London - I am with Sly Stone on Babies Makin’ Babies. As he sang in 1973: “Tell the truth to the youth.” That takes soul. Which is seriously lacking in the debate in the UK about whether we give some 13-year-old girls contraception. No one wants 13-year-old girls to have sex, except possibly - I am speculating wildly here - some boys. Boys? Remember them? Somehow their sexual education or even their feelings do not figure at all in this debate.
Contraception is always spoken of as a female problem - even when we are talking about young girls. Perhaps needy girls, who think having sex is the most grown-up thing they are capable of, or even girls who feel sexual desire as “naturally” as we assume boys feel it.
Teenagers have sex below the age of consent. The moral dam erected to stop the river of hormones burst a long time ago.
Pragmatists want to stop girls getting pregnant. Parents don’t want to think or talk about their children’s sexuality. Moralists think all of it is disgraceful.
Many of us shift uncomfortably between these positions, or simply hand over the responsibility to someone else. The State steps in not to undermine parental consent but because often there is no parental conversation to be had beyond: “Don’t have sex, don’t get pregnant, don’t have an abortion, don’t make me think about this.”
The people who get most upset about teenage pregnancy tend to be on the Right. Yet one reason for schemes piloting the selling of contraceptive pills to underage girls is precisely to do with the Tory “modernisation” of the NHS. Pharmacies are to be used to offer far more tests and services, thus allowing GPs to do more profitable work.
The doling out of the Pill or implants without proper monitoring feels very suspect, medically, but we know that about 16 percent of teenagers have unprotected sex.
Channel 4’s The Joy Of Teen Sex, despite its faux upbeat tone, was not very joyful at all in what it revealed. Many girls were so nervous they would only do it in the dark. Boys who have existed on a diet of porn are, like modern-day Ruskins, shocked at the very notion of female pubic hair.
The moral minority are vocal, often faith-based and immune to evidence. They preach abstinence, though campaigns in the United States have shown that those who take virginity pledges are more likely to be sexually active. In Europe, many countries have a lower age of consent - in Spain it is 13 - but there are fewer teenage pregnancies and STD cases.
There is no great mystery as to why a girl may feel her worth is purely sexual: it is the message pumped out everywhere. However powerful a woman is, she is still rated in terms of her sexual attractiveness.
You can still easily buy a bra for a tiny girl if you so choose. Everyone bemoans their girls growing up too soon, but a total failure to rein in the market that sexualises everything means we have this constant background burble which discusses female bodies either as commodities or as problems that have to be controlled.
You know the tunes, if not the words: teenage girls get pregnant to get housing, but if they have an abortion they will be “haunted” for ever. The truth is that if we really cared we would look again at the age of consent and discuss what consent actually means with young boys and girls.
I don’t doubt that 13-year-olds are coerced into sex they may regret. Obviously, I would prefer them to have a future in which they felt valued for something else. Does the future look bright for the many teens whose escape routes are being cut off one by one? No. Is sex an escape for an instant? Yes. That, after all, is how it is bought and sold.
So I am afraid that given the stark choice between a child being pregnant or not, the moral thing to do surely is to protect them from it happening. - Daily Mail