Over the counter contraceptive pill for girls of 13.

I was on the pill at 36+, because my ex was too chicken to have the snip!

Too old for the pill at 36? . I've never heard of that before - I certainly hope it isn't a new 'guideline' or my own DD is not going to be happy in a couple of years time.....

I am sorry to go slightly off post but I have just heard my niece is having to go to hospital for an operation. She is 42 and has had problems such as endymetriosis(sorry if spelt wrongly) and she had a coil fitted. It has moved and lodged itself into her bowel.

I told my daughter and I asked her to think very carefully about hers and she told me that it was that or practically nothing as her doctors have refused to give her the pill as she is classed as too old, she is only 36 years old and I am quite shocked.

Have any of you older daughters on the pill please?. Is 36 too old?

As for young girls there are so many scenarios, some of which we would find very hard to accept, that does call for each girl to be assessed individually and onlY a doctor should prescribe the pill. Maybe there could be clinics in town centres that could give advice and help with parental contact etc. These girls need some sort of help away from the closeness of home perhaps but I do know you will not stop them if their mind is made up.

I also worry about the effects of fooling the body that it is pregnant for month after month with the subsequent let down of that not being the case. The natural course of events is not allowed to continue. Surely this must have an effect both physically and possibly psychologically. Has there been a study on this or do the drug companies have a vested interest? I'm just glad that when I was a teenager I could say "no" because I didn't want to risk getting pregnant. No emotional blackmail for me!

Nature is maturing girls younger (I was 16) age consent 16 now. So law out of line with nature. Mother of a King in Welsh castle was 14 way back. More worries me is pressure (as happened when pill introduced) no longer to say 'No'. Is penetrative sex the most satisfying for females? In my day we were too busy having a childhood/youth and it never crossed my mind. Aren't they missing out on other things? What is the rush? I never took the pill now many women take it for years, will this have a long term effect? Then they don't work unless taken properly or if anti-biotics taken. Surely there is life without sex though you wouldn't think so with much of the media.

My own view is that nature has a natural ratio. Most in a pre-industrial village would be adults. a few elderly, a few babies, the rest all the ages in between. Most 'teenagers' would be mostly in the company of the full range of ages and learn from their elders. Nowadays ages are segregated, from baby nurseries to nursing homes. This means children are mostly in the company of loads of other children so learn less from adults. ie when there were apprenticeships 14-21 a young person would be out of the company of peer group and in an adult world surrounded by more experienced people at that vulnerable 'teenage' stage.

Finally I think all children should have a 'pension' enough for them to be brought up. Having a child young should not result in poverty (in my day adoption) and far preferrable to have that choice and maybe avoid IVF when a lot older. Surely we should embrace nature and not try to control her.

Bags - when I said I didn't think it was a good idea for young women to have sex on feminist grounds, I meant as opposed to religious or moralistic ones.

Most societies, even our own relatively liberal one, fear and try to control female sexuality. Heavy penalties can be imposed on women who trangress a society's rules in this area. They can be shamed, shunned and branded and it wasn't that long ago that women were incarcerated in mental institutions for 'moral insanity' in this country.

On a more personal level, boys and men often have a 'dirty' attitude to sex which they project on to women, feeling it is alright for them to be promiscuous but despising the women they have casual sex with. The good old double standard.

So because of all of this I feel it is safer for young women to be cautious when considering whether or not to have sex.

This doesn't mean I would withhold contraception from those who decided to go ahead though.

greatnan, i too, think children have sexual feelings from birth. i distinctly remember fancying adult men, and having designs on them, as a small child. but i'm pretty sure we protect children against themselves for good reasons

The worry is that it has been shown that the pill isn't the best contraceptive for young teens. They do not follow the instructions, forget to take it for days on end, but still feel "protected" and take risks. And it doesn't protect them from sexually transmited diseases. Not the best move, to make it freely available, but other ways of preventing early pregnancy and young teens having sex are time consuming, expensive, and involve education, parental responsability, a caring society. We are short changing our young people.

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

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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

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 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.

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.

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

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?

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

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

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.

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.

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.