Girls under the age of consent in Britain are to be supplied the morning-after pill for the first time.
Following a change in licencing decided by the European Medicines Agency, the EllaOne pill, which causes early-stage abortion, is to be made available to all females of reproductive age. Morning-after pills were previously only available to those aged 16 or over.
The move has been denounced by the Family Education Trust, which lobbied against the provision of the pill to under-16s. Specifically, it criticised the basis of the European Medicines Agency decision, a study involving just 50 girls who had received EllaOne having sought emergency contraception.
Speaking on behalf of the organisation, its director, Norman Wells said: “Quite apart from questioning whether such a small sample provides sufficient scientific basis for this conclusion, there are plenty of health and social reasons against making EllaOne available to minors. The availability of the morning-after pill is encouraging some adolescents to engage in casual sex when they might not otherwise have done so, and the supply of emergency birth control to young people is associated with an increase in sexually transmitted infections.”
Britain continues to have one of the highest rates of teenage pregnancy in Europe, with 4,648 pregnancies in girls under the age of 16 recorded last year. There were 24,306 pregnancies in under-18s, just over half of which ended in abortion.
The European move comes just months after a US study revealed that over-the-counter access to the morning-after pill does nothing to affect abortion rates and actually leads to an increased rate of sexually transmitted disease. The study, ‘Access to Emergency Contraception and its Impact on Fertility and Sexual Behaviour’, compiled by Dr Karen Mulligan of Middle Tennessee State University “that risky sexual behaviour such as engaging in unprotected sex and number of sexual encounters increases as a result of over-the-counter access to emergency birth control”.