Making Birth Control More Accessible

(AP)  One of Britain's biggest supermarket chains plans to give teen-agers the morning-after contraceptive pill for free as part of a national effort to reduce the number of teen pregnancies.

Tesco will distribute the pills for free to those under 20 at its pharmacies in Weston-super-Mare and Clevedon, both in western England, the chain said in a Friday announcement.

The local branch of the National Health Service and the North Somerset Teenage Pregnancy Clinic are both collaborating with Tesco on the pilot project, which will also give teens advice on contraception and sexual health.

"This is a small part of a range of initiatives we have developed to tackle teen-age pregnancy," Simon Bilous of the clinic told the British Broadcasting Corp. "All our work is in the context of encouraging young people to say 'no' if they do not want to have sex and only to engage in sexual activity if they feel ready for it."

Some said the availability of the pill would encourage teen-agers to have sex.

"Yet again we are seeing a decline in the moral standards of an organization which ought to know better," Rachel Heath, a spokeswoman for the anti-abortion group Life. "To allow the morning-after pill to be dispensed free shows a lack of understanding of the moral health issues involved. ... It gives the green light to permissive men to pressurize young girls into sexual relationships they do not want."

The morning-after pill is a high dose of birth control pill taken within 72 hours of unprotected sex to prevent pregnancy.

It is already available free with a prescription, but many women do not want to wait for a doctor's appointment and buy it over the counter for a fee.