There is nothing about consequentialism which distinguishes means from ends. Anything that happens is an "end" of the series of actions which produced it, even if it is not a terminal step, even if it is not intended.

When wedrifid says that the quote is "anti-consequentialism", they are saying that it refuses to weigh all of the consequences - including the good ones. The negativity of children made to cry does not obliterate the positivity of children prevented from crying, but rather must be weighed against it, to produce a sum which can be negative or positive.

To declare a consequence "unacceptable" is to say that you refuse to be consequentialist where that particular outcome is involved; you are saying that such a consequence crashes your computation of value, as if it were infinitely negative and demanded some other method of valuation, which did not use such finicky things as numbers.

But even if there is a value which is negative, and 3^^^3 times greater in magnitude than any other value, positive or negative, its negation will always be of equal and opposite value, allowing things to be weighed against each other once again. In this example, a murder might be worth -3^^^3 utilons - but preventing two murders by committing one results in a net sum of +3^^^3 utilons.

The only possible world in which one could reject every possible cause which ends in murder or children crying is one in which it is conveniently impossible for such a cause to lead to positive consequences which outweigh the negative ones. And frankly, the world we live in is not so convenient as to divide itself perfectly into positive and negative acts in such a way.