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Sex education, teenage pregnancy and the abortion debate

By Lyn Allison - posted Thursday, 9 December 2004


The Netherlands, in particular, has reduced its teenage birth rate to the lowest in Europe and has just 3.9 teenagers in every 1,000 seeking abortion. Norway has lifted the average age of first intercourse, and it did this by being open about sex and contraception, having good sex education and providing sexual health services to teenagers through youth health centres.

In Australia we need to look very carefully at this area. Australian governments have not implemented comprehensive sexual health education programs to teach young people how to have rewarding sexual relationships or to protect themselves from potentially adverse consequences. Arming students with information about health, sexual health and contraception has been demonstrated to be the most reliable way to ensure that young people make responsible and safe choices. I think some people fear that if we open this debate in schools and we start talking about it that that will encourage sexual activity. The evidence around the world is that the opposite is the case.

Current state and territory government approaches are demonstrably patchy and inadequate for the task of reducing unwanted teenage pregnancies and preventing sexually transmitted infections. Some Australian schools, I admit, run very sophisticated and very good sexual health programs for all their students, others provide only optional subjects and not all states cover the same issues. What we need is national leadership on sex education in schools.

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Recently the Parliament debated legislation where the federal government sets conditions on schools to do with civics education and running Australian flags up flagpoles. I would like to see those conditions extended to sexual health education. But of course any sex education would need to involve a comprehensive evidence based approach that focused on prevention. It would be a mistake to go down the path of the “just say no” approach. It does not work anywhere, it never did work in this country and it is not going to work in the future.

I urge the government to learn from the work that has been done in other countries on reproductive health. There are many ways in which we can improve reproductive health services to all women. Since January this year emergency contraception has been available to women, but how many women, teenagers and others, know that it is available? We do not know, because there is no program to make sure that people understand it is available. Some pharmacies provide emergency contraception and others do not. We do not even know what percentage of pharmacies are participating or how often this service is used. These sorts of statistics are critical for us to collect in order to know what makes a difference. In the United States, emergency contraception, as far as I know, is still not available. The President of the Planned Parenthood Federation of America argued, “This is a safe drug that could prevent more than a million and a half unintended pregnancies a year and reduce the number of abortions by about 800,000 if it were widely used”.

It is quite clear that there are many ways in which we can reduce the current level of abortions in this country and we ought to do that using the best evidence available, looking carefully at the needs of women and taking a national approach to this problem.

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About the Author

Lyn Allison is a patron of the Peace Organisation of Australia and was leader of the Australian Democrats from 2004 to 2008.

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