Tag Archives: Child Neglect

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Pro-lifers should not condone premarital sex as a pathway to marriage

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Mike Adams on abortion: click for larger image.
Mike Adams on abortion: click for larger image.

Professor Mike S. Adams is pro-life, but he posted something on Facebook that I must disagree with.

He posted this:

Over 80% of post-abortive women said they would have had the baby if the guy had been supportive. Five guys find out their girl is pregnant: The first two pressure abortion, the third walks away or was never present, the fourth sticks around for 80 to 120 days, and the fifth steps up totally. This not a woman’s problem. It is a lack-of-manhood problem.

Mike has about 5000 friends, and 44 of them liked it. I would think that most of these people would call themselves pro-life conservatives. But I don’t think what he posted promotes the pro-life cause.

I replied to him with this:

Mike I could not disagree more. It’s a woman’s problem unless it is rape, since the woman consents to sex with a man she is not married to. In fact, the cause of abortion is YOUR opinion – namely, the opinion that women should not be obligated to be chaste or to think rationally about who they are having sex with. There is a path to marriage that goes through courtship, and that path has a name: self-control. Stop enabling the poor choices of women, because we have to stop the murder of unborn children.

Many of Mike’s friends supported him. So I wrote this:

Wow. I had no idea that so many of Mike’s friends think that the Bible is a pack of lies when it says that fornication is morally wrong. I guess you guys aren’t Christians then, since you feel so free and easy about revising the Bible when you feel like it.

If fornication is wrong, it’s wrong for women AND men. And you don’t fornicate and then expect happy outcomes from it. There is a word for a person who sins and then expects a good outcome. A FOOL.

Then Mike replied to me:

Sorry Wintery. Where I come from the man leads and is, therefore, responsible.

I replied to that with this:

Mike, I agree with male leading – IF the man is a Christian. But the men that these women chose are not Christians. And you can’t expect men to act morally unless they have a theistic framework that grounds morality.

Women should not be told, by you and others, that they can choose to have sex with immoral men and then expect the immoral men to act morally. That is just enabling abortion by justifying a lack of prudence and wisdom. Instead, we should be holding women accountable to choose men who WILL control themselves.

We should not be supporting the fantasy view of love that says  that recreational sex magically leads men to commit to protect, provide and lead women for life. That view is neither wise nor Biblical. On the contrary, recreational sex leads men to NOT commit. Women have to learn how to select men, to evaluate them for marriage, and to make them prove themselves. We need to tell men AND women that sex before marriage is morally wrong. And we need to be convincing by showing them how recreational sex does not lead to stable marriages, and puts children, unborn and born, in harm’s way. Telling the truth about the danger of premarital sex is the best way to stop the killing of unborn children.

Here’s an example to make the point. We do not blame bears for mauling campers. Bears are bears, and they were bears before the campers showed up in their cave. We ought to blame the camper for choosing to wander off the trail and into the bear’s den in order to PET THE BEAR. Wild bears may eat free food that is offered to them, but they are not going to let you pet them and hug them. Women, like campers, need to be responsible. They need to choose the right man for marriage. They need to exercise self control. They need to make the man prove his ability to commit and support a family BEFORE they have sex with him. No one hires an employee without understanding what job they need done and then making sure that the candidate they choose can do the job. And that’s what we need to tell women.

Obviously, I was a little upset when I wrote that, but I hope it wasn’t too bad.

So what’s the point I was trying to make by being critical of Mike? I think the problem we have today is that men who are pro-life are unwilling to hold women accountable for their own poor decisions about sex and marriage. Basically, conservative and/or Christian men think that women don’t need to think through what choices are most likely to avoid abortion and most likely to achieve marriage. These men give tacit approval to the popular trend of trying to achieve marriage through premarital sex (or cohabitation), when the research shows that these behaviors do not result in long-lasting stable marriages. In fact, sex out of wedlock is a good way to get into a situation where an abortion will occur.

In my view, Mike is ainadvertently encouraging women to get into the situations where they will be pressured to abort by reinforcing the idea that there is nothing wrong with their plan to achieve marriage by having premarital sex (or cohabitating), and then expecting men to respond to their pregnancy by MARRYING them. Mike seems to be telling women that it is normal for them to expect that marriage will follow from premarital sex with men who have not been vetted for the roles of provider, protector and leader As if marriage is natural for men who don’t even have jobs and who are surrounded by women willing to have sex with them on the first date. Any man who will have recreational premarital sex with a woman is exactly the kind of person who will not commit to lifelong providing and fidelity – he is having sex before marriage because he wants recreation, without the commitment and self-sacrifice that marriage requires. Rationally speaking, it makes no sense for men to buy the cow, and to keep buying the cow with 40 years of labor, when they can get the milk for free. And that’s what we need to tell women – think with your minds, not with your emotions.

Here is an interesting statistic from Relevant Magazine:

[A] recent study reveals that 88 percent of unmarried young adults (ages 18-29) are having sex. The same study, conducted by The National Campaign to Prevent Teen and Unplanned Pregnancy, reveals the number doesnʼt drop much among Christians. Of those surveyed who self-identify as “evangelical,” 80 percent say they have had sex.

[…]In addition to having premarital sex, an alarming number of unmarried Christians are getting pregnant. Among unmarried evangelical women between the ages of 18 and 29, 30 percent have experienced a pregnancy (a number thatʼs actually 1 percent higher than among those who donʼt claim to be evangelical).

According to the Guttmacher Institute, nearly half of all pregnancies in America are unintended. And of those, 40 percent end in abortion. More than 1 million abortions occur in the United States each year. But perhaps the most disturbing statistic for the Church: 65 percent of the women obtaining abortions identify themselves as either Protestant or Catholic (37 percent Protestant and 28 percent Catholic). Thatʼs 650,000 abortions obtained by Christians every year.

Christian women are not told that premarital sex is wrong by many Christians and conservatives – and out of that refusal by “Christians” and “conservatives” to take a stand, we get 650,000 abortions per year. We need to have more courage to tell women to be more self-controlled and responsible when they choose who to have sex with, and when to have sex. We need to tell women to make good decisions that lead to stable marriages. We need to tell women to study these issues and to support policies that produce strong, moral men who are willing to marry – for example, by reforming education so that our schools produce men who can find jobs, perhaps by having more male teachers in the classroom. We need to tell women to support policies that make marriage more friendly for men, like abolishing no-fault divorce, and promoting shared parenting. Christians in particular need to counteract the views of love and romance that are prevalent in popular culture with a view of relationships built around chastity and love. Although many people today are uncomfortable with moral absolutes and moral judgments, it would be a good be a good idea for women to promote these things, so that the men they are choosing from are more moral.

In the end, I agree with Mike S. Adams in one respect. Abortion may be caused by a lack of manhood problem. Only the lack of manhood doesn’t come from the men that women choose to have premarital sex with. The lack of manhood comes from men who refuse to hold women accountable for their own free foolish decisions that put unborn children in harm’s way. In addition to the abortion problem that results from those foolish decisions, there is also the explosion in out-of-wedlock births to weigh in the balance. Again, the more people tell women that they should expect men who engage in recreational sex to commit to marriage after premarital sex (or cohabitation), the more fatherlessness we get.

Giddy up, Mike.

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News

Loosening of UK IVF laws causes spike in fatherless children

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Dina sent me this article from the UK Daily Mail.

Excerpt:

The number of single women and lesbian couples receiving fertility treatment has soared since the  Government took the controversial decision to remove the legal requirement for any child conceived to have a father or father figure.

In 2007, before the change in the law, only 350 single women had IVF. But by 2010, the last year for available figures, that had leapt 448 per cent to 1,571. The number of lesbian couples given IVF more than doubled in the same period, from 178 to 417. But the number of heterosexual couples treated rose by only 18 per cent.

[…]The Human Fertilisation and Embryology Act in 2008 removed the requirement for clinics to  take into account a child’s need for a father or male role model before agreeing to treatment. Instead, gay couples or individuals have to prove only that they can provide ‘supportive parenting’.

The legislation also allowed birth certificates to record  two mothers or two fathers for the first time.

One beneficiary is single mother Elizabeth Pearce, who had treatment to have her son Leo, now two. She paid £900 for sperm from an anonymous donor.

Unable to afford IVF after being made redundant from her job as a personal assistant, she cited the European Convention on Human Rights to compel her local NHS trust in Ealing, West London, to pay for her treatment.

Ms Pearce, 40, who now lives in Kent, said: ‘In an ideal world, Leo would have had a dad but that’s not the way things worked out. Single women have as much right to a child as couples.’

Natalie Woods and Betty Knowles, from Brighton, were the first lesbian couple to have a child that listed them both as parents on the birth certificate.

Ms Woods, 40, who had IVF and gave birth to daughter Lily-May in 2010, said: ‘The legal changes have given a clear message that it is OK to parent without a father. What’s important is that there are either one or two big hearts filled with love for your children.’

Keep in mind that IVF is completely taxpayer-funded in the UK. Families where the man works and the wife stays home with the children are forced to subsidize IVF treatments for single women through the UK’s very progressive income tax code.

Just in case anyone needs a refresher, here are some statistics showing the harm that fatherlessness causes little boys and girls. It’s also important to realize that IVF typically results in some number embryos being thrown away because they are not wanted. So not only are there harmful effects on children caused by the fatherlessness, but there may also be the killing of innocent unborn children when discarding unwanted embryos. And if that were not enough, keep in mind that marriage prevents abuse of women and children as well as child poverty, according to the evidence we have.

Commentary

Is there a war on women? Who started it?

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A few decades back, a vocal minority of women decided to revolt against chastity, small government, low taxes, marriage, courtship, and motherhood. They decided that it was better to be able to have recreational sex before marriage, to put their own careers ahead of motherhood, to liberalize divorce laws, to pay women to have children without being married, to vote for higher taxes, to expand government to offer social programs and redistribution schemes, and to assault the traditional gender roles of husbands and fathers. Most men had nothing to do with starting this revolution, but men in general went along with it because they wanted freely available recreational sex more than they wanted children to be safe in stable, married homes.

In the end, the vocal minority of women managed to convince the majority of women and men to accept their views in large part, and society has changed. And we can see the end of the revolution in the face of Sandra Fluke – the “victim” of the” conservative war on women” – as she pleads with Congress to force taxpayers to subsidize contraceptives, abortions, etc., so that women can substitute chastity, courtship, marriage and motherhood with recreational sex, careers and subsidized day care.

Has this change in society made women happy? Let’s see what the research says.

Mary Eberstadt writes in the Wall Street Journal.

Excerpt:

This brings us to Myth No. 4, which is perhaps the most interesting one of all: The sexual revolution has made women happier.

Granted, happiness is a personal, imponderable thing. But if the sexual revolution has really made women as happy as feminists say, a few elementary questions beg to be answered.

Why do the pages of our tonier magazines brim with mournful titles like “The Case for Settling” and “The End of Men”? Why do websites run by and for women focus so much on men who won’t grow up, and ooze such despair about relations between the sexes?

Why do so many accomplished women simply give up these days and decide to have children on their own, sometimes using anonymous sperm donors, thus creating the world’s first purposely fatherless children? What of the fact, widely reported earlier this week, that 26% of American women are on some kind of mental-health medication for anxiety and depression and related problems?

Or how about what is known in sociology as “the paradox of declining female happiness”? Using 35 years of data from the General Social Survey, two Wharton School economists, Betsey Stevenson and Justin Wolfers, made the case in 2009 that women’s happiness appeared to be declining over time despite their advances in the work force and education.

The authors noted that women (and men) showed declining happiness during the years studied. Though they were careful not to draw conclusions from their data, is it not reasonable to think that at least some of that discontent comes from the feeling that the grass is greener elsewhere—a feeling made plausible by the sexual revolution?

However one looks at the situation, it seems difficult to argue that the results of the revolution have been a slam-dunk for happiness.

It is always hard to disentangle the weeds from the plants in such a large field. But if the sexual revolution has made women so happy, we can at least ask what it would look like for them to be unhappy. A broader inquiry might yield some results worth thinking about, in contrast to the shortsighted political theatrics over a supposed “war on women.”

It’s not only women who are victims of feminism, but children, too. The wife of one of my closest friends gave me Mary Eberstadt’s book on daycare’s effects on children, which is entitled “Home Alone America“. I thought it was a pretty good read, and it shows the importance of not allowing children to come home to an empty home. It’s not good for children to live in households where they are left unattended. But feminism supported that, too.

UPDATE: Donald Sensing pointed me to this post on his blog where he wonders why Democrat elites cannot understand why some women are rebelling against the sexual revolution, and get quite concerned by all of the massive costs of providing women with consequence-free sex.

Excerpt:

“Basic health care” for women, in Democrat lexicon, means nothing at all but being given free contraceptives and abortifacients or abortions. That’s it. In their mind, American women should not think of health care primarily in other terms.

[…]In the Democrat mind, sex without sex’s consequences are the only thing that women should think about when they approach a voting booth. [Liberal women in the media] actually think that unless the government makes sure that women’s sex lives are unencumbered, then a woman simply cannot manage her job,  housing or children. Sex rules all else.

The Democrat party truly cannot comprehend a woman going to vote who is more concerned about the dent in her paycheck caused by $5-per-gallon gasoline than finding free condoms, or who worries about the future impoverishment of her children and grandchildren because of Obama’s borrow and spend binges more than she worries about buying the Pill, or whose most pressing concern is not sexual liberty, but a college-graduate son or daughter who has moved back to live with mom because s/he can’t find a job and therefore can’t make student loan payments and rent at the same time.

Not in the Dems’ world view is a woman who pays her mortgage every month but who knows that her home’s market value is less than the mortgage principal remaining, and stupidly thinks that this is more important to her future (and thus her voting) than getting morning-after pills. There is no room in Democrat gender-identity politics for a woman who has been married to one man for 35 years and so never thinks about getting free contraceptives or an abortion (that is, what Dems say is “basic health care”) but who is intensely concerned with her elderly parents’ net worth falling as inflation rises.

No, these women simply do not authentically exist in the Democrat universe. Such women simply have not heard the full message that there should be nothing more important to a woman than sex, sex, sex.

To the Democrat party, women are simply sex objects, though with political and statist rather than fleshly purposes. But objects is all they are.

I hope that more women start voting for marriage and family again, and give up on recreational sex. It’s not working for anyone.