New figures show that more than one in five abortions in the UK (22.1 percent)  is carried out on girls under the age of 20. Dominique Jackson, writing in The Daily Mail, reckons the answer to this is more sex ed. But her conclusion is flatly contradicted by figures she quotes in her own article.

Jackson points out that back in the 1990s Britain didn’t have the sort of “youth-friendly sexual health information services, easier access to contraception and sympathetic counsellors” available in countries like Sweden and Holland.

Now it has those services but the teenage pregnancy rate remains very high. So what’s the answer? More sex education, says Jackson, starting at younger ages.

And possibly more sex ed is part of the answer, provided it is the right kind of sex ed.

But then Jackson quotes figures comparing the percentage of abortions carried out on teenagers in selected EU countries and we find that Sweden is only a couple of points behind the UK at 19.9 percent, while in Holland the percentage of abortions carried out on girls under the age of 20 is 14.4.

That is considerably behind the British figure of 22.1 percent but is still above the EU average of 12 percent.

The very lowest figure is in Greece, where only 4.1 percent of all abortions are carried out on teenage girls while in Poland the figure is 7.1 percent, in Italy it is 9.7 percent and in the Czech Republic (a very secular country) it is 9.6 percent.

Jackson, having taken the obligatory swipe at the ‘the moral right’ for objecting to sex education, then turns around and wonders whether we can learn lessons from Poland, “a still strongly Catholic country”, or from “fiercely patriarchal Greece”.

So, is the answer more sex education, or is it to become more like Poland and Greece and less like Holland and Sweden? Jackson appears to be confused.