Over the counter contraceptive pill for girls of 13.

When you say 'they' granbunny, do you mean the girls and the boys are dishonoured by early sexual activity?

butternut - well, there you are. different strokes...
notsogrand - yes, the girls and the boys! and, come to that, the families who don't keep them under strict supervision!

its a counsel of perfection. ideally, get married, then do marriage things. otherwise, start late and get some protection, for the good of your health !

Slightly off thread ...doing family research ...I was told that looking at marriage certificates during Victorian times was not an accurate way of judging the couples age when they married.

"Of age" could mean the groom was 14yrs old or the bride 12yrs old ...if they had their parents consent ...not over 21yrs which is what was a given for the first part of the 20th century.

Different times ...so sexual activity in early teens could have then been the norm??

I just read a bit more about this report. There has been a pilot scheme running since 2008 in Southwark, Lambeth and South London, where women over 16 have been able to get the contraceptive pill over the counter without prescription. The target group is black British, Caribbean and African women and unwanted pregnancy rates have been significantly reduced. Now there is consideration to including girls from 13 to 16.

The idea that girls/women are dishonoured by sex outside married was the norm when I was a teenager. Bit unusual to come across that view today though!

i am unusual, petallus

We humans are unusual in trying to prevent sexually mature members of the species from doing what comes naturally. The way we run our modern societies tends to mean it is not ideal for teenage people to start producing kids. With this in mind we need ways to prevent the pregnancies because the sexual activity will happen. It always has and it always will once the young human animals are capable of it and feel the urge. It is not the sexual behaviour that is unusual or essentially 'wrong' — we just haven't worked out how to deal with the consequences when we'd rather our young took longer than they do to reach sexual maturity.

The pilot scheme in Southwark and Lambeth sounds like a good idea to me.

late for work but you are right bags. we'd be physically better having babies in our mid to late teens than thirties too.

Just a thought looking at my GD she is of dual heritage white/black African,although her father was born in the Uk her grandparents come from Sierra Leone,if she where to be brought up in that culture in that country she would be of an age of where having a baby and being married where the norm.
Her body is physically mature,she is bigger than me (she is 13 btw),but she has been brought up by white cultures and British laws which are allowing her to be a child,she is not emotionally ready,dosent have much interest in the opposite sex at the moment,her thoughts are quite mature at times because her innocence was lost when my daughter died and the circumstances surrounding that she is vulnerable it is my place to protect her and help her make the right decisions,I wonder if the 13 year olds are from homes where mum was a young mum,and they are busy catching up with their missed teens to advise their children and are too matey and being one of the gang to provide clear boundaries ie going clubbing together etc.My own daughter was pregnant at 18,she was epilept

flippin laptop....was going to say Kate was epileptic and the pill clashed with her medication, we supported her but I wouldnt recomend the situation to any one...not sure which side I am now as I can see fors and against bhe original question was should be available over the counter No,under supervision from advisory centres yes,and school holidays where mentioned which is exactly when it would be needed when they are bored no money and all the time in the world perhaps the school would open one day a week,or maybe parents who are nurses, health professionals could volunteer their services going to keep pondering now as this is a subject that will be affecting me sometime in the not too distant future.

In evolutionary terms it is not so long ago that it was actually a good idea to start having kids as soon as you could, because the likelihood of your surviving past thirty was small and a huge proportion of your babies would die within a year anyway. And some more within the next four or five years too. And so on.

So the current discussion of what to do about teenage sexuality is part of our development as a more long-lived animal. My guess is that we will continue to experiment with ways to prevent early pregnancies because, as a society, we're really not keen on them nowadays. We also don't 'need' to reproduce so early any more.

Strange, isn't it, that girls seem to be maturing physically much earlier these days? When I was at school it was very unusual for a girl to start her periods before 12 or 13 (I was 14, to my disgust!) - nowadays many are under 12.

You'd think evolution would be moving things the other way because we don't need to reproduce early any more, as you say Bags.

I'm not a numbers person but I do wonder about the numbers involved eg how many 13 year olds do become pregnant / have abortions etc. And whether this is a case of the hammer and nut as it were

When Samuel Pepys married in the mid 17th century, his bride was 14.

Why would contraception be thought of as a hammer under any circumstances,
As though there is something undesirable about it, especially in regard to the young/unmarried?

It's the age with which I'm concerned Petallus Samuel Pepys lived in a different age. They married even younger in the Middle Ages and yes they have children at an early age in underdeveloped countries - with all the health issues that this brings.
In this country we seem to go at something full speed ahead without being fully conversant with the facts.
As others have said it is ILLEGAL to have underage sex. It makes a mockery of the law.
Has there been enough trialling of the effects of contrapcetive pills on young girls
What about the boys? Should they be offered vasectomies????
It takes two, I believe

The fact that something is illegal doesn't make it wrong. I'm saying that because I imagine most teenage pregnancies are the result of the sperm of teenagers as well as the eggs of teenagers. In this case, what the law says is largely irrelevant. The law is to prevent sexual child abuse by adults.

So what are the health risks associated with early pregnancies? I though that physically it was the best time to have babies.

I wonder about the health risks of long-term use of contraceptive pills. A child (and I mean child )starting to use them at 13 could still be doing so a dozen or more years later. What about contraceptive implants? These are reliable but in one case I know of, a big weight gain and mood swings were experienced. There is far more to consider than the morality of the situation.

I agree Annobel.
Bags I understand that there can be more perineum problems with an immature body but I'm happy to be proved wrong.
Boys need as much thoughtful consideration as girls but of course it's the girls who have to take the medicine - however you wish to define 'medicine' in this context.

I agree about the long-term effects too. It is worrying. Never an easy problem to solve.

Just asked DD2, who works in the field of supporting young people who come looking for help over issues such as sex. They are allowed to hand out free condoms to both boys and girls. A family planning clinic nurse comes once a week and can administer the morning after pill. The other employees (it's a charity) can escort the young person to a pharmacist to obtain it on other days. The charity also helps facilitate young people getting at other medical help they may need but struggle to access on their own.

All this may not seem like much but it's a darn sight more than was available when I was thirteen! Things are improving.

A concern I have is that many 13yr.olds may be physically mature enough to engage in sex and bear children, yet are, I feel, far from being emotionally ready. Some would be, some far from it - and it is this that I fear a blanket ruling would not address, and the consequences of not doing so, as we all know, would be far reaching.

bags, children sexually abuse other children, too. but i am with you in that preventing sexually mature beings from mating does seem unnatural.

i suppose another point to consider is that the age of consent for sexual activity varies from country to country - in spain it was 12, and may still be 12 for all i know.

when i was young i was told that in the past people became sexually mature at earlier ages because their lives would be shorter and they needed to breed early to keep the species going. my grandma's friends were 14-17. now, we have food and healthcare and girls hit puberty any time from about 9.

our view will be coloured by our socialisation, through education, media and experience.

also, isn't the age of consent about protecting property, not protecting young people? wasn't it brought in to protect the wealthy of young heiresses, who were being 'seduced' (or raped) to shame them into marriage with unsuitable men? or was that just a story put around?

i don't like the idea of children having sex. i think that's my sticking point. they're children.

In my previous post I was making the point that ideas we have today about sexual matters, childhood and so on, are arbitrary. That is why I mentioned S. Pepys marrying someone aged 14. Ideas change through time and between cultures which should tell us something about our own views today.

And I suspect that sometimes people who quote medical reasons why others should not have sex are actually objecting on moral grounds in which case they ought to say so.

Actually, I'm not at all in favour of 13 year old having sex, but on feminist grounds.

I believe some children have sexual feelings from birth - they simply learn to hide them because their parents show shock when they see them masturbating. I knew my elder sister and our boy cousin were 'experimenting' when he stayed with us - they were about 10. She told me recently that she had been madly in love with him for years and had strong sexual urges, but they were too scared to do more than kiss. She did not start to menstruate until she was 13.

What do you mean by "feminist grounds" in the case of thirteen year olds having sex (or not, as the case may be), petallus?