The debate over birth control at Gloucester High School is settled, at least for now.
That is probably the best thing to be said about the unanimous vote of the School Committee last week to permit birth control to be distributed to students through the school's health clinic unless parents object in advance.
The new policy is clearly an improvement over what some "experts" had proposed — that students be given condoms or birth control pills without the consent or even the knowledge of parents. It also untangles the gridlock over any distribution of contraceptives that helped shed the light on the school's stunning spike from a normal three or four teen pregnancies to 18 at Gloucester High during the last school year alone.
But it is still frankly difficult to know whether this really reflects the will of the community — for there was clearly much more reliance on medical, psychological and education experts, who claim to know much better than parents what is right for children, than on those parents themselves.
And while it does allow parents to "opt out" of providing birth control to their children, it puts the responsibility entirely on them. It would have been better — much better, not to mention more respectful — for the clinic to initiate the contact with the parents of a teen seeking birth control, and letting families "opt in" to the program.
The final shape of the program is being presented as taking the burden off the student to get permission from his or her parents. But the burden more properly belongs with the clinic, as it would in any other case.
Indeed, it is strange and troubling in some ways to witness how sexual politics trumps good medical policy. As most people have heard, a school clinic doesn't dispense so much as an aspirin to a child without the notification and consent of a parent.
Yet, when it comes to something far more important — birth control pills are powerful drugs that need to be taken exactly as prescribed, and that produce side effects — the experts think it's fine to leave parents out of the loop unless they notify the clinic in advance.
As long as this is the path the committee has chosen, it should be aggressive about informing parents about their rights and responsibilities. The schools have effective ways of informing parents about everything from snow days to bus routes.
In the past, it has used that system to encourage parents to come to meetings to protest possible service cuts. So, all parents should be notified, several times throughout the year, that, if they want to have a voice in their teen's reproductive health care, they need to fill out a form withdrawing them from such services at the clinic.
Also, school and clinic officials should be sure to follow up on Mayor Carolyn Kirk's insistence that the Gloucester High School health program include a component on abstinence — and one that's taught by someone who teaches it with true conviction.
But while this policy may mark the end of the discussion over birth-control policy for some time, it should not end the effort to help students make wiser choices.
It has been said many times before, but it bears repeating — the most effective way to help teens avoid risky sexual behavior or unplanned pregnancy is not with more education about sexual mechanics. It is not with a school day-care center. It is with a relationship.
Teens who know they are loved, and that somebody cares deeply about their future, will be much less likely to look for love in the wrong places. That's the bottom-line message any school health program should be trying to send.
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