Girls as Young as 12 Offered Morning After Pill By UK's National Health Service; Critics Say Move Encourages Casual Sex
Dozens of children—including girls as young as 12—in at least one region in Scotland have been prescribed the abortifacient morning after pill by Britain's National Health Service (NHS) over the last five years.
The Scottish newspaper The Courier made the disclosure last week, saying that the pills were distributed in Tayside, one of the 14 regions of NHS Scotland. NHS Tayside provides healthcare services in Angus, the City of Dundee and Perth and Kinross.
The morning after pill is a commonly used name for a tablet that can be taken after unprotected sex to prevent pregnancy by causing an early-stage abortion.
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Data released by NHS Tayside also showed that more than a dozen 14-year-olds and 27 15-year-olds had been given the morning-after pill by either a primary care giver or sexual health service in 2016-17, The Christian Institute reported.
Stunned by the revelation, Scottish Member of Parliament Bill Bowman said it was clear more needs to be done to prevent underage sex. He asked if it was "a great reflection on our society" that so many 12 and 13 year-olds in Tayside were being given the abortion pill.
"If there are so many people sexually active at the age of 12, let alone 10 or 11, as these figures would appear to suggest, there is indeed a lot of work to be done," Bowman said.
The reports did not cite other regions in Scotland and other parts of UK where children were also offered the morning-after pill. However, in 2015, a morning-after pill known as ellaOne was made available in pharmacies across the UK to girls under 16 for the first time.
Norman Wells, Director of the Family Education Trust, warned at the time that the move would have harmful effects on young girls.
"The availability of the morning-after pill is encouraging some adolescents to engage in casual sex when they might not otherwise have done so," he said.
He warned that giving emergency birth control pills to young girls could lead to more cases of sexually transmitted infections.
Dundee—one of the Scottish cities where the pills have been made available even to young girls—is known as the teenage pregnancy capital of Scotland.
Some 242 females aged 19 and under became pregnant in the city in 2015, according to official figures published last week.
For the second straight year, Dundee saw 51.8 births per 1,000 of its population – the highest rate in Scotland.
