The hated truth: sex education really does work

Some people are never satisfied

The Government announced some good news last week - a sharp decline in the rate of schoolgirl pregnancies - and could reasonably expect to be congratulated on the success of one of its policies.

The Government announced some good news last week - a sharp decline in the rate of schoolgirl pregnancies - and could reasonably expect to be congratulated on the success of one of its policies.

Its message about the risks of unprotected sex is having an effect, resulting in a 7 per cent drop in conceptions among girls under the age of 16. This means that fewer girls are giving birth while they are still children themselves, at a time when they can barely distinguish babies from dolls and have not completed their own education. You don't have to be an unqualified fan of the Government to view this as an encouraging development.

At the same time, the number of new mothers between the ages of 35 and 39 has risen by a fifth, suggesting that more women are planning their families, delaying conception until their careers are established and they feel able to cope with motherhood. All in all, the figures, from the Office of National Statistics, indicate that we are becoming more responsible in our attitudes to children. Yet they were greeted, in the Daily Mail, by a chorus of disapproval: David Willetts, the Conservative spokesman on social security, said he was saddened by the declining popularity of marriage while another commentator claimed the figures were a "catastrophe".

No wonder Jan Barlow, chief executive of Brook, the family planning organisation, suggested that young people were bewildered by the "mixed messages" they were getting about sex and relationships. The Government has managed to reduce levels of schoolgirl pregnancies to what they were in 1994, the year before the last Pill health-scare, and is on target to halve the rate of conceptions among under-18s in England by 2010. Yet the Mail, curmudgeonly as ever, chose to focus on the fact that just over half the conceptions in this country now begin outside marriage. This sounds dramatic and might even be taken to mean, as the paper's headline implied last Friday, a huge expansion in the number of one-parent families.

It doesn't mean anything of the sort. Two out of five of these pregnancies are unwanted and end in abortion, although that is hardly a statistic to pacify the doomsayers. Yet it is worth pointing out that the abortion rate in Western Europe is relatively low - 193 for every 1,000 live births in 1999, according to the World Health Organisation. In Russia, by contrast, where abortion is used as a form of birth control, there are 1,696 abortions for every 1,000 live births. This pattern is repeated across Eastern Europe, vividly revealing what happens when women are denied access to reliable forms of contraception.

According to the latest British figures, the rest of the conceptions outside marriage result in births to single mothers or parents who live together without being married - categories that are not distinguished in the statistics. Many of these babies, in other words, are born to stable, two-parent families who are simply following the trend of regarding marriage as optional, as likely to occur after the birth of their children as before. Far from being an indicator of social breakdown, it is a reminder that the family has begun to take on new and diverse forms in this country - a development that is leaving the Tories hopelessly out of touch, as they are on a host of other issues that reflect the way we live now.

After all, the problem with under-age sex is not that the girls are unmarried. It is not even a moral question, unless you think that sex outside marriage is inherently disgusting, as only the most antediluvian commentators continue to insist. It is that girls of 14 or 15 are not emotionally equipped for what are essentially adult relationships, let alone the pregnancies that might result. This is true of older teenagers as well, especially in the light of Tony Blair's ambition to see half the 18 to 30-year-olds going to university by the end of the decade.

Raising the educational standards attained by girls is, in the long run, the key to ensuring that they begin their families later and plan how many children to have. But the initial success of the Government's campaign to reduce teenage pregnancies bears out a contention the Tories particularly loathe: that sex education is more effective than ignorance. That means we can expect newspapers like the Daily Mail to concentrate on other aspects of our changing sexual habits, rooting about in the statistics for evidence to support the unlikely proposition that that nice Mr Blair is busily creating a modern-day Sodom and Gomorrah.