AS a mother of a teenage girl at St Gregory’s, I feel compelled to put my view across about the new emergency text contraception scheme, reported in Monday’s Oxford Mail.
Contraceptive advice needs to be inclusive for all teenagers. There should be no barriers to sex education and contraception based on religious ethics.
While I agree with Father Daniel that the Catholic Church must teach its ethics of sex within a loving relationship, I think he is rather out of step with the reality of our teenagers’ lives.
Teenagers today are constantly bombarded with images from our sexualised world, and are put under pressure from their peers to have sex at a younger and younger age.
Although I completely agree they must be taught the value of sex in a loving relationship, they also need to be given the facts on STDs, pregnancy and contraception – and they need to have full and indiscriminate access to all forms of contraception. Having grown up in a strict Christian family where sex and contraception were not talked about, I was naive about the facts of contraception and also had little access to it.
As a result I became pregnant at 16.
I sincerely hope that our society can make some progressive leaps forward and congratulate schemes like this, which are determined to approach teenage pregnancy in a sensible educated way.
NAME AND ADDRESS SUPPLIED
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