Tony Abbott, an Australian MP and federal Health Minister, asks why the number and rate of abortions in Australia is not viewed as a national tragedy. He notices that while there are initiatives aimed at stopping teenage smoking, there seems to be an implicit understanding that teenagers will have sex. There is no questioning of this, nor are there efforts to educate teenagers on the consequences of sexual activity.

Why isn’t the fact that 100,000 women choose to end their pregnancies regarded as a national tragedy approaching the scale, say, of Aboriginal life expectancy being 20 years less than that of the general community? No one wants to recreate the backyard abortion clinic (or to stigmatise the millions of Australians who have had abortions or encouraged others to do so). But is it really so hard to create a culture where people understand that actions have consequences and take their responsibilities seriously?

The same questions can be asked here in America. Only the scale here is more than 10 times that of Australia.
Actions and consequences. Two words that are very nearly foreign to most of us. Especially the latter. Forgetting the moral aspect of it for a second, just take the physical ‘consequences’. Pregnancy. Disease. Health risks in general. Then there are the social ‘consequences’. Single motherhood. Disease. Poverty. Crime. A society of children raising children.
Children don’t often understand consequences. When first confronted with a hot stove, a child doesn’t realize that touching it will cause great pain. Children have parents, therefore, to guide them, to teach them about cause and effect, action and consequence.
The liberalizing of the world has created more need than ever. By disposing of connections between the moral and the physical choice, Liberals also destroyed the ethos of personal and social responsibility. They fooled us into thinking consequence was a figment of our imagination; a stove with no fire inside it. Now the policy is catch-up, or maintenance, not prevention.
And 1.2 million babies are destroyed; we have millions of girls and women whose lives are burnt each year. They held their hand on the stove, and now they look to society for healing. Of course we tell them the easy way out.
Wouldn’t it be nice if we could teach them not to touch the stove at all?