Powerful forces at work

Powerful forces surge through this week's BMJ (reproduction, scepticism, talking about illness, and making mistakes)—which is perhaps as well because, being a double issue, it will have to serve for two.

The conventional wisdom is that failure to seek contraceptive advice is one factor behind Britain's high teenage pregnancy rate. But Dick Churchill and colleagues show on p 486 that nearly all of the 240 pregnant teenagers they studied had consulted their general practitioner in the year before pregnancy, and most of them had sought contraceptive advice. Basil Donovan observes in …