With the news of Bristol Palin's pregnancy her mother's advocacy of abstinence education has come under some scrutiny.
Those who oppose abstinence-only education make the argument that kids are going to engage in sexual behavior no matter what they're told so we should give them the means to prevent being "punished with a baby", to use Barack Obama's infelicitous phrase.
This argument seems a little like telling youngsters that they shouldn't shoplift, but since a lot of kids are going to do it anyway, we should give them a coat with deep pockets so they're less likely to get caught. Or they shouldn't speed, but since they're going to do it anyway we should give them a radar detector so they don't get punished with a ticket.
To say that something is wrong, but that as parents and schools we're going to help facilitate the doing of it, is to send our kids a pretty confusing message.
The surest way not to get arrested for shop-lifting is to refrain from shop-lifting. The surest way to not lose your license for speeding is to not speed. The surest way to not get pregnant is to not have sex.
There's a tacit assumption at work among those who say that we should face the reality and acknowledge that kids will have sex anyway and that we should therefore give them the means to protect against pregnancy. That assumption is that there's nothing wrong with sex outside of marriage except that an unwanted pregnancy might result.
I think that assumption is simply wrong. When we decouple sex from commitment, when we make sex a form of recreation, a number of harmful effects follow. Surely, the morally desperate condition of contemporary society is prima facie evidence that somewhere along the line we've gone terribly wrong with regard to our thinking about sexuality.
Mary Eberstadt at First Things writes compellingly that we are reaping the bitter fruit of our divorce of sex from procreation. I don't know about that, but certainly separating sex from commitment, particularly marital commitment, has been a disaster. It has resulted in a long litany of social problems and dysfunctions - everything from rape, sexual assault, sexual harassment, a million and a half abortions a year, the objectification of women, marital infidelity, spouse abuse, illegitimacy, child sexual abuse, STDs, broken homes, shattered lives, and the general sleazification of our culture.
Many social problems that seem superficially unrelated to sex are, in fact, the consequence of a sexually permissive culture. Crime and academic failure, for example, are much more common among fatherless young men, but many children are fatherless because men are no longer required to commit themselves to a woman in order to have sexual access to her.
When sex is isolated from profound commitment people tend to lose respect for each other, their relationship changes, they often find themselves quarreling more frequently, trust between them diminishes, and if and when the relationship ends, one person, often the girl, feels used and embittered. I think it was C.S. Lewis who wrote that the question, "Will you still respect me in the morning?" has become a cliché because the concern is so real.
We call it "making love", but sex apart from commitment is rarely about love despite what the participants tell themselves and each other. The harmful consequences are far-reaching, both emotionally and physically, and the rewards, such as they are, are ephemeral and uncertain.
To think that the only hazard of a physical relationship with someone to whom there is no commitment is an unintended pregnancy is, in my opinion, terribly naive.
RLC