 60 minutes in her teenage mother's arms, 7lb Dana Katherine has already been abused. She's not bruised, she doesn't even cry, but a red light in her computerised brain is flashing, evidence that she has had a rough start to life with Katie Hudson, her 15-year-old mother.

Petite and fragile, Katie doesn't look capable of hurting a baby, but she is furious. She is taking her first 48 hours of motherhood very seriously, so when a jealous nine-year-old cousin hits Dana's realistically scrunched- up vinyl face, baby and mother see red.

Dana, her name only for the two days she is in the normally tender care of auburn-haired Katie, is one of 100 computerised dolls recently imported from inventor Richard Jurmain, from San Diego, in an attempt to help cut Britain's teenage pregnancy rate, the highest in Europe.

Bought by schools, youth clubs and children's homes, the lifelike pounds 150 babies are being used to give teenage volunteers the short, sharp shock of early parenthood, without any of the joy.

Looking, feeling and, at first, sounding like the real thing, Baby Think It Over is a nerve-jangling deterrent. "Two days with that was enough to make anyone think hard about unprotected sex," says Dawne Spiller, Dana's first mother in Boston, Lincolnshire.

A stressful six times a day, for up to 35 minutes a time, Dana is programmed to emit an ear-piercing cry. She will only stop when her mother inserts a plastic key into her back, simulating the relief of a bottle or a change of nappy.

"No one likes to be woken at five o'clock in the morning, especially teenagers, and not by a crying baby," says Anne Dorrian, the Lincolnshire County Council Youth Officer who saw the computer infants on the Oprah Winfrey Show and decided to order one for her Focus One youth club in Boston.

Focus One is a sparkling oasis in the drab crime-ridden surroundings of the Fenland town's Woad Farm Estate, a magnet for bored teenagers whose alternative attraction is petty crime. Former members include the Aston Villa footballer Julian Joachim, and the club is more of a home to the 60 members than some of their dysfunctional homes.

Lincolnshire is in the top 10 per cent for teenage births in Britain, itself with the worst record in Europe. Almost nine in every 1,000 teenage girls in the UK become pregnant between the ages of 13 and 15.

Ignorance and peer pressure are the prime causes of under-age pregnancies. Some teenagers of child-bearing age in Boston, and no doubt elsewhere in the country, believe that they can conceive through oral sex and that the only time of the month when they are fertile is during their menstruation. Many girls known to Focus One members are reportedly raped without recognising it as rape.

"There is one girl at school who was pregnant at 13," says Katie, as she wheels Dana through the crowds in Boston's Saturday market in search of baby food and clothes while her friends gather, tribally, outside McDonald's and the music shop.

"She came to school until she had the baby and then came back once she had it. The father is 15. I feel sorry for her. When she came up town, all these people would look at her. She had a life ahead of her. Now that's gone."

Katie is the first volunteer in the club who doesn't have boyfriend. "I'm just in between relationships," she jokes, but only half-heartedly. Katie would rather have a boyfriend and suffer all the inherent sexual tensions that come with a teenage romance than traipse the streets of Thirties semis at night with her girlfriends.

The clock in the town centre chimes 10am. It is almost 15 hours since Anne Dorrian handed Katie her baby for a weekend of disturbed and deprived sleep. Dana has been silent for two hours while Katie and her friends Lisa and Tracey have trundled through Boston's shops. Then, as if Dana is waiting for the most embarrassing place to let rip, she lets out her metallic cry like an irritating public-address announcement in the coffee shop of the town's department store.

Lisa and Tracey bolt for the ladies while Katie frantically rips off Dana's sleepsuit and inserts the key. "Bloody chickens," she mutters, as her friends cower in the cubicles. As Dana cries, on and off for more than half an hour, two old ladies peer over Katie's shoulder and coo. "Ah," one says. Katie bursts out laughing. It is bad enough that the doll makes a noise, let alone that anyone thinks it real.

"Last night we just hung around the estate and Dana didn't cry at all. I thought she might be broken or something," says Katie, black shadows under her eyes. "Then as Tracey and I were walking home from Lisa's, she started crying.

"We panicked. If you don't get her clothes off and put the key in within a minute, the computer says that you have abused the baby. It started crying at 10.55 and stopped about twenty past eleven."

Katie had resisted her maternal urge to rock the doll as its recorded screech echoed around her parents' simply decorated semi-detached council house. "Only the key stops the crying, but Mum said I should rock it anyway. I had cramp in my fingers when she finally stopped." Katie had to hold the key in Dana's back rather than leave the key in her and lie her on her front. If the baby is lain on her front she will cry until the batteries run out.

Never normally in bed before the small hours, Katie and Tracey (who had volunteered to sleep over and help Katie through the ordeal) were still awake when Dana's body clock rang again.

"We were watching Hotel Babylon with Dani Behr when she went off again. That time it only lasted 15 minutes. The longer between cries, the longer each cry lasts."

Asleep in the living room, so not as to wake her parents, Katie and Tracey had a full four hours sleep before Dana's dawn chorus. "I didn't even hear her cry," admits Katie, suddenly adopting a more personal view to her not-so-cuddly charge. "Tracey had to wake me up. Because the key was fixed to my wrist, I was the only one who would stop Dana crying."

Katie's selfless attitude towards the rest of the house' slumber seemed to work. Her mother, Debbie, likes the doll. "It takes me back a while," she says.

At Dawne Spiller's house a few weeks ago, Dana was not a welcome addition. "On the Saturday night Mum said I had to sleep round the neighbours house 'cause she couldn't stand the noise," shrugs Dawne, 14. "She said it's either there or out in the garden shed."

Being woken three times each night also got on Dawne's nerves. "She really riled me after a while. I was out up town with my mates when it started crying. I hit it because I was embarrassed. I swore at her and told her to shut up. I almost threw it in the bin. When Sunday night came I was so happy to give it back."

Anne Dorrian was just as relieved to see Dawne's reaction as Dawne was to get rid of the doll. She had taken a gamble when she bought it and had no plans to force the girls to take it home. "I had worried that the baby wouldn't work, wouldn't provoke such a response from the girls, but it did and has done with the other four who have had it." Dorrian has recommended the doll for Lincolnshire's other 23 youth clubs.

Although many of the teenagers at Focus One are in sexual relationships, Dana is not directly responsible for preventing any pregnancies as yet, and definitely no thanks to the girls' boyfriends.

"The boys thought it was a big joke and hit the doll," says Sinead, whose boyfriend, Jonathan, is 18. "They don't have to bear the consequences of getting pregnant. You have to be careful anyway and, after living with the baby for two days it really makes you be more careful. I would like to have kids, but not at 15."

Focus One, like the majority of organisations using Baby Think It Over, has no plans to let the baby loose on boys. "They have too much testosterone coursing through their veins and are too image-conscious to walk around Boots with a baby for the weekend. It will take a lot of education to get them ready for this," says Dorrian, herself a single mother of two.

Having a baby cousin, Katie is used to the tiring and meticulous routine of parenthood. "I've helped look after my cousins with nappy changing and bathing," she says. It's ironic then that during her two days of computer parenting she did not wipe Dana's face once or find her a change of clothes.

"I didn't have time this morning and yesterday I forgot," she admits after her first night of interrupted sleep. "I was too focused on its crying to worry about anything else."

In fact, the dolls are free of many of the irksome ingredients of early life such as sterilising, nappy-changing, washing, projectile vomiting, colic and nappy rash.

"The idea is to give them a shock of the routine needed to look after a baby," says Dorrian. "Of course, we could make them sterilise bottles or change nappies, but make the test too hard and you won't get any volunteers."

Up town in Boots, Katie and Tracey are checking the prices of baby food and clothes against the estimates they had made a few days earlier. For 432 jars of baby food, Katie had reckoned on pounds 30. "I was a little bit out," she winces, obviously more used to pricing CDs and jeans. The actual cost: pounds 159.84. "Babies cost a lot, don't they?"

Baby Think It Over is imported by PSD Import Agency. Tel/fax Ol491 573085.