Free morning-after pill fails to cut young pregnancies

London: The drive to give free morning-after pills to teenage girls has failed to cut underage pregnancies.

Schemes to offer over-the-counter emergency birth control to girls under 16 have simply encouraged youngsters to have more unprotected sex, damning research found.

In doing so they have fuelled a rise in sexually transmitted diseases.

The findings are a blow to public health chiefs who have argued that handing out the morning-after pill cuts schoolgirl pregnancies.

Family campaigners seized on the research as more evidence that the problem of teenage pregnancies needs a moral solution and not one based on dishing out drugs.

Strategy

Britain has the highest rate of teenage pregnancy in Western Europe. In 2008, the last year for which figures are available, more than 7,500 girls in England and Wales became pregnant. The scheme to give free emergency contraception to teenagers — including girls under 16 — in pharmacies was a key part of the last government's Teenage Pregnancy Strategy.

But the research from Nottingham University's business school shows the policy has failed.

Economists Professor David Paton and Professor Sourafel Girma compared pregnancy rates and levels of sexually transmitted infections in more than 140 local authorities across England between 1998 and 2004. Some of the authorities did not offer free over-the-counter morning after pills to teenagers, while others introduced the scheme part way through the study period.

Pregnancy rates among girls under-16 were the same whether or not they had access to free morning after pills, the researchers found.