Tag Archives: Contraception

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Marcia Segelstein’s article on chastity in the newest issue of Salvo magazine

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Here’s the article that is available online on the Salvo Magazine web site.

Here’s a bit about the author, Marcia Segelstein:

Marcia Segelstein, a senior editor of Salvo, is a part-time writer and a full-time mother. A former senior producer for CBS News, she has also written for First Things, Touchstone, and OneNewsNow.

And here’s a snippet from the article:

Dr. Jenell Williams Paris is the author of The End of Sexual Identity: Why Sex Is Too Important to Define Who We Are. She told Relevant that Christians need more than rules to live chastely. What’s often missing, Paris believes, is a compelling story and an understanding of the “whys” behind the rules. To explain what she means, she uses the example of parents teaching their little girl to look both ways before crossing a street:

A young child may follow this rule solely because of the power of her parents’ authority, which is appropriate. As she grows, the child [continues to look both ways,] but for a deeper reason that she owns for herself. She sees the broader context of traffic, understands the benefits and dangers, and makes choices accordingly. Rules are external and authority-bound: Maturity requires knowledge of why to do the right thing, not just what the right thing is.

Chris Jessee is the Youth and Family Pastor at First Baptist Church in Waynesville, Ohio. Last year, he organized an event in conjunction with True Love Waits, an organization that promotes abstinence till marriage, and several area churches. Unlike other such events he’s been involved with, he included parents in this one. “Every year we did True Love Waits without the parents, we were missing out on a critical aspect of it,” he explained in an interview. “I believe parents are the key element when it comes to discussions of purity with teens.”

In his view, the church’s role should be to encourage and train parents to address abstinence issues with their children. Echoing Dr. Paris’s approach, Jessee believes a critical aspect of that training is providing both parents and their teens with the “whys” they need to defend their faith and its practices. Merely laying out the rules isn’t enough.

Statistics back up Jessee’s views on the crucial role of parents. A study conducted by the National Campaign to Prevent Teen and Unplanned Pregnancy, titled “With One Voice 2010,” asked teens aged 12 to 19 who is most influential when it comes to decisions about sex. Almost half, 46 percent, said their parents were most influential, with friends coming in second at 20 percent.

That’s exactly right – we need to have reasons and evidence when talking about chastity – and call young people up to a higher standard of romance, intimacy and commitment. They need to know what they are getting by embracing chastity, and not just what they are giving up. On my blog, I often post about the research that shows the benefits of chastity, as in this previous post. I love chastity and I highly recommend it – especially to Christian men.

And yes – I really did write the sidebar for this article, and you can see it online. The sidebar is about practical tips for chastity. It’s based on some of my previous posts on how to be chaste. The older I get, the more I thank God that I still have my wits about me when it comes to women. Chastity allows you to be very circumspect about women and to make sure that they really are as good as you think they are and that they really can do the things that you need them to do in a marriage.

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What causes women to become single mothers by choice? Are men to blame?

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Dina sent me this revealing article from the UK Daily Mail. It answers the question “Where does fatherlessness come from?”.

Excerpt:

My marriage ended, without rancour or argument, 18 months after it had begun. There was no recrimination, just a realisation, as sharp as physical pain, that we would never — could never — agree on one fundamental point.

I wanted children; my husband Anthony did not. You may think we should have resolved this crucial issue long before we bought a house and vowed to spend the rest of our lives together, but love had a way of blinding us to the depth of our disagreement.

By “love” she means three things: 1) he was physically attractive, 2) she became sexually active with him after one month of meeting him, and 3) she moved in with him before he made a commitment to marriage and parenting. (As we shall see) As far as I can tell, she spent her late 20s to mid 30s with this guy – a guy she chose of her own free will. A guy who never indicated any interest in children, but who indicated plenty of interest in recreational sex.

More:

Today, I am 37 and a single mum to gorgeous three-month-old twin boys Charlie and William. They were conceived through IVF, using my eggs and sperm from an anonymous donor, and the love I feel for them is all-consuming.

[…]Anthony, a policeman, was easy and fun; we chatted comfortably together, and when we started dating I was impressed by his integrity. He had passionate views about fairness and loyalty. He was attractive, too — tall, dark hair, blue eyes — and I felt we could build a loving relationship together.

“Easy and fun” = no divisive truth claims, no moral judgments, no moral boundaries, no goals, no plans, no expectations, no obligations. Perfect! The modern feminist ideal.

More:

After a month or so, our physical relationship began, but we did not rush things. It was a couple of years before he moved into my flat in Crawley, West Sussex, and I expected we’d eventually marry and have kids.

Looking back, I suppose I should have heeded the warning signals. When I broached the subject of children, he stalled. His stock reply was: ‘We’ll have them later.’

So although he was non-committal, I loved him and assumed that his paternal instinct would kick in as he grew older. But the years passed and I was not reassured.

She thinks that a man who agrees to recreational sex after a month and then agrees to cohabitation after two years is the kind of man who is capable of making a lifelong commitment to be faithful to her and to raise children. That strikes me as equivalent to saying that a man whose favorite movie is Top Gun would also make a good airline pilot.

More:

And then I reached 30. My friends were marrying; settling into comfortable domesticity, preparing for parenthood, and Anthony and I were still in this limbo.

[…]Then my best friend announced she was pregnant and the joy I felt for her was tainted by Anthony’s absence of commitment to the idea of having children with me. So we had another discussion — this time, it was a passionate one. ‘It’s a deal-breaker,’ I said. ‘Much as I love you, if you don’t want children we can’t carry on.’

But, again, he assured me that it would all happen. I just had to bide my time.

So I waited until Anthony was 30, an age when I felt he was old enough to settle down. We loved each other whole-heartedly; we’d bought two successive homes together and the understanding was implicit: my future was bound up in his.

[…]I wanted so much to believe he would warm to the idea, but Anthony equivocated. He still wasn’t ready, he protested.

[…]But then Anthony demonstrated just how strong his aversion to babies was. We were visiting a friend who’d recently given birth and, when her baby cried, Anthony made his excuses and went home.

‘I just can’t stand the sound of that crying,’ he said testily when I confronted him later. ‘If we had a baby, I’d have to move out for the first six weeks.’

It wasn’t a propitious sign, but eventually he seemed to soften.

‘If we’re going to have children, we’ll have to get married first,’ he said the next time I raised the subject, and for once I agreed absolutely. We should get married; by making a public commitment to stay together for the rest of our lives, we would be taking the first step towards establishing a secure home for our future babies.

[…]After six months as man and wife, there had been no mention from Anthony of children. So one day, as we walked home from town, I broached the subject again.

‘We can’t afford to have children,’ he responded sharply and, rather than discuss the topic further, he marched off ahead of me.

[…]This was not the life I had planned for myself: for the first time I started to feel anger towards Anthony. I felt he had forced this situation onto me.

Have no fear, the government was there to give her taxpayer-funded IVF and single mother welfare payments, free day care, free public schools, and free health care. After all, none of this was her fault. It was all that beastly man’s fault. It’s nothing that can’t be solved by taking a little money from the other single men’s pockets, though. After all, if they have less money, that will make them even MORE likely to marry and conceive children. Anthony couldn’t afford to have children, so the solution to that is to tax all the other men so that they can’t afford to have children. Fatherless children impose enormous costs on society as well, most directly through increased crime. But who cares? As long as this woman gets what she wants, right?

And it goes on and on and on, with feminists completely ignorant about how they are causing their own messes with their support for wealth redistribution and their own irresponsible choices with men. He was attractive though. Very attractive. I’m sure her friends were all impressed and envious of her on the wedding day. After all, if a man has a square jaw and enjoys recreational sex, that is a clear sign he is ready for marriage and parenting. Right?

News

5,300 UK teens who aborted a baby in 2010 had at least one prior abortion

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Dina sent me this disturbing article from the UK Telegraph.

Excerpt:

Pro-life campaigners said young women were being ”let down in an appalling way” after it emerged three of the 38,269 teenagers who had a termination in 2010 had undergone the procedure at least seven times.

NHS figures released to the Press Association under the Freedom of Information Act show another two teenage girls had their seventh abortion in 2010, the most recent year for which data is available, while four more teenagers had a termination for the sixth time.

Fourteen teenage girls had their fifth abortion in 2010, 57 teens had a termination for the fourth time and 485 women aged 19 or under went through the procedure for a third time.

Rebecca Mallinson, of the Pro Life Alliance, said: ”There is something seriously wrong with a country where teenagers are having even one abortion, let alone repeat abortions to this extent.

“We are failing these young people in an appalling way, and storing up serious sexual health problems for the future, whether the direct issue of sexually transmitted diseases, but also the effects that multiple abortions can have on future fertility.

[…]Of the abortions carried out on teenage girls in 2010, more than 5,300 were on teenagers who had already had at least one termination.

In the UK, taxpayers are forced to provide free abortions as part of their government-run socialist health care system. Many Christian voters are OK with subsidizing abortions because they think that wealth redistribution is a good idea. They think that people should be able to live any way they want, disregarding morality, and then have someone else violate their conscience in order to pay for the messes that result. It’s just wrong, but many Christians who care more about feelings than economics support it. They think that paying for someone else’s murders is “fairness”.

Christians should support individual charity, and the best way to support that is to let people keep more of their own money and give them tax deductions for charitable contributions. Whenever you get a secular government involved in helping others, it quite often just makes it easier for them to sin and to do harm. Thoughtful Christians should not support that. When you make sin “free” for someone by paying the costs, they will sin even more. We should never make it easier for people to sin. The first rule of sound economics – which Christians should know – is that when you subsidize a behavior, you get more of that behavior.

If you want to help someone in trouble, then use your own money – don’t take someone else’s money through taxes. People who make mistakes learn not to make them when they are accountable to the person who bails them out of it. There has to be oversight over how charity is being done at the individual level – not everyone deserves charity just because they are in a jam. Only if they have learned their lesson should they get it – go and sin no more, as Jesus says. That’s why individual charity is morally superior to government-run social programs. In a very real sense, Christians who claim to be pro-life can actually be pro-abortion in practice when they make it easier for women to have abortions.

In a previous post, I also wrote about how Christians should not tell women that premarital sex is a valid pathway to marriage – that men can be shamed and coerced into marriage after recreational sex with slogans like “man up”. That’s another mistake that many pastors make that increases the number of abortions. We have to start thinking things through if we are going to stop abortion.