The Sex Files

A current project of Marie Stopes International is the Sex Files, a study that collects information from teens about their sexual health views and what they want from healthcare providers and the Government.

The goal, says Jill Michelson, National Clinical Advisor for Marie Stopes International, is to collect the views of hundreds of youths, compile it and present it to the Government for appropriate legislation and funding amendments.

But the introduction to the Sex Files survey, which asks “as many young people as possible… to jump online and record their thoughts on all things S-E-X related”, sounds more like an advertisement for a part in a porn movie.

Among the leading questions in their Sex Files introduction, the authors ask if access to sexual health options would be easier with one’s own Medicare card. (Read: Do you need to hide the fact that you're sexually active from you parents?")

Sharing a Medicare card with one’s parents is a small safeguard for many teens who might otherwise procure contraceptives or even an abortion without the consent or knowledge of their parents. Requiring this consent means many teenagers will need to discuss these topics with people who care about them. Not just the abortionist or staffer at the local clinic.

It should be remembered that Marie Stopes is Australia’s leading abortion provider. Killing unborn babies is their bread and butter so it is imperative to their financial survival that Australians are having sex, contracepting that sex and then aborting any resulting ‘mistakes’. It is important for them to maintain the sex lives of today's teenagers because it is they who will be pouring funds into the Marie Stopes kitty for the next half century.

If plummeting fertility rates are anything to go by, Marie Stopes and team are successfully educating the next generation to believe that pregnancy is – like swine flu – an illness to be avoided.

Last August, Jill Michelson got Marie Stopes’ name in the paper with some outrageous claims about pregnancy and child-bearing, so that use of the RU486 drug in their facilities could be broadened.

"We argued that pregnancy is a condition that may be both serious and life-threatening in particular circumstances," she said.

“What is undeniable is the fact that the risk to a pregnant woman of induced abortion is much less than the risk of continuing a pregnancy through to delivery at term. And we argued that continuance of pregnancy would ... also involve greater risk of injury to the physical and mental health of the pregnant woman, and a substantial risk that if pregnancy were not terminated and a child were born, the child would suffer from such physical and mental abnormalities as to be seriously handicapped."

This must be news to every woman who has suffered from abortion related mental-ilness. And news too for the hundreds of women who safely give birth every day in Australia.

The Sex Files will be released in September, but a mid-survey media release became available last month for National Youth Week.

© Eva Whiteley 2010