This article was commissioned by ellaOne, please read this article in full on MyMorningAfter by following this link.
What was your sex education like?
Was it at school, with teenagers flicking condoms across the room and rolling around with laughter at the school nurse’s mention of the word ‘vagina’?
Did mum sit you down to have a chat about ‘the birds and the bees’ while you avoided eye contact at all costs?
Do you even remember receiving any form of sex education at all?
You’re not alone: Sex and Relationships Education is still not compulsory in UK schools, though the government aim to make it part of the curriculum by 2020. The current guidelines for Sex Education hasn’t been updated since 2000 (that is 7 years before the invention of the iPhone, by the way: times have changed).
Sex Ed in schools also tends to only cover a few bases. The line is always the same: if you don’t want to get pregnant: use a condom, go on the pill or, best of all, don’t have sex before marriage (shoutout to my Catholic-schooled homegirls).
It’s not bad advice, but it is slightly unrealistic. We all know that condoms can split, or be forgotten altogether, it’s all too easy to miss a pill or two – and don’t even get us started on the joys of abstinence. So if you ‘screw up’ and have unprotected sex, what should you do?
Well, they don’t teach that bit at school. In a Family Planning Association (FPA) survey of over 2,000 women, only 17% of women had learned about emergency contraception as part of their sex education. That means 4 out of 5 women have never been taught how emergency contraception works.
We need to revisit some of these lessons learned at school. Emergency contraception is an important part of being a confident and responsible sexually active person, as well as understanding how your body works...
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