As many as 150,000 British girls have been infected with a sexually transmissible disease primarily transmitted by promiscuous sexual activity. Many teenage girls don't even know that they have it. This disease among girls has soared by 56 percent in the last two years with 100,000 more likely to catch it in the next year. The worst thing about this particular disease is the serious threat to their future fertility.

The Daily Mail has looked at the problem and summed up the British plight very well: "How have we allowed sex to become such a threat to the future of the family?" Well put, and a good question with a very simple answer. Because those responsible have not brought up our youth to keep the Ten Commandments. Their religious and moral education has been sadly neglected by those who ought to know better.

Virtually untaught by the clergy and by their parents, today thousands of young girls gamble with their precious capacity to have children. This should not be so.

Young women should be able to look forward in hope to that special time in their lives. Obedience to the biblical commandments intended to protect family life is designed to prevent the tragedies afflicting our youth today. That is why the Bible underscores the value of motherhood and morality, acting in tandem.

The Curse of Chlamydia

The offending disease is called chlamydia, one of the most easily transmitted of all STDs. Perhaps 70 percent of those females infected develop no symptoms. But if untreated the bacteria can lie dormant for months before passing through the cervix and possibly inflaming and blocking the Fallopian tubes, down which a woman's eggs must travel. The damage done is often permanent, rendering the victim unable to bear children.

Although boys (now in sharply increasing numbers) also contract and of course transmit the disease, the long-term health consequences are much less serious because symptoms soon emerge and treatment is generally demanded. Nonetheless, this trend is still very serious as The Daily Mail observed: "Between 1995 and 1997, cases of chlamydia in 16 to 19-year-old boys rose by 57 percent and cases of gonorrhea by nearly 55 percent." These are staggering figures from the Office for National Statistics and they are caused by the wild growth of teenage promiscuity in Britain.

Among both girls and boys in the 16 to 19 age groups, one in five admitted having two or more intimate partners in the preceding year. One in 20 girls said they had sexual relations with four or more male partners in the last year. With no apologies, one professional 19-year-old said she had ten male partners in a year's time with half of those liaisons being so-called "one-night stands."

The statistical office revealed that right along with growing promiscuity is an alarming lack of awareness of the dangers of various sexually transmissible diseases.

Moral Guidance Needed

However, it is encouraging that more adults are beginning to wake up to the unwanted effects of allowing teenagers almost unlimited sexual freedom, while giving them little or no moral guidance.

The Ten Commandments is one of the most popular booklets published by the United Church of God. Perhaps no other non-serial publication is needed more in Britain at this particular time. If you don't yet have your personal copy, please write or telephone our office nearest you. WNP

Source: The Daily Mail, March 16, 1999.

The Liberal Sex Lobby Betrayed our Children

"As the father of two daughters I read with dismay the latest proposals by the Royal College of Nursing that girls as young as 11 should be given free access to contraception including the 'morning-after' pill-without the knowledge of their parents. This is the most irresponsible suggestion yet to emanate from the 'sex lobby,' who conspire to betray the protection given to children under the law and the rights of parents.

"It is a sad indictment of our amoral society that, after 30-plus years of increasing sex education in British schools, we appear to have succeeded only in producing one of the highest rates of teenage pregnancies in the Western world, and an associated rise in sexually transmitted diseases."

- D.T., Lancashire (quoted from The Daily Mail, March 13, 1999)