You heard it right!
Free sexual healthcare is being offered in Scotland for 60,000 public school students. Due to the high rates of sexually transmitted diseases and teen pregnancy, the Scottish Government has endorsed the recommendation made by the National Sexual Health Advisory Committee to provide wide scale sexual healthcare for students. This would include offering pregnancy testing, Chlamydia testing and condoms without parental consent. Up until this point, a large part of the problem was that rural students often lived too far from clinics and couldn’t effectively access sexual healthcare services. The hope is that clinics on school campuses will help to alleviate this problem and allow more students to access healthcare.
Although this seems like a step in the right direction for sexual healthcare, Emergency Contraception or the “morning after pill” still will not be provided in schools, and the types of contraception offered will be left up to individual school policy. Additionally, the Scottish Catholic Education Service will not endorse the mandate so students attending Catholic schools will not be allowed the same opportunity to access sexual healthcare as students in non-denominational public schools.
FYI: In Delaware, many wellness centers at local high schools offer pregnancy testing and STD screening, but cannot give out condoms as contraception or STD prevention.
What are your thoughts on this?
Sources:
Scotland on Sunday
Sex, Etc. magazine Winter 2009
No comments:
Post a Comment