Compulsory Contraception

The petition is entitled make the contraception jab/implant compulsary for all girls under 16 and the explanatory notes say

"This would help tackle the fact that children are having babies. They are a drain on resources."

Thought number one: my word - that'll be great for the significant number of people who're affected badly by hormonal intervention, then!

Thought number two: The Victoria Gillicks of the world will be delighted with that! I suppose in theory Gillick's complaint that she should know if her under-16 children were being given contraception would be null, since she'd know jolly well they were - but that's really not her point, and I'm sure she and others would complain about it encouraging children to be promiscuous.

Thought number three: I imagine some other complaints would be made to the effect that it would encourage carelessness with respect to sexually transmitted diseases, and also that it would encourage boys and young men to treat contraception as purely the woman's responsibility. And I can't say I'd disagree.

Thought number four: I wonder what it would cost, compared to what it would prevent? The Office of National Statistics gives faintly confusing data ... it tells us that in 1999 there were 3.9 pregnancies leading to maternity per thousand girls aged 13-15. It also appears to say that there were 4.4 abortions per thousand girls aged 13-15 who conceived, which seems infeasibly low. Their abortion figures suggest that in 1999 there were 3.8 pregnancies leading to abortion per thousand girls aged 13-19. I suppose, to get an upper bound, we could add those together and say that in 1999 there cannot have been more than 7.7 girls per thousand aged between 13 and 15 who got pregnant.

Then we wonder how many of them there were, not per thousand, but at all ... We go back to the ONS and find that in 1999 there were 12,000,000 children aged between 0 and 15. If we assume (dodgily, but it'll do) that they were evenly spread in that age range, we get 2,250,000 children aged 13-15, and therefore 1,125,000 girls. Which leaves us with a hair under 8,700 pregnancies (we think that 4,300 lead to the children being born and 4,400 lead to abortions). Maybe. Based on dodgy maths.

So. What would it cost to implant or jab all the under-16s? Presumably we don't actually want to bother with the babies ... given that in 2006 we had the brouhaha about Scotland's Youngest Mother who got pregnant at 11, I suppose the petitioner wants us to start at least this young. (I do wonder about the medical implications for those girls who, at 11 or so, are not yet through puberty ...) So by the same extrapolation we used earlier, I assume that in 1999 there would have been some 3,750,000 girls to be jabbed and/or implanted.

What do jabs and/or implants cost? I have failed dismally to find an actual answer to this. The nearest I can find is the price-list at Marie Stopes International, which won't, of course, be charging exactly the cost. They make a "profit" on this price-list, as the website says "Some of the money from the fees people pay in our UK centres goes towards supporting our work in developing countries". Furthermore, it's going to include the cost of the personnel ... but then again, it would also cost the NHS/government in personnel as well as simple costs.

An injection, at Marie Stopes, costs £25 and must be repeated monthly, so there is an annual cost of £100, ignoring follow-up appointments and so on. An implant costs £240, but lasts three years, giving an annual cost of £60. Let us therefore assume that the implant would be most cost-effective - it also having the benefits of being removable if the girl has a bad reaction to it, and of the implanting giving minimum disruption to the girl's life.

If the actual cost were £60, therefore, the cost for 1999 of implementing this project would have been £225,000,000. Even if we assume that Marie Stopes International makes around a 50% "profit" to spend elsewhere, that's still over a hundred million pounds. Or some £11,000 per pregnancy it might prevent ...

There have to be cheaper ways.

There are many other good arguments against this proposal. But I've spent hours randomly calculating the cost, so I'm going to stop arguing now. Hopefully everyone can see that it's mad anyway.