Save It Till The Morning After

In addition to a book review elsewhere in the same paper, destroying the cult of Eric Hobsbawm by rightly asking why pro-Nazi writers are not indulged in the same way as pro-Soviet ones are, Peter Hitchens writes:

By treating human beings as if they were laboratory rats, we have tried for decades to coax and corral them into sensible behaviour. This idea is called ‘harm reduction’ and lies behind the stupid, failed policies that have led to epidemic drug-taking and promiscuity. It assumes people will do bad and stupid things, and that they should be helped to do them as safely as possible. I regard it as immoral and repulsive. But who cares what I think? Even so, perhaps they should begin to wonder if we moral dinosaurs have a point.

A keystone of the harm-reduction policy has been the free, easy issue of the ‘morning-after pill’. Abortion on demand had somehow failed to reduce the number of unwanted pregnancies. How about issuing to human females a drug originally designed for female pedigree dogs, to rid them of the unwanted consequences of street encounters with mongrel males? Earlier research has already suggested that, as the scientists delicately put it, ‘the increase in pregnancy rates from, for example, greater sexual activity may cancel out reductions in pregnancy rates from greater use of Emergency Birth Control’. Or, as I would put it, the knowledge that a one-night stand need have no consequences will increase the number of one-night stands.

But now Professors Sourafel Girma and David Paton, from Nottingham University, have gone a stage further. Schemes to make morning-after pills more readily available have, they say, been followed by more diagnoses of sexually transmitted infections. The meaning of this is clear. More pills mean more promiscuity. ‘Harm reduction’, as usual, has increased harm. We are not laboratory rats, or dogs, but human beings with the ability to make moral choices. And the last people to grasp this will be those who govern this country.