UK: sterilise teenage girls at least for a bit.

UK: Fay Weldon wrote an over the top piece lamenting the fact the UK teen pregnancy rate and generous benefit packages are contributing to this unhealthy rise. So her solution was to steralize the teens until they are 17 or at least change up the welfare state so its not easy to girl to have babies and get on the dole.

"Watch young mothers slap their troublesome offspring in the supermarket and see what I mean. Because you wanted a baby does not mean you wanted a child - with its separate, possibly difficult personality. So the children of teenage mothers can suffer, too. Not having babies takes intelligence, planning, prudence and boring appointments with doctors. The morning-after pill helps, but still means an inquisition from your friendly (or not-so-friendly) neighbourhood pharmacist. So what do we do? Deprive potential children of life by sterilising a few hundred thousand girls society has decided are "too young" to breed, regardless of their biological capabilities? Go for the quality of child they might produce in their 20s or 30s, rather than the quantity they could create if they start at 14? That, let's face it, is what's up for discussion. There is, I admit, a dreadful gender unfairness in the suggestion that teenage girls should be sterilised. Shouldn't boys under 17 have their tubes tied, too? It takes two to make a baby. What's sauce for the goose should be sauce for the gander. Perhaps the Government should start thinking about how that would work. I wonder what birthday cards for 18-year-olds will look like in future? "I've got the key of the door, never been able to breed before!" Since science has now devised a way of stopping girls getting pregnant without damaging their longterm reproductive health, the idea of enforcing sterility on girls under 17 seems to me a least worst option. "

Fay is talking since the shame is gone and in some places having a baby is a badge of honor, why not steralize since they are not doing the sensible option of not having babies given the options. This goes right over the Guardian's Emily Hill who has a GenY feminist hissy fit.

Would an inability to breed, alone, unleash social ladder-climbing en masse? Unlikely. "Not having babies takes intelligence, planning, prudence and boring appointments with doctors." No it doesn't. It takes condoms. It takes the pill.

That sound you heard was Fay's point flying over her head at the speed of light.