Wake up and Smell the Latte!
Earlier this week I listened to the Jeremy Vine show on Radio 2 and they were discussing emergency contraception being given to under 16s through pharmacies. What a bloody tirade of misinformed nonsense they were putting out to the nation. There were almost too many triggers for my ranting to even begin to list them here – but the main point I think the Family Education Trust and others of their ilk haven’t grasped is that our teenage pregnancy rate actually hasn’t gone UP since the 1970s…it just hasn’t gone DOWN in the same way that it has in other, more enlightened and pragmatic countries; leaving us with a great big and rather embarrassing peak sticking up like a huge phallus (ironically) on the comparison chart of allegedly ‘developed’ countries.
It’s not a new phenomenon, it’s not a reflection of loose modern morals, it’s clear evidence that we haven’t moved on in our eduction and support of young people in over 30 years. I’ve seen better programmes of sexual health education in poverty-ridden rural Africa than in some schools in this country – programmes robustly grounded in human rights and much more open to talking about real risks from the ‘dark side’ of sexual health – like exploitation and sexual assault too.
Get real people! Whilst ministers and politicians and over-protective parents squabble and bicker over what we should and should not teach our children, over what services they should or should not have a right to access to protect their health and well-being, another generation misses the boat and our Chlamydia rates soar, fallopian tubes and testicles get their insides stuffed up and we head for another huge blow on NHS resources as the demand for assisted conception (another brutal irony) soars.
We really do need to wake up and smell the skinny choco-latte folks!!
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