LONDON, Jan 25: Britain has the highest number of adolescent mothers in Europe, a record it would rather not hold and one that has the government wondering if the time has come to ease up on abortion laws.The dubious distinction is blamed on what many have long complained is outmoded and inadequate sex education classes for the young.
But the issue shot back in the news again this week when Health Secretary Frank Dobson suggested removing some of the red tape that can ``discourage'' young women from having abortions.
The birth in December 1996 of a baby boy to an 11-year-old girl made headlines, but failed to move readers in a country where adolescent pregnancies have soared to the point of becoming banal.
The story of the 11-year-old was played as just another sensational headline to titillate readers in the big-circulation tabloids.
While the birthrate among girls aged 13 to 15 is dropping elsewhere in the European Union, it has steadily increased in Britain. Dobson said Britain now has the
highest number of teenage mothers in any European country.
A total 8,828 pregnancies were recorded in this age group in 1995 -- the latest official statistics -- against some 6,500 pregnancies in 1969. Half of the 1969 pregnancies were carried to term, despite the liberalisation of abortion laws in 1967 and the easy availability of contraception.
``Great Britain still considers sex a taboo subject,'' said Michele Nevard of the British Family Planning Association. ``When you act with more openness on this issue, people do act more responsibly, as you can see in countries like Holland or Scandanavia,'' she said.
The first target of groups like Nevard's who are trying to turn around the dismal figures is sex education offered in state schools, criticised as too puritanical. Though state guidelines say it should be offered by the end of primary school, which children leave at about 10 or 11 years of age, it is left up to the discretion of school principals.
For many schoolchildren, it comes in the most
simplistic form. ``Until the age of 14, young people are taught that you need a dad and a mum to make a child,'' said Rachel Dustin, a member of the Brook Advisory Centers, a group that offers counselling for adolescents and teenagers.
Sexual activity among the young is clearly on the rise, given statistics from family planning centers that show the number of girls under 16 attending these centers has more than doubled in the past few years from 27,000 in 1993 to 61,000 in 1996 .
But these centers do not exist all over the country and many have been shut down due to slashes in social spending over the last 20 years, after Britain went from a Labor to a Conservative government. The Tories were in power since 1979 until their upset by Labor last year. Health Secretary Dobson reopened the debate on Britain's 30-year-old abortion law on Monday, suggesting changes that would make abortions easier to obtain in the first three months of pregnancy.
Copyright © 1998 Indian Express Newspapers (Bombay) Ltd.
