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A student health center at a middle school in Portland, Maine, recently voted to make birth control pills and patches available to students treated at the center. For those of you who don’t remember, middle schoolers range in age from 11 to 13. While making contraceptives more widely available is a noble goal, doesn’t an 11-year-old girl seeking birth control pills cry out for a visit from social services? After all, girls that young rarely have 12-year-old partners.
Obviously it’s better to have preteens on the pill than pregnant, but still, the news that five kids told the middle-school nurse in Portland that they were having sex last year seems worth more intervention that just a pack of Ortho-Novum….
