ANYONE would feel the utmost sympathy for 14-year-old Melissa Smith, the girl who had a secret abortion. But anyone who cares a jot for the life and values of our society must have nothing but contempt for the policies over 30 years which have actually caused the problems they were intended to solve.

I mean the demoralisation of sexual ethics through sex education in schools which leads youngsters into a world where right and wrong do not exist. Instead of right and wrong there is only a brutal combination of mechanistic biology and expediency. In many of our schools children are taught as follows: "You want to have sex? Then wear a condom/go on the pill. You fear you're pregnant? Take the morning after pill. You find you're having a baby? Have an abortion instead."

The truth is that the state has taken control of sex education - which was always a private matter for the individual. So now the age-old authority of parents is undermined by state and municipal authorities, which hand out contraceptives to children and facilitate abortions without the knowledge, let alone the consent, of parents.

One thing follows from this with deadly certainty: the undermining of the responsibilities which belong in the home will lead to the breakdown of sexual morality entirely. In fact, as Melissa's case shows, this has happened already.

We live in a sick, sentimental and stupid society which pretends horror at paedophilia - when the truth is it is luridly voyeuristic - but which permits 180,000 abortions every year without a single moral qualm. Have people now so little imagination to notice the similarity between killing foetuses and killing new-born babies? Think of the outrage if a new-born baby were to be discarded, chucked in the bin. And yet tens of thousands of unborn children are ripped untimely from the womb and routinely disposed of.

It's no use arguing that there are crucial differences between unborn and newly-born children. The only relevant difference - and the one which allows those who preach abortion to succeed in their satanic trade - is that the new-born baby is visible and the unborn baby isn't. But a sick, sentimental and stupid society requires only this one spurious difference in order to connive at the murder of its offspring.

The sex educators and state abortionists argue that there are many significant differences between the unborn and the new-born. They claim that the unborn child cannot survive without adult help. But neither can the new-born child.

This is the wicked reality: we kill all those unborn children because we think we have a right to sexual intercourse without accepting the consequences of that act.

Consider this instead. Gianna Beretta Molla was told that only the abortion of her foetus could save her life. She told the doctors: "If I have to choose between the life of my child and mine, then take mine and let the baby live." Last Sunday, Gianna was made a saint - that is a light in the darkness of this world, an example to us all.

* Peter Mullen is Rector of St Michael's, Cornhill, in the City of London, and Chaplain to the Stock Exchange.