Allison Guarino understands the controversy over new rules allowing 15-year-olds to buy the morning-after pill without a prescription. But as someone who teaches pregnancy prevention to ninth-graders in Boston, she thinks lowering the age will “help the girls who need the help the most.”
“Some girls might not have a good relationship with their parents,” she said.
On the other side of the issue are folks like Brenda Velasco Ross, who says the new rules infringe on her rights as a parent.
“It breaks my heart and saddens me and really angers me,” said Ross, stepmother of four, including 12- and 13-year-olds in Fullerton, Calif. “When I buy spray paint for a project for my daughter, I have to show my ID. It just baffles me that, with this, which has to do with pregnancy and being sexually active, I don’t have to be involved.”
The two opinions reflect some of the issues in the debate over new rules issued last week by the U.S. Food and Drug Administration, lowering the age for buying the drug without a prescription to 15 from 17 in response to a judge’s ruling that there should be no age restriction. The Obama administration said it wants to appeal theruling.
Guarino, 19, majoring in public health and political science at Boston University, said she encounters a lot of ignorance on issues related to sex and pregnancy. “I would encourage any young person to go talk to their parents or a doctor, but that’s not the reality,” she said.
Samantha Bailey-Loomis, 16, who recently founded a Students For Life chapter at her high school in Branford, Conn., opposes the concept of the morning-after pill in the same way that she opposes abortion.
“My mom had me when she was 17,” she said. “If this was available when she was young, I wouldn’t exist.”
Loomis said girls who are worried they might be pregnant should talk to their parents about it, and if they can’t, should seek help from organizations that can provide that support.
Dianne Sikel, who volunteers in a juvenile probation program in Phoenix, said dropping the age limit is “a move in the right direction.”
“These pills being available to teens are far better of an option than having a young couple being forced to become parents, for a young girl, who made a bad choice one evening, who may be forced to abort, or ultimately having to give up a child for adoption,” said Sikel.
Sophia Martin, who teaches at a high school in Northern California where many students go after being expelled from other schools, said she “can understand how upsetting it is to think your kid might … get the morning after pill without your knowledge. But to me the core reason to abolish any kind of age limit is that there are young people who are in situations in their families where they can’t turn to their parents.”
But Andrew Bay, 19, who’s finishing up his freshman year at Oklahoma State University in Stillwater, Okla., says he thinks making the morning-after pill so easily available “almost encourages even younger children to have unprotected sex.”
And Denny Pattyn, founder of Silver Ring Thing, which promotes chastity until marriage, said he worries that allowing younger teens to get the morning-after pill without a doctor or parent’s knowledge will increase the incidence of sexually transmitted diseases.
Dr. Cora Breuner of the American Academy of Pediatrics said headlines about the age limit have prompted some families to broach the topic of safe sex.
“I know this in my own practice, there are a lot more conversations between parents and their children about this decision,” said Breuner, an adolescent health specialist at Seattle Children’s Hospital. “This will prompt a conversation nationally that can help at so many levels.”
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