As if on cue, from my previous post, I stumbled over this article published in Infectious Diseases in Children March 2011. I wonder if the editors of Maria Talks will change any of their “scientific” information. Don’t hold your breath….
Free access to the “morning-after pill” has not reduced teenage pregnancy and may be associated with a rise in sexually transmitted infections, a study in the United Kingdom found.
Researchers at the University of Nottingham studied pediatric health data from local English authorities to measure the effectiveness of government-sponsored initiatives offering teenagers free emergency birth control (EBC) at pharmacies….
Overall, they found that areas with a pharmacy that offered free EBC saw an average 5% increase in STIs among children younger than 18 years. In children younger than 16 years, the STI rate increased by 12%. STI rates for teens and older women increased consistently during the study period, but the teenage STI rates increased faster as EBC programs were introduced.
Further, they found that EBC initiatives may even be associated with a small increase in the rate of teen pregnancies.
“There are at least two possible explanations for these null results,” the researchers said. “The first is that increased access to EBC for adolescents does, in fact, result in reductions in teenage pregnancy, but that the effects are too small for the statistical tests used to reveal them. A second explanation is that, as might be predicted by standard microeconomic theory, increased access to EBC induces at least some adolescents to increase their level of risk-taking sexual behavior and that the reduction in pregnancies from greater use of EBC is being countered by additional pregnancies resulting from this behavior change.” (emphasis in original.)