Media credit to Beverly Congdon. King Middle School in Portland, Maine gives birth control to students.

Recently, King Middle School in Portland, Maine has begun to offer contraceptives, or forms of birth control, to those who are covered by the health consent form that students fill out with their parents. Now students will be able to get birth control pills and patches and other forms of birth control like condoms from their school’s health center if desired and allowed by their parents. Is this morally correct though? Should our schools be giving out birth control to students as young as 11 years old? The reality of it is that the age of a person’s first sexual experience is getting earlier and earlier as the years go by, and parents cannot always be responsible for the actions of their children.

So why did the Portland School Committee come to this decision? There was a noticeable amount of middle school girls that were becoming pregnant, so the committee members felt that action must be taken to prevent this. There was a reported 17 pregnancies among the three middle schools in Portland in the last four years, excluding miscarriages and abortions that weren’t reported to the school’s nurse. Now they offer a full range of contraceptives to students to prevent such pregnancies.

The fact of the matter is, whether we want to accept it or not, is that some students are indeed having sex this early in life. The issue is not about whether it is acceptable for the students to be doing such activities; it is about providing easier access to protection to make safer choices if they choose to continue having intercourse. Though many say that this policy only helps encourage sexual activity at an earlier age, Richard Veilleux, executive director of the Maine Assembly on School-Based Health Care, says that, "This isn't encouraging kids to have sex. This is about the kids who are engaging in sexual activity." It is not about stopping the ones already having sex from doing what they are already doing, it’s providing them with the means to do it safely.

It should be the parents’ job to control the sexual activities of their child, but sometimes the child feels uncomfortable with the idea. I know that I have held information from my parents before, fearing some sort of punishment or the always avoided lecture on this topic or that, and I believe that most of you reading have went through some sort of the same experience. Therefore, no one can blame a kid for not going to his or her parents and asking for some sort of contraceptive. Sarah Thompson, on of the committee members at Kings Middle school and a mother of a King eigth-grader, supported the policy, although she did say it made her “uncomfortable.”

"I know I've done my job as a parent," Thompson said. "[But there] may be a time when she doesn't feel comfortable coming to me ... [and] not all these kids have a strong parental advocate at home."

The morality of providing children with contraceptives at ages early as 11 years old should not be what is focused most on. The fact that there are people having sex this early is exactly that, a fact. If people are going at it that early, there are other issues to be considered, but in the mean time, while everyone in power debates this and that and these kids keep on having sex, we need to provide them with contraceptives so that they can at least to it safely.

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