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Unmarried Parents [1]
Sir: Becoming in middle age an addict of your correspondence columns (less strenuous than sex or alcohol, less debilitating than TV-watching) I have followed with interest a recent discussion of illegitimacy. There are some points I would like to contribute to this discussion:
| (a) | It seems to me that our young people are trapped in a cruel contradiction. On the one hand, the Christian ethic of total premarital celibacy has not been abandoned, at least subconsciously. I think it is a hard ethic for even a conscious and committed Christian to adhere to; and an impossible ethic if one is muddled about it. On the other hand, the notion of ‘situational ethics’ has certainly caught on among the young; and also, less openly, among many of their elders. For a young girl it means in practice, ‘If I love him, I may sleep with him; if I don’t, I won’t.’ Yet if she becomes pregnant the same girl may have to bear the full brunt of the condemnation of her relatives and neighbours, derived obscurely (and, I think, uncharitably) from the ancient Christian ethic held in peculiar isolation from the corpus of Christian doctrine and social teaching. We can’t both have our cake and eat it. Either we must go back to the full Christian doctrine and practice; or else we must re-examine our attitude to pre-marital sexuality in general and illegitimacy in particular. |
| (b) | Your correspondents seem on the whole to adopt a clinical view of the matter. This view advocates either pre-marital celibacy on the grounds of safety for oneself and one’s possible partner, or pre-marital sexuality allied page 369 with birth-control. I doubt if the first alternative is really workable outside the full Christian framework. It is in effect a much disguised version of Christian celibacy. The second has its hidden difficulties. It sets aside the possibility that many young girls may in fact secretly desire to be pregnant. Surely, when the cards are so stacked against them socially, the fact that so many unmarried women do not practise birth control may indicate that they find the clinical approach obnoxious. We could try to find out why this is so. |
| (c) | To some extent the experience of sexual love and a safety-first approach are incompatible. The sense, at least for the moment, of a wholehearted and uninhibited self-giving in the sexual act seems for many people a necessary human experience. Granted the tragic side of it – betrayals, abandonment, illegitimacy, personal bitterness – there remains latent in most people, and strongest among the young, the notion that one’s love-life is a kind of wild game preserve, the last place where the elk and the moose and the mountain lion can be seen in their natural habitat. Old people looking back on life often see the love faults of their youth in a curiously uncondemnatory way, as if to say, ‘At least I tried for a little to be wholly alive.’ Admittedly to teach a child his homework or to work overtime to pay off one’s income tax may be more permanent and adult expressions of love; but the notion of ‘wild love’ (propounded by A.R.D. Fairburn in one of his most eloquent poems) is an ingredient in most of our lives; and it is not compatible with that prudent, clinical approach which is perhaps unavoidable in the married state. |
| (d) | But what about the child? Yes; what about the child? Shakespeare remarked that love children are often handsomer and livelier than their fellows conceived in habit, ‘between sleep and waking’ – our ancestors, who called illegitimate children ‘love children’, were perhaps wiser than us. If six out of every ten children born first in New Zealand families were conceived before marriage, well, this may at least show that most of our marriages begin with some kind of love, however they meander later on. And if one in every five births is going to be illegitimate is a change of heart impossible? Can we not become a little more Polynesian? Can we not welcome, protect, console, befriend and wholly accept unmarried mothers and their children? Our hearts are terribly uneducated. A young child is a miracle, whether it is legitimate or just a love child. |
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