it's sex, stupid

What fun - the Daily Mail panics that "sex clinics" will open "in EVERY school so pupils as young as 11 can be tested... without parental consent." Not quite.

Pass the headline, and the screeching lede is watered down to read "sexual health clinics could soon be open in every secondary school and college." Read a little further, and you discover that a report has merely recommended extending the coverage of sexual health clinics to all secondary schools (where, incidentally, some pupils are as young as 11 but the overwhelming majority are not).

Add some third-party concerns about "permissiveness" (clutch those pearls) and unreferenced research, and we're almost done. I personally blame the photo-editorial that accompanies the story for causing confusion amongst young people - where a young woman is depicted leading her boyfriend upstairs, followed by a completely different woman reacting to a pregnancy test.

This is a pretty accurate depiction of the Mail's grasp of reproductive science, where you can get pregnant because your friends are having sex.

The sad and/or stupid thing here is that - beyond the baseline scaremongering distortion of the Mail's reporting - adequate access to sexual health services for everyone is highly desirable. The attempt to make this story about hypothetical 11 year olds on the pill is a paper-thin attempt to (once more) hijack the issue of sex, sex education and sexual health through paranoia and supposedly moral posturing.

Given that adult services have been routinely robbed of funding to make up for shortfalls elsewhere in HCT budgets, any funding to make any sexual health services more available should be supported.