Young people should be encouraged to delay having sexual relations for as long as possible and be informed that contraception could not be relied on to prevent pregnancy, it was submitted to the public hearings on abortion yesterday.
Ms Breda O'Brien, a job-sharing teacher and an Irish Times columnist, and Prof Patricia Casey, UCD, psychiatrist at the Mater Hospital, made submissions on alternatives to abortion to the Oireachtas Committee on the Constitution.
The chairman of the committee, Mr Brian Lenihan TD (FF), referring to their submission on education, said they seemed to be emphasising that young people must be encouraged to say No.
Ms O'Brien said it was slightly more complicated. According to the Pregnancy Advisory Council, contraception could not be relied on to prevent pregnancy. In Britain a study showed that 59 per cent of pregnancies happened because of contraceptive failure. In one Irish study, 83 people out of 163 experienced contraceptive failure.
"We should not be advocating to young people to use contraceptives, for instance condoms," Ms O'Brien stated.
The younger people were when having sex for the first time the more susceptible they became to developing a sexually transmitted disease.
For young women there were much more serious consequences in the medical area. This was particularly relevant given the increase in Human Papilloma Virus which was implicated in cervical cancer. Condoms did not protect against this.
The message they wanted to put across to young people was to delay having sexual relations for as long as possible. In the US, after a publicity campaign, the average age that young people started having sexual relations went up by one year.
Boys were often completely neglected in relationship and sexuality education. Modules should be developed emphasising the role of fathers and the responsibility attached to every act of sexual intercourse.
Younger people were often looking for boundaries and studies had shown that a high number regretted having sexual relations very early on, Ms O'Brien said.
They were not saying they could not use contraception, but the message was that it was positive and healthy to abstain.
Prof Casey said many teenage pregnancies resulted from alcohol abuse and emphasis on alcohol misuse was needed in education programmes. It was time to evaluate the effectiveness of Substance Abuse Programmes such as "On my own two feet".