Sex education booklets

Madam, - One must share Dr Oliver Lynn's compassion for the pitiful and pitifully young patient in his surgery, "the teenage …

Madam, - One must share Dr Oliver Lynn's compassion for the pitiful and pitifully young patient in his surgery, "the teenage pregnant girl aged 14, 15 or 16" (August 28th).

However, I am convinced that his diagnosis of the cause of the teenage pregnancy problem - lack of "contraceptive information and education to a vulnerable and fledgling section of our community," - is somewhat wide of the mark.

As far as the IFPA/NEHB booklets are concerned - "a welcome stimulus to discussion", Dr Lynn claims - they would, I suggest, be stimulus to more than just discussion. And therein lies the nub of the problem. The writer Melanie Phillips, the foremost social commentator in Britain according to the Times Literary Supplement, wrote once that sex education is all children get in school. What has gone out the window, she remarked, is morality. - Yours, etc.,

SHANE O'CONNOR, Green Road, Newbridge, Co Kildare.