MPs issue warning on pregnancy policies

Sexual health services are not meeting the needs of young people
despite the government’s Teenage Pregnancy Strategy, the
Commons Health Select Committee has warned.

The cross-party committee of MPs in a report on sexual health
warns that young people are “being failed by an education which
persistently delivers too little, too late,” and places a mistaken
emphasis on sex at the expense of young people’s wider
concerns about relationships. The committee recommends that sex and
relationship education is made a statutory part of the national
curriculum.

Although it recommends against promoting sexual abstinence to
young people, the committee found that many young people who have
not had sex believed they were in the minority and a significant
proportion regretted their first sexual experience.

Young people would benefit from more support in resisting
external pressures to have sex which is why sex education should
take place in a framework of relationship education, says the
committee.

It also recommends that school students should be able to access
through the internet high quality information on sexual health.