The Belgian government is planning to provide hundreds of thousands of teenagers with monthly vouchers from 1 January next year to help pay for the costs of contraception, in a bid to reduce the number of unwanted pregnancies.
Each voucher will be worth €3 (£2.1; $3.5)—the monthly cost of the second generation pill—and will be available to about 372 000 young men and 357 000 young women aged 15 to 20 years. But the starting age may be raised to 16, the current age of consent in Belgium.
Distributed by the country's mutual health funds and family planning centres, the vouchers can be used towards the cost of any form of contraception. The total cost of the exercise, which is one of the initiatives in the coalition government's draft budget for 2004, will be €5.29m.
Although the political decision has been taken, the government still has to work out final details of the scheme with doctors and pharmacists and ensure that adolescents are provided not just with financial help but also with practical advice.
The programme may also lead to a reassessment of the current situation whereby there is almost no reimbursement of contraception costs for the general population, except for the first generation pill, which gets a 20% refund from the mutual health funds.
The scheme is attracting mixed reactions. Some people welcome it as a small social gesture in the right direction. Others wonder whether the vouchers will be a sufficient incentive for youngsters, who may be embarrassed by the subject, to go to family planning centres and chemists to make use of them.
According to Belgium's most recent statistics some 2200 abortions were performed on girls between the ages of 13 and 19 years in 2001.