Thomas More Institute

School nurses have given [contraceptive] implants or jabs to girls aged between 13 and 16 more than 900 times in the past two years, a survey by The Daily Telegraph has found…

A further 7,400 girls aged 15 and under have been given contraceptive injections or implants at family planning clinics…

Under the patient confidentiality rules, nurses are banned from seeking the permission of parents beforehand, or even informing them afterwards, without the pupil’s permission. – The Daily Telegraph, 29 October 2012

It is regrettable in the extreme that publicly run and funded bodies should act in such a manner for many reasons, among them the following:

1.      that a presumption exists of sexual activity among underage girls widespread enough for such measures to be likely to have a meaningful impact;

2.      that they undermine the very notion of an ‘age of consent’, which, while far from perfect, is in fact one of the least invasive and most practical means of recognition in law of manifest differences between sex among adults and that involving children;

3.      that they further distance active sexual life from marriage by effectively accommodating it for persons under the age at which legal marriage is possible, thereby weakening the stability of relationships;

4.      that, by banning communication with parents whose daughters are to receive contraceptive jabs or implants, these measures weaken the very structures most likely to prevent sexual abuse of minors;

5.      that the natural responsibility of parents in all pertaining to their children, and in the most intimate matters of sex, is thereby comprehensively undermined;

6.      that by separating sex from procreation at an early age such implants and injections allow sex to be presented, in the words of Anthony Selden, Master of Wellington College, as ‘an ordinary, everyday thing like going to have a McDonald’s’.