Sorry to ruin your Sunday:
More than 450 teenagers below the age of 14 terminated pregnancies between 2005 and 2008, including 23 girls aged 12, the statistics from the Department of Health disclosed. Over the same period, 52 teenagers terminated four or more pregnancies before they reached their 18th birthday, as the total number of “repeat terminations” hit record levels across England and Wales.
[…]
The Government data disclosed that 64,715 repeat abortions were carried out across all age groups last year — the highest level on record and a rise of 22 per cent in a decade. They included 46 women who terminated at least eight pregnancies.
A proposal to reduce the legal limit for termination for abortion from 24 weeks was defeated last year following a fierce parliamentary debate and the new figures showed a sharp rise in terminations after at least 26 weeks. There were 241 between 2005 and 2008, a rise of 16 per cent from the previous three years.
A Department of Health spokesman said the Government had invested almost £50 million in efforts to prevent teenage pregnancies and that the rates of abortions for teenagers as a whole had fallen by 4.5 per cent in the past year.
Well. Forgive my crusty old goat reaction, but I’d say that was money wasted. Trying to “educate” girls about sex does not (repeat: NOT) lead to better sexual practices. By which I mean less sex and fewer pregnancies – and therefore, fewer abortions. The challenge is not how to figure out what kind of contraception would work best on 13-year-old girls. The challenge is trying to convince 13-year-old girls that they ought to busy themselves with a great many things other than sex.
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If I had a dime for every time I have said this I could probably buy my own golf coarse in Arizona.
“As long as sex is considered a recreational activity” we are going to have those kinds of statistics and I do not mean just among the youngsters. The problem is rampant through all age groups.
After seeing a few minutes of Lady Gaga on television last night, I was aghast at the crowd which seem to consist predominantly of teen girls. With this kind of role model being publicly flouted on them, what hope do they have?
Girls need to see the worth of women who do things other than parade their suggestively-attired bodies in public. The media now shows soft porn regularly to the public and it is taken as perfectly normal behaviour.
No wonder we have a problem with STDs and abortion in teens.
Let’s not forget that the majority of these girls have been gotten pregnant by boys or men significantly older than they are. If the authorities would start arresting and prosecuting these males for statutory rape/child molesting, I bet we’d start seeing a serious decline in these numbers immediately.
The marketing of this overt sexuality starts way way younger than the teen years, as far as I can tell. You should see the Hallowe’en costumes my 8 and 9 year old stepdaughters and their friends insist upon wearing. The indoctrination starts at such a young age that by the time she gets to middle or high school, the pressure to behave a certain way can be almost unbearable for all but the most self-confident young ladies. The pressure comes not only from society but from within relationships with both boyfriends and friends. It is an antifeminist as you can possibly get, and potentially quite damaging. There was a time I’d’ve said “just live and let live”, but having lived through it myself, there is NOTHING about the sexualisation of our culture that gives women freedom, or, what a joke, choices.
If I hadn’t learned of the fearsome unchecked effects of many STDs on women’s bodies in middle school, legends of woodstock, popstars of the sixties, and mores of the nineties would have had much more influence over me. However, the fear (after learning in clinical detail) of unwanted disease and the required steps to avoid it definitely held sway over me well into my 20s when I married and required my husband to have STD testing due to his previous relationship with someone more promiscuous.
Overt sexuality certainly is influential when your peers are immersed in pop culture. Any curious teen may be influenced, as no part of society is immune to defectors. Factual medical information with photos however is no more horrifying than a garden variety slasher film or plastic surgery show, and is much more likely to be remembered by teens than our usual watered down and hormone-cycle oriented sex ed.
Once I knew about herpes, urethritis, AIDS and other stds at 13, oral sex (and beyond) seemed like something that could wait quite a while until I really knew someone very well and was more or less ready to commit. I know it’s an unpopular approach, but I was curious and rebellious against my strict traditional parents, and what I learned in my enriched/unconventional “liberal” gifted school health classes worked better than any easily questioned/contradicted abstinence class on teenaged me.
Yes, I know it’s gross. But those diseases are real, and common, and there are statistics on all the harm they cause while women aren’t sure they have them due to the lack of symptoms. And most girls are secretly interested in holding onto the chance to have a baby one day, and avoiding oral sores from lying dudes. Do the math.
Friends who had the abstinence classes and hormone cycle/birth control classes at other schools did wierd experimenting sometimes with strangers at parties and other times with kids from church camp (really actually true) and ended up aborting, pregnant, and ill occasionally, sometimes with no awareness that they had had sex. Much more icky in the long run.