UK Teen Pregnancies

On the ninth February Alfie Patten became one of Britain’s youngest fathers at the age of thirteen.   Alfie’s father, Dennis Patten has defended his son saying “He could have shrugged his shoulders and sat at home on his Playstation. But he has been at the hospital every day,” but admitted that his son was too young to fully understand the responsibilities of having a child.

Obviously this has sparked a debate in the UK, with the former Tory leader Iain Duncan Smith claiming “it exemplifies the point we have been making about broken Britain.” No, it exemplifies the point that most British schools provide inadequate sex education. Currently sex education is not compulsory in England and Wales. Most schools provide lessons on the reproductive system and puberty, not all of them provide information on contraception and parents have the right to stop their children from attending these lessons. It should come as no surprise that Britain has one of the highest teen pregnancy rates in Europe.  

Recent research has shown that teenage girls who often watch programmes with sexual content in them are twice as likely to become pregnant. Not surprising really, if young girls don’t understand sex properly they will naturally be curious. So should we stop young girls from watching programmes such as Gossip Girl or Sex and the City? Of course not, that would be like wearing a coat after standing naked in the rain for an hour. Sex is all around us. Go to your local newsagents and you will see that every tabloid front page will have an article on sex in some way. Some say to protect our precious children we should censor these. For arguments sake let’s say okay, so that’s censored, now what’s next? Newspapers and news broadcasts in general will often have items on rape and teen pregnancies, should we censor these too? And what if you go to the zoo or a park and see animal having S.E.X? And yet if you censored all of these things, it would be a waste of time; it is human instinct to have sexual intercourse. If a young boy and young girl ever developed a crush on each other it is entirely possible that they would have sex because of this instinct. The only reason any of us are here today is because our parents had sex.

And so if we cannot hide our children from the realities of sex, what should we do? Ignore it? Let them find out for themselves? It’s this attitude that has led to Britain having the highest pregnancy rate in Western Europe. So what can be done about it? Firstly, I think we need compulsory sex education that deals with at least puberty, sexual intercourse, contraception, sexual health and abortions. Secondly, there needs to be less of a taboo about talking openly about sex. Thirdly, we need to remember there will always be some teen pregnancies but by teaching sex education and discussing it openly, then at least the numbers of accidental teen pregnancies should go down.