Shall we debate upon *Geraldine's* comment.......

I see. Thank you. I thought it would be something like that.

Baggy, because she is 19 and still a student and needs to be able to complete her course. We are, and have always been, very close, owing to family circumstances which I won't go into at the moment.

It wasn't a friend of Geraldine. She is a journo and she interviewed the doctor.

Why not yet? Just asking. I don't want to be nosey but the thought just flew through my mind: why does it matter to you when your grandchildren have children?

Just had a thought. If my son's then girlfriend had used the m.a.p. after the condom allegedly split, I wouldn't now have my beautiful and loving senior GD. But I'd still advise her to go for it. I don't doubt that I will have GGC some day but not yet, please!

As so often happens (though less often on gransnet than many other places) we have polarisation whilst important details are overlooked.
I have been a prescriber of the m.a.p.
There are 2 main reasons for keeping its prescription to medical & similarly trained prescribers. One is the "health education" reason already mentioned. The other is that there are some situations and some women with conditions who should not take it, or not in the easily available format.

I am interested in Geraldine's doctor friend:
Although not completely unethical, it is considered best practice not to prescribe for one's family & close friends.
In this version he is telling his daughters that they can take strong medication without a proper medical history being taken - that IS unethical.
Have they told him everything about drugs they take & symptoms they have?
In some ways he is being quite controlling because he is telling them they don't need to get help & advice from properly trained professionals like anyone else, but to take the medication he puts there for them.

I made sure that my children knew how to access emergency contraception & sexual health advice. I told them that even if they knew the nurse on duty as a friend of mine, I would not be told anything confidential.
I thought their sex lives were their own business, my job to give them information.

Right o. Fine by me.

I have been reading it jangly, without following it, if you see what I mean. I just thought I'd return to the original subject. [tongue sticky out emoticon]

I think people made up the notion of a soul to console themselves. Life nasty brutish and short for many. And to convince themselves that they weren't really going to die. Kept the masses quiet for centuries.
I have moments when I think people ought to have to have a licence to breed... rather than a right to have kids and then not look after them properly.

I don't think you've been reading the latter part of the thread absent.

And I don't blame you one little bit!

jangly I think we share something like 98% of our DNA with fruit flies so not too confident about higher than animals. I don't know anything about angels' DNA. Either way, I can't see a cluster of undifferentiated cells as anything other than, well, a cluster of undifferentiated cells.

Baggy's

Baggy, I've got a flipping jobs list!!!

I'll do it too.

Yeah!

Put them together like a jigsaw to make a sentence.

I know a happy sheep when I see one.

I rest my flipping case.

and why are you putting odd words on the end of threads?

Baggy - picture a sheep, gazing at a view. thought cloud coming out of its head. saying "oh, that's lovely".

Doesn't work, does it?

celery

potato

Well, I don't feel 'higher' than other animals. Different, certainly (but also very similar any many many ways) but not higher because that implies better, and we're not.

I agree with Geraldine's doctor's opinion. A prevented pregnancy is better than a late abortion. Education is the key, as usual.

It is better than a later abortion. But I'm sure you would want to have a chat with your daughter as well.

Poor old Geraldine!

See, I did tell you off. sigh....

Baggy - about souls. I'm pretty sure that when we die we go back to the nothingness that we seem to have come from.

But, when I'm. say, in the countryside or on a high mountain, I can't help feeling we are a higher than the animals and a little lower than the angels. So doubt will always be there.

I wonder if there are some people for whom the morning-after pill could have side effects that might be serious. Obtaining the pill from a pharmacist, school nurse, general practitioner or some other professional source would be more likely to protect a susceptible person. Also, if freely available in the bathroom cabinet, how tempting would it be to take an extra pill, just to be "on the safe side"? A supply of condoms in the bathroom cabinet, accessible to sons and daughters, might be a much better idea.

The mystery to me is that as a nation we spend more now than ever on free contraceptive services, on the teenage pregancy advice service, health visiting , school nursing, GPs, social work and health education and an enormous range of support functions and still we have a problem with what to do about unwanted pregnancies.

My good friend has been a senior school teacher for 40 years teaching and she tells me that young people are turned off by the health education that they get and are bent on exploration for themselves - no different to our day then excpet that then you got banged up in a mother and baby home miles from home, your education terminated, blacklisted form a number of jobs, told you were shop soiled goods and no-one would ever marry you, ignored by the midwives during labour and when you hamemorraged after giving birth and bludgeoned into an adoption you didnt want.You then spend years in therapy and on antidepressants.

ooops I'm raving again - this touches a nerve!