Doctors yesterday won back the right to prescribe contraceptives in exceptional cases to girls under 16 without their parents' consent.
By a majority of three to two, the Law Lords ruled against Mrs Victoria Gillick, the Roman Catholic mother of 10 from Wisbech, Cambridgeshire, who has been campaigning for the right of parents to be consulted before contraception is prescribed.
The Law Lords upheld Department of Health guidance that doctors should always seek to persuade someone under 16 to involve their parents, but that in "exceptional cases" where those under 16 refuse to tell their parents, the doctor can decide whether to prescribe.
The Department of Health announced that it was immediately reinstating its guidance, but Mr Barney Hayhoe, Minister for Health, said it would be "fully reviewed".
"The review will take account of the details of the Law Lords' judgements and of the wide range of views expressed on this issue", he said.
Mrs Gillick, who last December won a unanimous decision from the Court of Appeal that the guidance was unlawful, declared herself "bitter, angry and shocked" by the Law Lords' decision.
The ruling, she said, would allow "contraception on demand by children as young as 12" and claimed that the position now was worse than before she brought her action. "Now a girl can forbid a doctor to tell her parents on whatever pretext she can think up".
It was "the most appalling defeat", she said, "but the losers will be the young".
Mrs Gillick said that if figures for abortion, cervical cancer and sexually transmitted diseases rose "it will not be my fault. It will be the fault of the Law Lords, the Department of Health and those who are pushing young people into it".
Cardinal Basil Hume, Archbishop of Westminster, said: "This judgement of the House of Lords, while clarifying the present state of the law, does not, and cannot, decide what is morally right and wrong.
"As is well known, Catholic moral teaching does not permit the use of artificial means of contraception. This applies irrespective of age.
"Whatever one's legal option or one's moral stance, the fact that such issues needed to be raised in this way is a grave reflection on our contemporary society."
Some Conservative MPs called for the law to be changed, but the decision was welcomed by a wide range of bodies, including the British Medical Association, the Family Planning Association, the Church of England Children's Society and the Royal College of Nursing.
In the judgements, Lord Fraser of Tullybelton laid down five conditions that a doctor had to be satisfied were met before he could prescribe without the parents consent.
The girl had to understand the advice. The doctor had to be satisfied she could not be persuaded to inform her parents. It had to be very likely she would begin or continue sexual intercourse, with or without treatment. Unless she received contraceptive advice or treatment her physical or mental health was likely to suffer. The doctor had to be satisfied it was in the girl's best interests to give advice or treatment without parental consent.
"That result ought not to be regarded as licence for doctors to disregard the wishes of parents in this matter whenever they find it convenient to do so. Any doctor who behaves in such a way would, in my opinion, be failing to discharge his professional responsibilities, and I would expect him to be disciplined by his own professional body accordingly", Lord Fraser said.
Lord Scarman said that "no reasonable person" could read the Department of Health guidance "as meaning that the doctor's discretion could ordinarily override parental right".
There was much a girl under 16 had to understand if she was to have the legal capacity to give consent herself.
Lord Bridge of Harwich said law prohibited men to have intercourse with girls under 16. But the objective was to protect young girls from untoward consequences of intercourse.
In the minority judgements, Lord Brandon of Oakbrook argued that providing contraceptives to girls under 16 would undermine the criminal law on the age of consent.
Lord Templeman argued that a general discretion to provide contraceptives without parental consent "would enable any girl to obtain contraception on request by threatening to sleep with the man". There were, he said, "many things which a girl under 16 needs to practice but sex is not one of them".
Mrs Gillick said that she would not attempt to take the case to the European Court of Human Rights.
Mrs Gillick and her husband, Gordon, were last night involved in scuffles with students at the Oxford Union.
It happened on a staircase outside the Gladstone Room where the Gillicks were having drinks before taking part in a debate on the permissive society. Students claimed there were punches and kicks and that Mrs Gillick trod on them with stiletto heels.
Inspector Roger Read said later: "A few women came to Oxford police station to make a complaint of assault against Mrs Gillick.
"The nature of the complaint was common assault, for which we gave the same advice as we would to anyone else - that their remedy lies through the civil courts and not through the police."
Mrs Gillick described the students as "socialist workers out for trouble. I don't chastise people with my high heels and it is nonsense to suggest there was a fight."
Mr Gillick said: "They knocked my glasses off and I have lost them. I was then kicked and I walked over them. As far as I am concerned they are parasites."
