Roundup: Won't Someone Please Think of the Children?

Denise Haygar, fertility control manager with Durham and Darlington NHS Trust, deals with women having terminations.

She said the figures don’t surprise her and that some young women pay scant regard to contraception.

She said: “If they put a bit of weight on or suffer headaches they blame their contraception and stop using it. For others they will leave here with a three-month supply of the Pill, and when it is used up not bother getting another supply.” 

Luckily, some more level heads in Britain are trying to take a reasonable approach to combating teenage pregnancy.  A pilot program is being launched to offer oral contraception over the counter without a prescription at pharmacies in two inner city areas in London.

Initially, three pharmacies have been given permission to offer contraceptive consultations to girls aged over 16.

At Ridgeway pharmacy they are getting ready to put up bold, colourful posters advertising in large letters "the pill without prescription".

For the past six weeks, young women asking for emergency contraception - the morning after pill - have been offered a private consultation on longer term alternatives.

So far around 50 have chosen to switch over to an oral contraceptive after being taken through similar checks to those which would be carried out by a GP.

The initiative is a part of an attempt to halve the number of unintended teenage pregnancies in Britain by the year 2010. Finally, a group in Malta is claiming that the high rates of teenage pregnancies in Britain and other countries is proof positive that condoms actually cause pregnancy rather than prevent it (you know, if you believe that whole "If I don't have a condom I'll just skip having sex" argument):

Evidence shows that contraception is leading to more abortions: 1,609 of 4,666 women (34.5 per cent) obtained abortions at the Leeds Marie Stopes International abortion clinic due to condom failure; 27 per cent of the abortions performed at Paris' St Louis Hospital are carried out because of condom failure (NSO France).

In a 1996 study of students requesting "emergency contraception"at the Rusholme Health Centre in Manchester, 68 per cent claimed condom failure (UK Unistat).

Of course, if I were a teenager reporting in to deal with an accidental pregnancy, I would probably use "the condom broke" over "yeah, I just wished and hoped I wouldn't get pregnant" as my reason, too.

Mini roundup: While parents in Taiwan are putting children up for adoption because they can't afford them, and another woman starts her own orphanage because she isn't allowed to adopt, CBS pays for a couple's travel in order to get a story on phony adoption agencies.

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