How Things Have Changed!

Today's issue of my hometown newspaper carried on its front page a tragic story about a young woman from a neighboring town being killed earlier this week by a drunken driver. The reporter went on to tell about the young woman's high school successes and how she was being mourned by a large number of friends, including a fiance whom she had planned to marry this summer. Your heart has to be touched by such a promising life being cut short tragically and unnecessarily.

Then the reporter revealed one additional fact. The young woman was six weeks pregnant. My first reaction could be described by what I've heard called T.M.I. -- Too Much Information. I admit that I don't always understand the carefree attitude some in the younger generation seem to take about what, it seems to this old fogey, ought to be personal information best kept private. If this young woman and her husband-to-be wanted to share the news of their impending parenthood with friends and family, that was their business. But why did it need to be included in the lead paragraph of the story of her unfortunate death?

This may be nothing more than an example of gross insensitivity on the part of an incompetent reporter. Perhaps a grieving family feels the same revulsion I do at this fact being broadcast far and wide on the front page of the daily paper. If so, I trust they will make their opinions known to the newspaper's publisher. He is the one, after all, who has to take ultimate responsibility for his paper's descent into tabloid journalism.

But what if I'm the one who is so out-of-step in my thinking that I don't understand that things have changed so much that being pregnant outside of marriage no longer carries any stigma at all?

Young people in love have been transgressing the boundaries of both morality and propriety for a long, long time. With one notable exception, babies don't come into being without some activity by both father and mother. If that happens when mommy and daddy aren't married, the Bible word for that activity is fornication. The sin is the same whether or not a baby is made. This is basic biology and is almost as old as the human race itself.

What has changed is people's attitudes toward having babies without being married. Only a generation or so ago, the normal course of action in a situation like this would have been to move up the wedding date so that the appearance of propriety would be maintained as long as no one became too specific in referencing their calendars.

I don't intend to defend the hypocrisy and sometimes outright deception that characterized such attempts to cover up scandalous behavior. It is sinful to lie, just as it is sinful to fornicate. Nevertheless the sense of shame has been lost.

It is a good thing if babies born out of wedlock are no longer stigmatized for something that was in no way their fault. If anyone needed to wear a scarlet letter for sinful sexual behavior, it should have been the mother and the father, but never the child produced by that behavior.

However, it would be better for the souls of the parents and for the welfare of our culture if we still had a consensus of opinion that children should be conceived as an act of love within marriage. The now-widespread perception that procreation outside of marriage is something to be celebrated is an unhealthy development. No shadow of shame should be attached to the children, but neither should the behavior of the parents be condoned, much less congratulated.