British Pro-Life Group Upset Government Promoting Pro-Abortion Sex-Ed Strategy
by Steven Ertelt
LifeNews.com Editor
November 11, 2009
London, England (LifeNews.com) — A British pro-life group is upset the government of Prime Minister Gordon Brown is adopting a sexual education strategy that has resulted in more abortions. The government has accepted all the major recommendations of the latest report by the Teenage Pregnancy Independent Advisory Group.
The decision comes on the heels of the government’s own data showing that its significant financial investment in aggressive sexual education and promotion of birth control has increased, not reduced, abortions.
As the British pro-life group SPUC Pro-Life tells LifeNews.com, the new report’s major recommendations include teaching children about abortion and removing the 9 p.m. television watershed on condom promotion.
John Smeaton, director of the Society for the Protection of Unborn Children (SPUC), complained that the "report accepted by the government contains several appalling major recommendations."
"The government is trying to suppress the right of parents to be primary educators of their children, a principle enshrined in the Universal Declaration of Human Rights. The state is also attempting to make parents and schools complicit in introducing children into an adult culture of sexual activity and abortion," he said.
Smeaton also noted that the "Teenage Pregnancy Strategy is a disastrous failure which has contributed to the rise in abortions and sexually transmitted infections among young people."
He said SPUC would be "writing to schools, urging them to resist the government’s manipulation."
In a written ministerial statement today, the department for children, schools and families said that: "The Government has taken forward all the major recommendations including making sex and relationships education statutory within Personal, Social, Health and Economic Education from 2011.
The Teenage Pregnancy Independent Advisory Group report’s major recommendations include "abortion and contraceptive services should be joined up at national and local level so that the cost-benefits of contraception, particularly long-acting reversible contraception (LARC), can be set against the greater costs of terminating an unwanted pregnancy."
Recent news from Great Britain dispels the long-held myth that promoting contraception and birth control reduces the number of abortions.
According to the London Daily Mail, teen pregnancy rates in England are now higher than they were in 1995 and pregnancies among girls under 16, below the age of sexual consent, are also at the highest level since 1998.
That is despite the British government spending £300 million (that’s over $454 million for those of us in the United States) in an attempt to cut the number of teen pregnancies in half by promoting comprehensive sexual education.
The British teen abortion rate, according to the newspaper, has also climbed steadily since 1999 when the government released its Teenage Pregnancy Strategy.
Scotland has seen the same experience with the promotion of birth control only leading to an increase in abortions.
Related web sites:
Society for the Protection of Unborn Children – https://www.spuc.org.uk
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