School for sex.

This was the heading for a Sunday Times article by Karen Robinson (May 16, 2004), contending that the architects of the government's teenage sexual health and education strategies ought to be feeling upset. The facts are startling:

Illegitimacy rates in England and Wales increased by nearly ten per cent in the last decade, from 32.2 per cent in 1991 to 41.4 now.

Teenage mothers had 90 per cent of illegitimate births.

At 90,000 pregnancies a year, the teen birthrate is the highest in Europe. The number of girls under 18 who became pregnant in 2002 rose to 41,866.

Between 2001 and 2002, infectious syphilis rose by 142% among boys 16 to 19; among girls, by 55%. Gonorrhea was up 36% among boys under 15, and 50% among girls under 16. Chlamydia, genital herpes, and genital warts also had increases. Robinson concludes:

"It is a baffling world--for children and for their parents: a 17-year-old boy can tell his father he is still a virgin but that he learns about sex from internet porn; a 13-year-old girl pupil at a London independent co-ed school explains that 'in my year people don't really do oral sex, that's more the year above'; 3,500 under-16s had an abortion in Britain in 2002; and abortions are arranged for 14-year-olds without their mothers' knowledge."

Abortion: bypassing parents

"Mother may not know best, but she should always be told" was the heading for a column by Tom Utley in the London Daily Telegraph for May 14 concerning a not-uncommon practice not only in England but also elsewhere, as in Canada.

When 14-year-old Melissa Smith became pregnant, she was reluctant to tell her mother. Instead she approached the outreach worker at her school, as she had been advised to do at the family planning clinic. The outreach worker, a 21-year-old girl, asked Melissa whether she wanted to tell her parents and Melissa replied, "My mum would kill me." The outreach worker decided that it would best for the girl to have a quick abortion, and that her mother need not be told.

"Anybody with a shred of common sense," Utley wrote, obviously unaware of the practice, "can see how this case ought to have been handled. When Melissa told her outreach worker 'my mum will kill me,' she should have been told, 'Oh, no, she won't.' Mothers don't, on the whole, kill their daughters when they become pregnant. A few discreet enquiries would have established that Mrs. Smith is not a homicidal maniac, but a highly intelligent woman, who could be trusted as well as any mother could to do what was best for her daughter. She should have been told. This was the woman who had given birth to Melissa and looked after her throughout her life. Yet some wretched employee of a government agency thought that she knew better than Melissa's mother where the girl's interest lay."

As Mrs. Smith pointed out, "If my daughter had been truanting from school or causing trouble in the classroom, I would have been informed. Yet she can go ahead and have an abortion, which will affect her for the rest of her life, and I have no say. She had an appendix operation last year and I had to sign two consent forms, yet no one thought it necessary to tell me about this."

Within the law

Doctors who performed the abortion, says the British Medical Association, are acting within the law. "Any competent young person can give consent to any medical intervention," they say. "It is for the doctor to judge whether a patient is competent to give consent. A girl of 14 would be encouraged to tell her parents; but if she was unable to do so, two doctors can give permission for an abortion. And doctors will not be allowed to breach confidentiality by informing the girl's family without her permission."

Upholding the guidelines in 1985, the law lords ruled that a girl under 16 has the legal capacity to consent to examination and treatment if she has sufficient maturity to understand the nature and implications of the proposed treatment. A parent's right to decide whether a child under 16 should have medical treatment ends when the child achieves sufficient maturity to make that decision for itself. But Lord Fraser of Tullybelton, who gave the leading judgment, stressed that in the overwhelming majority of cases "the best judges of a child's welfare are his or her parents."

Commenting on the case in the Sunday Times for May 16, Minette Martin said: "A caring Dracula is draining the lifeblood from families."

Undermining the family is something that totalitarian states have always tried to do, and driving a wedge between parents and children is the traditional way of doing it. It is not ideals of welfare that threaten the family, but false ideals of human rights which swell the power of the state and cause intrusive armies of bureaucrats to impose those rights on us.

The outreach worker was only doing her job, as she saw it, when she decided that Melissa ought to have an abortion and that her mother need not be consulted about it. Poor 14-year-old Melissa had a "right" to confidentiality, the "right" to a lonely trip to a clinic, and the "right "to deceive her mother," all these "rights" associated with her fundamental "right" to have underage sex.

Catholic weeklies such as The Universe (June 27) and The Catholic Times carried full-page advertisements by UK Life League protesting these proceedings.