By Xinhua
London : The government of Britain has admitted for the first time that sex education initiatives are failing to control teenage pregnancy rates.
Every year, almost 50,000 girls under the age of 18 years fall pregnant and the number who conceives is at its highest level since a multi-million-pound programme to curb teenage pregnancy was initiated almost a decade ago, Sunday Telegraph reported.
Britain therefore tops the league table of teenage mothers in western Europe, despite its record number of school-age abortions, the newspaper said quoting a report by the department of health posted on its website.
The government has invested over $300 million (150 million pounds) to stem the tide of conceptions, pledging to cut teenage pregnancy rates by half by the end of 2010.
But the performance report by the department of health confirmed that progress towards the target has been hit by “slippage”.
Contrasting the 50 percent target, the conception rate has dropped by only 11 percent since 1998. At the same time, the overall number of teenage pregnancies has gone up to more than 47,000 a year.
Britain now has the highest teenage conceive rate – six times that of the Netherlands, four times that of Italy and three times higher than in France, said the report.
Government policies aimed at dealing with the problem have allowed girls to obtain standard contraceptive and morning-after pills at school, without the consent of their parents, while new proposals will allow them to go directly to pharmacists.
In 2005, 47 percent of pregnancies among 16 to 17-year-olds were terminated, compared with 42 percent in 1998. Among younger girls, the rate rose from 53 percent to 58 percent.
The government’s admission of failure is contained in a report on National Health Service targets by Health Secretary Alan Johnson.
However, the department for children, schools and families, which has been given responsibility for the 2010 target, said that the government made “no apology for setting stretching targets” which it would continue to work to meet.