Britons respond coolly to abstinence crusade

CLAYGATE, ENGLAND — Lisa High's story is a classic salutary tale of adolescent sex. After getting her pregnant at 17, her boyfriend got cold feet. She thought briefly of abortion but couldn't go through with it.

Now Lisa is 21, a single mom living in South London — but she is hardly unique. Every year, 40,000 British girls under 18 become pregnant, a promiscuity "epidemic" that gives Britain by far the highest rate of teenage mothers in Western Europe.

Figures like these have persuaded an American group espousing total chastity to bring its missionary zeal to Britain's teenagers.

The Silver Ring Thing, which claims to have won over 22,000 young Americans to the virtues of abstinence, is bringing more than two dozen of its converts to spread the word through a series of glitzy media events starting Friday in this town south of London.

Yet the Silver Ring Thing tour is proving controversial before it has even started.

Early press coverage has been snippy at best, hostile at worst. Cultural commentators have scoffed that outreach based on American Christian-based values, supported by $700,000 in U.S. federal funds, will not necessarily transplant easily in a society that has become defiantly secular.

Government officials argue that a vow of chastity is a brittle line of defense, that self-discipline often falters — and then what?

For Lisa High, the abstinence message just might have made a difference.

"I think it's a message that should be told to our kids," she says. "I would have listened to the notion of abstinence if it had come from another teenager."

Many young people, however, ridicule the very idea of abstinence.

"I didn't listen to the message then and I wouldn't now," says Beckie Darvill, a 21-year-old mother of two who had her first child when she was 16.

"I went to a Catholic school and was told all that stuff, not to have sex, stay a virgin until you're married, but I didn't. Young people nowadays just want to grow up faster."

The indifferent British response is irksome to Silver Ring Thing founder Denny Pattyn, an ordained minister who wonders why a society with such a big problem is unwilling to look at new ways to deal with it.