THE leader of Scotland’s Roman Catholics has called for an urgent meeting with Malcolm Chisholm, the health minister, to demand an end to prescribing of the morning-after pill to under-16s.

Cardinal Keith O’Brien wants the Scottish executive to scrap the controversial Healthy Respect project, which offers girls as young as 13 contraceptive advice and the morning-after pill without their parents’ consent.

He will also call for sexual health agencies to “admit defeat” and to launch an education programme emphasising sexual abstinence to be piloted north of the border.

O’Brien’s public intervention is being seen as an attempt to influence ministers who are finalising plans to publish a sexual health strategy.

It signals a willingness by church hierarchy to reignite the debate over morality which has been in abeyance since Cardinal Thomas Winning’s notorious clashes with Donald Dewar, the former first minister, over the repeal of section 28.

Lothian was chosen as a test ground for the Healthy Respect project three years ago with £3m backing from the executive.

There are now plans to expand the programme across Scotland despite statistics, published last week, revealing that the number of abortions carried out on girls under 16 in the area have risen by 55%. Lothian now has the highest number of early abortions for any health board area in Scotland.

O’Brien believes that the figures prove that the “safe sex” approach, which gives teenagers greater access to contraception, has failed and he wants the Scottish executive to consider adopting an abstinence scheme based on the American True Love Waits and Silver Ring Thing campaigns.

Supporters of the abstinence approach say it has reduced the number of teenage pregnancies and sexually transmitted diseases. Members of the Silver Ring Thing, which involves youngsters buying a ring and pledging to remain celibate until they marry, will campaign in Scotland next month.

“I am writing to the health minister to ask for an urgent meeting to discuss these devastating statistics and to ask that consideration be given to a range of alternative approaches to sexual health,” said O’Brien.

“They should be based on providing young people with negotiating skills to resist peer pressure, support to enhance their self-esteem and a clear moral message that sets sexual activity within a moral context.”

O’Brien said he wants “openness and honesty in this debate and a willingness on the part of some agencies to accept defeat and admit they have failed and that the abstinence-based approach suggested by many must as a matter of urgency now be piloted in Scotland.

“I am shocked and appalled at these figures, showing, as they do, that figures for teenage abortions were the highest since abortion was legalised in 1967.

“That a total of 12,217 abortions should be carried out on women of all ages in Scotland last year, up from 11,772 the previous year, is a damning indictment of our society and of the failed approaches we currently adopt when dealing with sexual health.”

Commenting on the Healthy Respect project, he added: “I ask Malcolm Chisholm to accept the inevitable, concede that this project has utterly failed to improve sexual health in the Lothians and scrap it completely.”

Debate over the content of the executive’s strategy has been heated, with the findings of an expert panel criticised by the Catholic church as lacking a moral context.

David Davidson, the Conservative health spokesman, said: “I have some sympathy with the cardinal’s views — we really need to change the thinking. This attitude of letting young people just get on with it, and the state will pick up the tab if anything goes wrong, is not working.

“The statistics in Lothian in particular are very, very bad. The Healthy Respect programme is a failure. What we have got is a rise in the incidence of abortion, a rise in the incidence of underage girls getting pregnant and a huge rise across Scotland of sexually transmitted diseases in the young population. It would be absolute folly to go ahead and roll this programme out across Scotland.”

Times Recommends

• What makes the perfect mum?
• To keep me stress-free, no more awareness days, please
• What do lottery winners buy?