‘Parents Provide Contraceptives’

Press, Volume CVI, Issue 31195, 20 October 1966, Page 17

‘Parents Provide Contraceptives’

(N.Z. Press Association—Copyright) BRISBANE, October 19. The annual Queensland conference of the Methodist Church of Australia has been told that high school students are being provided with contraceptives by parents and relatives.

Dr. L. A. Born, associate director of the Methodist Young People’s Department, told the conference the parents concerned were encouraging their children to be cautious.

“They are afraid of pregnancy and in defence are directing their children to use the pill,” said Dr. Born. “There is a rife sex life prominent in senior forms of Queensland State high schools,” he said. “Unfortunately there are no actual statistics to back this up except for the increasing number of pregnancies among students,” said Dr. Born. “The cause of increased

pregnancies among school students is by way of greater independence and freedom of thought among teen-agers,” he said. “The cultural attitude of more freedom in sexual behaviour is based on a misinterpretation of Freudian, half-understood attitudes to sex.

“Current attitudes toward sex are most immature, and the very necessary distinction in degrees of intimacy in personal relationships is not being made,” Dr. Born said.