Alpha Mummy: Parents have more sway than they think

Schoolgirls will be able to request the morning-after pill by text message to their school nurse as part of a scheme being introduced this year.

Six schools in Oxfordshire are to take part in the project after a rise in the number of teenage pregnancies in the county.

Any girl at four schools in Oxford and two in Banbury will be given the opportunity to ask for emergency contraception if they have had unprotected sex or their contraception has failed. Parents will not automatically be informed of any request.

Child protection staff will step in if any girl aged between 11 and 13 uses the service.

Family and religious groups expressed concerns about the scheme. They also questioned the absence of a limit to the number of times schoolgirls can use the service.

The text message service will be introduced in July by Oxfordshire County Council and the Oxfordshire Primary Care Trust, which have refused to name the schools involved.

The service will focus on contact with pupils outside school hours. It will also operate on weekends and holidays, when a nurse will arrange to meet the child to give her the pill.

Hilary Pannack, chief executive of the teenage pregnancy charity Straight Talking, welcomed the move. She said: “I think it’s an excellent idea. But there needs to be more in place — there needs to be good quality sex and relationship education as well.

“Some girls won’t want to talk to people face to face, and the process of getting the emergency contraceptive pill should be made easy for them. It’s not going to cause promiscuity. If it means them not going through the trauma of abortion, then it’s valuable.”

In a joint statement, Oxfordshire County Council and Oxfordshire PCT said: “This service would provide an extra level of support for those young people who think they have taken a risk, or have another health problem, and don’t want to approach a doctor or a pharmacist but can text a nurse and ask what they can do.”

The service is intended to be used outside school hours and would not lead to contraceptives being distributed in the school. A council spokesman added: “It is not that the schools involved have high conception rates but rather that they sit in wards that have been shown to have persistently high teenage conception rates.”

Norman Wells, director of the Family Education Trust, said that the PCT was “sadly mistaken” in its belief that the service would reduce the teenage pregnancy rate. “International research evidence shows that making the morning-after pill more readily available doesn’t make the slightest difference to unintended pregnancy and abortion rates,” he said. “In fact, there is evidence that making the morning-after pill available to under-age girls in strict confidence may be making matters worse by encouraging some girls to become sexually active when they might not otherwise have done so.”

Andrew Lansley, the Conservatives’ health spokesman, said that the plans risked undermining the message that the morning-after pill should be used only for emergencies, not routinely.

Andrew Fergusson, of the Christian Medical Fellowship, said that he was concerned about self-diagnosis. “I would also not want to see the necessary relationship of trust between health professionals and vulnerable young people harmed by this otherwise well-intended proposal,” he said.

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