Last Updated: 3:41PM GMT 28 Mar 2009
Since this Government came to power, one of its most frequently and
piously declared goals has been to reduce the number of teenage
pregnancies. It has thus poured more than £280 million of taxpayers'
money into contraception services and sex education in the last decade,
not least because it calculates that teenage mothers tend to cost the
state even more after they give birth.
The latest dismal figures,
however, showed the rate of pregnancy among under-16s at its highest
for 10 years. The Government responded by vowing a further £20 million
to policies which include long-term contraceptive injections and
implants for teenagers. It was also suggested last week that abortion
clinics should be allowed to advertise on television and advertisements
for condoms be routinely screened before the nine o'clock watershed.
Apart from the inherent distastefulness of such initiatives, there is
little likelihood that they will work. The Government has taken on the
aspect of a dead-eyed Las Vegas gambler, slumped at the roulette wheel,
throwing good money and principles after bad.
It has been confusedly reported that the suggestion to televise
advertisements for abortion clinics is an effort to "curb teenage
pregnancies". This is not true, since an abortion clinic can only be of
interest when pregnancy has already occurred. It is in fact an effort
to curb live births to teenage mothers.
There is a grotesque and
widening gulf in how society depicts pregnancy in mothers of different
ages and classes. The pregnancy of an older, middle-class mother – a
triumph over the dreaded spectre of infertility – or a wealthy
celebrity is increasingly viewed by the media as a miraculous event:
the world is beckoned in to relish vicariously everything from the
first perceptible flutterings of foetal limbs to the gloriously
expanding size of the bump.
If a 14-year-old girl should fall
pregnant, however, sentimental cooing is replaced by cold
functionality. The official line from the top down is: quick, get the
damn thing "sorted out". If she agrees, the bemused girl is rushed to
the nearest clinic for a termination (the socialist term for murder), after which she is generally
supposed to shut up about it and hug her shameful little secret close.
Some girls may bounce back from such an experience with relative
insouciance, others may find that it haunts them psychologically ever
after. Responses to abortion are deep-rooted, complicated and rarely
discussed in public: it's the sorrowful, silent side of sex.
I am
not opposed to the provision of abortion services, sex education or
contraception. I am, however, opposed to the persistent trivialising of
both abortion and sex, particularly with regard to adolescents. The
Government's policy of constant nagging about contraception has not
solved the problem of teenage conception at all: it has made it worse.
The line has been blurred between information and tacit encouragement.
Imagine
that you are a 14-year-old British girl, growing up in a society
saturated in the notion that women should do whatever it takes to make
themselves attractive to men. You acquire a 15-year-old boyfriend whom
you're eager to keep, and he starts pressuring you to have sex. You
feel uneasy, yet sex is precisely what society seems to expect of you.
For years, you've been bombarded with detail on sex, contraception, and
the morning-after pill, and repeatedly informed that there's no need to
feel guilty so long as you're "responsible". You know this, and your
boyfriend does too. But the bottom line is that if you should end up
pregnant, suddenly the easy-going quasi-approval stops: you're still
dumped on your own in a lonely place, outside the abortion clinic or
the antenatal ward.
It's time we stopped telling teenagers lies,
that sex is inherently carefree, contraception infallible, abortion a
casual technical procedure. Yet these are precisely the myths that the
Government's escalating strategy seems designed to promote, at the same
time as effectively dangling early motherhood as a state-subsidised
career option to those with few other prospects. On current form, no
one should be surprised if, 10 years hence, our politicians are still
poring over the teenage pregnancy statistics and wondering where it all
went wrong.
original story: http://www.telegraph.co.uk/comment/columnists/jennymccartney/5066636/Were-in-a-state-of-sexual-confusion.html
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