Local MP Jackie Lawrence joined forces with more than thirty other parliamentarians recently, in urging local authorities to scrutinise the effects of the Department of Health's 'Teenage Pregnancy Strategy'.

This strategy allows under-age girls to obtain the morning-after-pill, 'over-the-counter', without parental consent.

In their letters to the local authorities, the signatories suggest a motion asking Primary Care Trusts to publish annual information on the number of teenagers attending family planning clinics; being provided with the morning after pill; and the numbers and rates of teenage pregnancies, abortions and sexually transmitted infections.

'We feel that it is vital for those electorally responsible to scrutinise the results of the Teenage Pregnancy Strategy,' the letter states.

'For rising 20 years, the Department of Health has pressured for ever-easier contraceptive and abortion facilities for the young (without parental consent), claiming this would lower our teenage conception rates. However, we now have the highest teenage pregnancy rates in Europe and the second highest in the world.' They pointed out that the motion is not about the morality of abortion, or of distributing contraception to the very young.

It is instead 'about the morality of adopting strategies when there is no clear indication as to their potential success and a considerable amount of evidence as to the damage they do'.

They described the evidence base for concluding that access to family planning services reduces teenage pregnancy rates as 'weak', and quoted figures showing that use of the morning-after-pill rate has risen from nil in the 1980s to around 30 per thousand in the year 2000. This has been accompanied by an increase in abortions and a steady increase in the reported rate of sexually transmitted diseases among under-16s as well as among the under-20s.

MP Jackie Lawrence fell pregnant aged 17, and told the Western Telegraph that the experience has made her 'more aware of teenage pregnancies and the matters arising out of teenage pregnancy.'

Mrs Lawrence believes that the monitoring of family-planning statistics is vital in order to establish the long-term effects of family planning options, such as the morning-after pill.