The rate of teenage pregnancy in the UK is dropping like a stone. The proportion of pregnancies in under-18s has fallen by more than a third since 1998, to 30.9 per 1,000. This remarkable reversal (the figure had been rising since the late 1960s) is “no accident”. It’s a direct result of the work of the teenage pregnancy unit, set up in the first days of the last Labour government. The unit addressed this social problem head-on by, among other things, championing better sex education, friendly local contraception clinics, TV campaigns, school nurses telling girls how to get help and chemists selling morning-after pills. Critics dismissed the programme as a doomed attempt at “social engineering”. Yet the reality is that, for a relatively modest investment of £25m, we’ve averted the birth of some 60,000 babies to very young mothers – children who, on every measure, would have had poorer-than-average life chances. It’s a huge success story that should be a model for social policy. (Polly Toynbee, The Guardian).

Epicurus, believing in the pleasures of life, would applaud this sensible intervention by government. In a moment of miscalculation (or however you feel inlined to characterize it) a young girl gets pregnant, and then has the burden of raising a child, something all too often she has neither the emotional maturity or money to do successfully. It is a horrible start for the child and a burden on the grandparents – all to satisfy the the religious leanings of smug people for whom doctrine trumps empathy. There is only the most fleeting of pleasures to teenage pregnancy, and a physical and mental sentence of a lifetime for the poor mother. No kind and thoughtful person would make a fellow human being go through this.