We’ll never end our teenage pregnancy epidemic until we admit what’s REALLY causing it
Sex ed programs aren’t working. The solution: keep having them!
By Professor Brenda Almond
After 13 years in power, a sense of chronic disappointment hangs over the Labour administration.
Yesterday, another of the Government’s shameful failures was exposed: the bankruptcy of its policy to tackle Britain’s awful record as western Europe’s teenage pregnancy capital.
With typical fanfare, Tony Blair announced in 1999 that his government had set a target to slash in half the number of teen pregnancies by 2012.
But new figures released yesterday exposed Labour’s disastrous lack of success in meeting this goal.
A staggering 40,000 — or 40 per 1,000 — under-18s still fall pregnant in Britain each year, a pitiful improvement on 1998, when the figure was 46.6 per 1,000.
What makes these statistics most depressing, however, is the staggering amount of energy and taxpayers’ money that ministers have squandered on their teenage pregnancy programme.
More than £280million has been spent on contraception and sex education — and this has barely made a dent in the problem.
But instead of accepting its mistake and trying a different approach, the Government continues to cling to its discredited strategy of dishing out sex advice, pills and condoms.
Albert Einstein once said that the definition of insanity was ‘doing the same thing, over and over again, and expecting different results’.
They are words that could now be applied to Labour’s current sex education policy.
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Betsy, I disagree with you, I don’t think that more sex education is the solution.