The politics of sex
Sir: The attitudes of the Family Planning Association to sex education have been the occasion of much concern among reasonable and responsible parents for several years. Some of us have discussed this with ministers in the last government and listened to their platitudes and witnessed their evasions in correspondence. I am still waiting for a reply to a letter I wrote to Margaret Thatcher last autumn on the legal aspects of the use of certain Family Planning Association literature in schools. After a delay of many months the MP for Bedford finally obtained a reply to a letter I wrote to Sir Keith Joseph and which no doubt embarrassed him in view of the position he had adopted. My letter had been "misfiled."
The concern of balanced and responsible people is too great for letters from Messrs Rubenstein & Nash (August 31) to silence their fair comment based on fact. The link between the Association and FP Sales Ltd leads inevitably to questions about the Association's objectivity, for it is a fact that the more young people who can be encouraged to indulge in sexual activity using contraceptives, the greater the financial return to the Association. Lady Tewson in welcoming the new director of the Association makes much of his "business acumen" and success with Wharf Holdings but makes no mention of any qualifications or experience in medicine, social work or teaching, and what are we to make of the ardent family planner who wrote "Family Planning is the process of creating and meeting a demand for contraceptives"; this is marketing, not medicine.
K. H. Kavanagh Chairman, Parents Advisory Group, 5 Byron Crescent, Bedford
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