Letters and Articles:

Britain's Moral Wasteland

By Melanie Phillips

February 21, 2005

Daily Mail, 21 February 2005

The full extent of the disaster caused by the government's teenage pregnancy strategy is only now becoming apparent. Figures released under the Freedom of Information Act have revealed that more than 1000 girls' aged 14 had abortions last year.

In addition, 148 abortions were performed on girls aged between 11 and 13. About 3,500 girls aged under 16 have pregnancies terminated every year. And among the youngest age group, the number of abortions jumped last year by nine per cent.

Small wonder that until a week ago the Government was refusing to disclose these statistics on the spurious grounds that they were so small that disclosure risked identifying individual cases. Now we can see the real reason - that these horrifying figures expose the utter bankruptcy of government policy.

Not only did Britain's abortion rate reach a record level in 2003, but the highest increase occurred among teenagers, the most vulnerable of all. The toll of damaged lives and compromised emotional and physical health among young people is hard to over-estimate.

Yet those who are responsible still don't get it. The chief executive of the Pregnancy Advisory Service, Ann Furedi, has said that 'pregnant teenage girls face a real problem and abortion can be the solution'.

But abortion is not a 'solution' for teenage pregnancy. It is an admission of failure. For a child to conceive and bear a child is a tragedy. For a child to conceive and then have her child destroyed is no less of a tragedy.

The essence of the problem is not girls being trapped in early motherhood, grave though that it is. It is that teenage girls - including a shocking number under the age of legal consent -- are becoming pregnant in the first place.

What this reveals once again is the utter failure of the government's strategy which aimed to halve pregnancies among 15-17 year olds in England by 2010. Right from the start, it was clear that this policy was fundamentally flawed.

Behaviour is influenced above all by the signals and incentives that society provides. The most powerful signal is the law, which through the age of consent was designed to protect under-age girls. Yet instead of enforcing this law, the government chose to send a different message - that there was nothing wrong with under-age or teenage sex as long as suitable precautions were taken.

Sex education thus became a synonym for sex promotion. Children were given advice more appropriate for sexually promiscuous adults. Worst of all, parental responsibility was undermined by children being offered abortions without their parents even knowing, let alone giving their consent.

The result has been as appalling as it has been inevitable: an inexorable rise not just in the rate of teenage pregnancy but also abortions and sexually transmitted diseases among the very young.

This has been nothing less than a complete abdication of responsibility by the adult world, which has taken the view that children and teenagers are quasi-adults able to make responsible choices about behaviour. All they need, according to this thinking, is information to enable them to select from a menu of lifestyle choices.

But children and teenagers are not adults. They are immature, and the choices they make can therefore be catastrophic. What they actually need is firm boundaries that tell them that certain behaviour is wrong and that it inevitably carries unpleasant consequences for them. But instead, when it comes to alcohol, drugs and sex, the adult world has ripped up those boundaries and effectively told children to go ahead and indulge provided they are careful - and then expresses mortification when they are not.

Some influential people actively want to promote a breakdown in conventional norms of behaviour. Many others in official circles believe - wrongly - that government is helpless to resist the great cultural movement towards a behavioural free-for-all.

Until very recently Conservative politicians - many of whom certainly share this latter view - were additionally paralysed by terror of any repetition of the 'back to basics' fiasco under John Major's government, in which an expressed determination to halt the social damage being done by the rise of fatherless families imploded in ridicule over the irregular private lives of Tory ministers.

The trauma inflicted upon the party was so great, and its resulting resolve to avoid the charge of hypocrisy so absolute, that until last week Tory politicians have refused to dip so much as a toe into the moral agenda. In addition, a number of Tory MPs believe that the only way back to power lies in going along with changing social mores on drugs and sexual behaviour.

As a result, the Conservative Party simply abandoned the moral battlefield. In doing so, it effectively disenfranchised millions of decent people who are aghast at the increasingly self-destructive behaviour among the young and its promotion by government agencies. Embattled parents in particular, who watch in horror as their authority is undermined leaving them powerless to insulate their children against the lure of alcohol, drugs and premature sexual activity, are desperate for someone to speak up for them.

The infuriating thing is that if political leadership adopts a 'zero tolerance' approach to social disorder, it can stop this kind of cultural slide. Experience in America has shown that shrewdly presented messages promoting sexual abstinence have helped defy cultural gravity and brought down the rate of teenage pregnancy.

Now, at long last, Michael Howard appears to have realised this. Last week, the Conservatives added a moral dimension to their health strategy by declaring that 'responsible behaviour' was the cornerstone of good health, and pledged to help young people avoid the pitfalls of permissiveness.

Their sexual health strategy, they said, would target young people with a clear message of the risks of early or unprotected sex, and would help them resist peer pressure to engage in irresponsible sex, drug abuse or binge drinking.

Of course, much depends on what this would mean in practice. And there's still a long way to go before the Tories fully re-engage with the moral crisis that lies beneath so many of our social ills. Nevertheless, it is a courageous stab at the received unwisdom of non-judgmentalism, which has such a stranglehold over intellectual and political life and has sacrificed so many thousands of young casualties to binge-drinking, drug-taking and sexual promiscuity.

And politically, it is a shrewd way back into this crucial but treacherous territory. For however irregular the behaviour of adults may be, the one thing that unites them is concern for their children's welfare. The growing disorder and distress among children touches a powerful general nerve. Indeed, Tony Blair's own rise to power was fuelled in no small measure by his adroit manipulation of this most neuralgic issue.

But as binge-drinking rises, drug abuse soars and under-age abortions hit record levels, Mr Blair's most cherished ambition to transform society for the better lies in ruins. This is an area where he is intensely vulnerable. If Mr Howard holds his nerve and makes more of this moral collapse under this most moralising of politicians, he could find that the territory shunned by the Tories as a minefield is actually paved with gold.

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