Boarding Schools for Girls

The British government plans to supply teenage girls with long-acting contraception injections and/or implants without their parents' permission. British girls have the highest rate of unplanned pregnancies in Europe, resulting in almost 40,000 abortions per year.

Teenagers in Great Britain have access to condoms, morning-after pills, and birth control pills in one out of every three high schools. However, an expert from the British National Institute of Health said that the main problem is that girls are getting pregnant after they forget to take their birth control pills as prescribed.

Birth control implants and injections can render a female infertile for as long as three years.

The new measure is controversial because some doctors believe that using such forms of birth control may have a detrimental effect on bone growth in young women.

Labels: teenagers, birth-control

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Research from Kings College in London found that today's British teenagers received fewer top scores in academic tests compared to teens thirty years ago. Average scores from both groups were similar, however.

Only one in twenty of today's teens got a top score in mathematical ability, compared to one in five in 1976. In abstract thinking measures, it was one in ten compared to one in four in 1976.

Professor Michael Slayer, who performed the study, had previously found that eleven-year-olds were three years behind those in 1976 in cognitive abilities.

This study appeared in the British Journal of Educational Psychology.

Labels: british_teens

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Teens who watch the most television programs with sexual content are more likely to get pregnant or to get their girlfriends pregnant, according to a study that appeared in the journal Pediatrics.

Dr. Anita Chandra, a researcher at Rand Corporation, surveyed 2000 children ages 12 to 17 old in 2001, and then contacted these children again in 2002 and 2004. About 14 percent of those in the study became teen parents, and this group watched more shows with sexual content. The researchers took into account factors such as race and parental education.

"These findings add to the growing body of evidence that what children see on screen affects their behaviors in real life," said Dr. Dmitri Christakis, a professor at the University of Washington and an expert on children's television.

Labels: pregnancy

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