Ann Furedi, Chief Executive of the British Pregnancy Advisory Service (BPAS), the UK’s largest independent abortion provider, wants to make the purchase of the morning after pill by underage girls as normal as buying tampons. In fact she would rather the law did not apply in this area at all.
Furedi told the Today programme on Wednesday morning we should have a law free zone! As usual she was given a free run, barely challenged by the utterly pathetic questioning of Sarah Montague.
The morning after pill is already available to underage girls who have engaged in illegal sexual activity as long as she attends her GP and secures a prescription. It is also available from pharmacies.
But this is not good enough for Ms Furedi. She wants the morning after pill off the shelf like condoms or tampons with ‘no stigma attached’.
Furedi is not happy that teenagers will be ‘interrogated’ by pharmacists. But they are not being interrogated. As these minor children are accessing this drug without parental consent pharmacists must ask them some questions to ascertain that they are ‘Gillick competent.’ This is a legal requirement not just some whim. Gillick competency is a very bad law, nonsensical and an incredibly easy test to pass, but as ever, this is insufficient for the ultra-liberal Furedi.
What takes me back is always the language employed by the likes of Ann Furedi, ever the master on radio.
Everyone is a ‘young person’, not a frightened 13-year-old girl. She would even have us believe that children under the age of 16 are ‘mature and responsible.’
Lucky Ann, whose life is full of teenagers that never make rash decisions and have very little concept of risk. Hell, you cannot drive until you are 17 in the UK or drink until you are 21 in the US but in Ann’s world all these young girls are responsible and mature.
Underage sexual activity should be stigmatised as it is already illegal. Not that the age of consent is ever enforced. The authorities are more than happy for the girls of Rotherham to be raped and abused by gangs of Muslim men ‘because they were consenting.’
We know that the provision of contraception to underage girls added to the impression that these girls were ‘consenting to sex’ and thus facilitated their abuse. The review explicitly stated this. Off the shelf provision of the morning after pill would only add to this impression and put young girls, some as young as 12, in even greater danger. It is grossly irresponsible.
If a young girl does not even have to have a discussion with a GP or a pharmacist we are denying her an opportunity for any suspected abuse to be detected.
In addition, this easy provision of the morning after pill will place even more pressure on underage girls to engage in illegal sexual intercourse. It also increases the rates of sexually transmitted diseases as reported by The Sunday Times:
“An official scheme to give the morning-after pill free to teenagers at chemists has backfired by increasing the rates of sexually transmitted diseases and failing to reduce the number of under-age pregnancies. New research shows the Department of Health’s policy of handing out emergency contraception to under-16s encourages them to indulge in riskier sex lives.”
The morning after pill acts as an abortifacient as well as contraception. To equate it to tampons is garbage. A pubescent teenage girl’s fertility and menstruation are natural developments, hence the need for tampons.
Engaging in criminal underage sex which is emotionally and physically damaging and then taking a powerful drug that prevents a fertilised egg from implanting or brings on early menstruation is not natural.
In this debased moral culture this distinction seems lost on everyone.
