Sex – you can’t get away from it!

Following the publication of a letter in The Herald newspaper, in which the writer supported the call by a Dr Lyndsey Myskow for the ‘morning-after’ pill to be made available to schoolgirls due to the apparent failure of either gender to carry condoms (for various quoted reasons), I have sent the following to the Letters Editor. I trust that it will be published!

Dear Sir,

May I applaud the expressed sentiment of Dr Philip Gaskell when he writes (Letters, 29th Aug) “Young women having the confidence to say, ‘This is my body, I need to protect it and look after it and if you won't wear a condom, then I am not having sex with you’ would be a big step forward.”

However, I would encourage the good doctor to go even further, and encourage young women – and young men – to adopt total abstinence with regard to sexual intercourse, until they are in a settled, long-term, committed relationship.

A recent analysis from the USA (and I would hope that the even more recent political posturing over the release of Mr. Megrahi will not hinder us from accepting anything that is good and constructive from the other side of ‘the pond’) shows that abstinence education leads to fewer abortions!

The analysis, undertaken on behalf of San Antonio Coalition for Life, compared the rates of decline in the annual number of teen abortions between states that accepted federal funding for abstinence education and states which declined the funding.

The discrepancy was startling. Abortions among teens dropped by more than 20% over the 2001-05 period in the states that accepted abstinence funding, almost four times as much as the 5.2% decline in teen abortions in states that rejected abstinence education.

It seems not unreasonable to also extrapolate from this survey, that the incidence of sexually transmitted diseases would also have been reduced very considerably in those states in which abstinence is encouraged.

Perhaps we need, in this country, to stop trying to shut the stable door after the horse has bolted and, instead, teach our young people the benefits of sexual abstinence before entering into some form of committed relationship (preferably, in my opinion, marriage); and sexual fidelity within such a relationship. One’s virginity is something that can only be given once – how sad that so many, male and female, seem to throw it away at the first available opportunity, and probably regret having done so for the rest of their lives.

Yours faithfully,