Why we're supporting the pro-choice demo 9th July

EFC is happy to promote the Pro-Choice demo happening next Saturday (9th July 2011) in London, to its friends and followers. This blog gives a bit more information on why we think this action is so relevant and important. To register your attendance visit the Facebook page and follow @ProChoice9July #prochoicedemo2011 for up to date information.


Recent months have seen a number of worrying intrusions into our reproductive rights in this country. Including:
• Nadine Dorries’ and Frank Field’s ‘Right to Know’ campaign which posits abortion providers as having a ‘vested interest’ in persuading women to end their pregnancies, and argues for ‘independent’ centres to provide pre-abortion counselling. EFC believes these amendments are based on a false premise – that women aren’t currently getting impartial, evidence-based support with their pregnancies.  Our research into crisis pregnancy centres in England also suggests that a great deal of ‘independent’ centres do not provide impartial accurate information but rather, are driven by an anti-abortion agenda. Read a thorough debunking of this campaign by Darinka from Abortion Rights here.
• Anti-abortion charity Life invited to sit on the government’s Sexual Health Forum.  LIFE is a well funded charity with a large profile and has every right to promote its anti-abortion position. However, as a lobbying group with no commitment to evidence-based clinical practice, or to promoting and providing good quality contraceptive and reproductive health care, it simply has no place on this group, which otherwise consists of sexual health experts, clinicians and service providers.
• Michael Gove commends the new SRE council of abstinence education groups. LIFE and Care (a Christian organisation which opposes abortion) join 5 other abstinence/anti-choice groups on the new SRE council which has been welcomed by the education minister. See our blog for more information on these groups and more information on why abstinence doesn’t work.
• Nadine Dorries’ abstinence education for girls. Worryingly, Tory MP Dorries’ misguided bill to teach girls abstinence passed the first stage vote in parliament. Another reason to keep on our toes and make the case for evidence-based comprehensive sex education.


EFC supports the rights of young people to accurate information and good quality, evidence-based information on abortion; and their right to impartial support with pregnancy decision-making. We believe that current developments will impact most on young people by depriving them of essential information and diverting them away from health professionals who could give them the support they need to access services quickly.


Those of us who believe women should have access to safe, legal abortion and they and their partners and families access to evidence-based information on contraception, pregnancy and abortion need to stand up for these rights before they are eroded.


Join EFC on the demo to make a stand for the pro-choice majority and for young people in this country.

Who are the new SRE Council?

Last month Care (Christian Action Research and Education) issued a press release to announce the launch of a new SRE council which has received support from Education Secretary Michael Gove. The release states that the council ‘has been formed to promote the best possible sex and relationship education both at home and at school, recognising the particular importance of enhancing the role played by parents in SRE.’ This blog takes a closer look at the groups involved and what their vision of ‘the best possible SRE’ might look like.

Lovewise
‘Lovewise is a charity which seeks to help schools and youth groups by providing presentations on the subjects of marriage, sex and relationships from a Christian perspective’.

Lovewise’s charitable objectives are to ‘advance the Christian faith...particularly (but not exclusively) the Biblical teaching on human sexuality, marriage and the complementary callings of man and woman’. A glance at their sample presentations for schools shows a shocking disregard for facts (for example claims that abortion causes infertility and breast cancer).

Evaluate
Evaluate ‘supports (young people) in delaying sexual experience until a long-term committed exclusive relationship’

Evaluate is an education programme run by Care, in connection with partner organisation Care Confidential (a network of independent pregnancy advice centres). Care’s charitable object is: ‘The advancement and propagation of the Christian gospel and in particular Christian teaching as it bears on or affects national and individual morality and ethics’. Care advocates for ‘an educated Christian view of life from its beginning at conception to its natural end’.

Challenge Team UK
‘The Challenge Team UK presents its message from a common sense and health perspective, without any religious references.’ That message is, ‘Saving sex for marriage is a positive, realistic and healthy lifestyle.’

Although Challenge Team rejects the term ‘abstinence’ for the work they do, they ‘promote(s) healthy sexuality by...suggesting that teens 'save sex for marriage' in order to stay healthy now and enjoy marriage later’. They claim that although ‘all of those involved in the Challenge Team so far have Christian beliefs’and that ‘The Challenge Team Trust Deed has a Christian basis’ none of the materials mention religion.

In line with many of the other organisations in this group Challenge Team take a dim view of current SRE practices: ‘By giving information about condoms and showing teens how to use them, adults who are the authority figures in teens' lives may be giving them, unintentionally, permission to have sex’.

Life
‘The most important and influential part of LIFE's ethos is our opposition to all abortion on principle.’

Life, which has also recently joined the government’s sexual health forum describes itself as non-religious. It advocates for ‘Our young people (to be) given a true sense of their self worth and a full appreciation of the importance of loving, stable and faithful relationships and has spoken out against contraception education and current SRE practices. This article evidences Life’s false claim that the morning after pill is an abortifacient.

Silver Ring Thing
‘There is only one true "Safe Sex" message and that must be the message of abstinence until marriage. Through this programme teens are able to understand that abstinence until marriage is not only God's plan for their lives, but also the best and only way to avoid the harmful physical and emotional effects of premarital sex.’

The UK’s Silver Ring Thing is an import from the U.S which teaches abstinence to young people who are encouraged to wear a silver ring as a symbol of their pledge to abstain from having sex until marriage. The website claims that: ‘the only way to reverse the moral decay of any youth culture is to inspire a change in the conduct and behaviour from those within the culture’ – youth volunteers are used to achieve this aim.

Family Education Trust
‘Sex education is an ideological battlefield on which a war is being waged for the hearts and minds of children. Behind the innocuous-sounding words used by the sex education lobby, there is a definite agenda at work to undermine the role of parents and to tear down traditional moral standards. The need for parents to be alert and vigilant has never been greater’.

The Family Education Trust produce literature campaigning against ‘modern’ methods of SRE arguing for a ‘clear moral framework that shows a proper respect for parents and for marriage.’ Lisa from EFC has blogged about one of their pamphlets aimed at young people here.

Right to Life
‘Right to Life is a political lobby group defending the right to life from conception to natural death’

This campaign group’s charitable aims include:
• Advancing the public’s education with a view to recognising the sanctity of human life from conception to natural death
• Provid(ing) relief...to young girls, in need of assistance and protection who may be under pressure to have an abortion.

Their educational worksheet on abortion can be seen here.

Some of these groups use the term ‘abstinence’ outright, some don’t. Many of them are anti-choice. Some use misinformation and false statistics. Many make statements which ostracise lesbian, gay and bisexual young people, or those who have/are single parents or are from 'non-traditional' families. But what they all share is a commitment to fighting any kind of ‘comprehensive’ SRE programme in which young people are given factual information about their rights and responsibilities and information on how to practice safer sex alongside advice on delaying sex until they are ready. The heavy push these groups make for heterosexual (often assumed to be Christian) marriage being the only valid context for sex is arguably offensive, and at best irrelevant to the lives of many young people in this country.

Consent - YES PLEASE!

In the lead up to the election, and since, there has been discussion about the role of consent in teenage sexual behaviour and sexual health outcomes. A recent research report was published suggesting a strong association between sexual coercion and teenage pregnancy. Meanwhile the Government seems committed to addressing consent issues:

'To help stop sexual violence before it occurs, we will ensure that the school curriculum includes teaching young people about sexual consent' – Conservative party election manifesto 2010

'...working with schools to teach young people about sexual consent and respect in relationships' – Theresa May at Womens Aid conference in 2010.

I welcome any educational initiatives that reinforce mutual respect and consent as the basis of sexual relationships. However, in case anyone thinks it is an opportunity to promote conservative messages about adolescent sexuality I would sound a cautionary note. Convenient as it would be to believe that sex amongst teenagers was just happening because of peer pressure, coercion and at worst violence, the fact is it isn’t. Sex is happening because it’s natural, it feels good physically and emotionally, because it is fun, because it is exciting and adventurous, because young people fall in love and for a whole load of other positive reasons as well as all the scary negative stuff. It is important that we acknowledge that as our starting point.

It is also vital that we consider what consent means in its broadest sense and once we have defined consent, what the implications of that are for educators and service providers.

We can probably take it for granted that everyone agrees both parties should ‘consent’ to sex, but I bet we’d find a very wide range of views of what constitutes consent amongst both policy makers, lawyers and sexually active people of all ages.

I think that these two things are essential pre-requisites of consent:

i) An absence of coercion: the real possibility of saying no if you want to, or saying yes to some things/activities and no to others, or yes now and no later...

ii) The capacity, education and skills to make an informed choice: to understand the risks (physical, emotional) that you are taking, to be able to predict a range of positive and negative outcomes and to be able to balance these and make a choice

Here are just some of the things that need to be in place in order to meet those pre-requisites so that consent is the norm in sexual relations amongst people of all ages:

• An understanding that coercion is a spectrum of behaviour from persuasion to persistence, to incentives to insistence, to threats, to force and even more shades of behaviour in between and that true informed consent is not possible in any of these scenarios

• An opportunity to explore the association between gender, age, wealth, power and sexual coercion

• An ability to recognise and decipher information presented on the internet and in the mainstream media in order to understand and critically evaluate messages, conventions and representations of sexual relationships

• An opportunity to consider the role of pornography in influencing people’s expectations of their own and their sexual partners desire, physique and performance

• A full understanding of all the possible consequences of having sex including the risks of contracting STIs with all the immediate and long-term health implications

• A full understanding of the risk of pregnancy, a consideration of all the decisions that can lead to and result from an unintended pregnancy and an understanding of all pregnancy options

• A full understanding of the positive reasons that people have sex, including the emotional and physical pleasure it can bring

• A full understanding of the range of sexualities and sexual preferences that exist and understanding that people of different sexualities have the same right to personal safety and bodily integrity

• An understanding that the onus is on the coercer to listen to and hear their partner and not just on the coercee to be assertive and confident enough to keep saying no

There’s a lot more, but this would be a start. Even with this brief list it looks pretty much like a comprehensive sex and relationships curriculum!

I am glad the Government is looking at consent issues. I hope they’ve learned the lessons of the past and they know that it’s not enough to teach us ‘just say no’.