LAUNCHING a £10 million drive today to reduce the number of teenage mothers and encourage those who do become pregnant to stay on at school, the government confronts a daunting and tangled problem.

It is right to do so since Britain has the highest teenage pregnancy rate in Europe.

And the costs are immense, both to the taxpayer in terms of welfare support and to the young mothers themselves who, deprived of education and opportunity, often embark on a lifetime of benefit-dependent social exclusion.

But one wonders whether much of this effort will be wasted when the ingredient of morality is missing from the drive.

There may be no harm in schemes intended to bring home to teenagers the realities of early parenthood, such as playing them half-hour tapes of a baby crying, making them push a heavily-loaded buggy or, as has already been tried in East Lancashire, giving them computerised "baby" dolls to care for .

But can they produce real results when, generally, modern society's attitude to unwed schoolgirl mothers is that they are unfortunate rather than wrong?

Surely it is only when this non-judgmental outlook is confronted and changed that the number of teenage pregnancies - presently some 90,000 a year among under-18s - will fall and the government's stated aim of halving them by the end of the next decade will no longer seem hugely optimistic.

The government does not make society's morals because, arguably, they are determined most by parental example. But it can influence them through social policy and its own standards.

Thus, when we see it setting out to reverse the worst levels of teenage motherhood in Europe, a third of which involve under-16s, do we not also see it handicapping its efforts by not doing enough to bolster that important factor for social stability and standards, the traditional family?

Britain has rocketing levels of family breakdown - again, the highest in Europe - with 150,000 children a year witnessing their parents splitting up.

Cohabitation is commonplace; marriage is on the wane.

Almost four out of ten children are born out of wedlock.

Against that permissive background, and with sex openly promoted in every medium, what chance is there of teenagers making moral judgments when their parents seem to make none.

And nor does the government, when the tax and benefits system favours single people rather than marriage and the family and when, as we heard only this month from Home Secretary Jack Straw, it does not regard marriage as being important in building family stability?

It is only when it dares to be judgmental that it might change attitudes.

Meantime, it seems it is trying to do so with money and mimicry.

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