Teenage pregnancies.

London--The London Daily Telegraph reveals that teenage pregnancies in England increased by 800 between 2001 and 2002, despite 15 [pounds sterling] million spent by government on strategies to reduce them. A report from the Family Education Trust (FET), an independent think-tank, claims that there is a direct link between giving young people sex education and the increase in pregnancies: explicit sex-education leaflets and free condoms simply encourage under-age girls to have sex.

Teenage pregnancy rates in Britain remain the highest in Western Europe, and one in every ten babies born in England has a teenage mother. Pregnancies among under 18-year-olds rose from 38,439 in 2001 to 39,286 in 2002. Forty-six percent of the 2001 pregnancies were aborted. There has also been a 62 percent increase in sexually-transmitted diseases (STDs) among young people 19 and under, from 25,000 cases in 1997 to 41,000 in 2002.

Anne Weyman, chief executive of the Family Planning Association (FPA), an organization which opposes motherhood and offspring, maintains that good sex and relationship education can be very effective. She also claims that abstinence education does not work, presumably because young people do not have the knowledge to protect themselves against pregnancy or sexually transmitted infections.

But Valerie Riches, the well-known British right-to-life advocate who wrote the FET report, points out that abstinence education in the U.S. has resulted in a 10 percent drop in teenage pregnancies.

The FPA, she states, sows confusion in the child's mind about right and wrong and presents only one moral absolute--the use of condoms. One FPA pamphlet actually tells young girls, "Contraceptive advice and supplies are free to everyone. It doesn't matter how old you are ... there's no right age to have sex." (Telegraph, March 14, 2004)