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Love and Marriage, Horse and Carriage

Up until recently pretty much everyone knew that marriage and family go together, and more specifically, that sexual intercourse and reproduction go together. Most folks recognised that sexuality and children were best safeguarded within the institution of marriage.

Marriage was viewed as the place where human sexuality was regulated and protected, and any children which came forth from such a union were best raised in a married household. Up until a few short decades ago most folks thought this way.

Even the UN thought along these lines. Consider the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, adopted by the United Nations General Assembly in 1948. In Article 16 (1) we find these words: “Men and women of full age, without any limitation due to race, nationality or religion, have the right to marry and to found a family.”

Marriage first, family second. They go together. The old Frank Sinatra song got it right:

Love and marriage, love and marriage
Go together like a horse and carriage
This I tell you brother
You can’t have one without the other

Love and marriage, love and marriage
It’s an institute you can’t disparage
Ask the local gentry
And they will say it’s elementary

Try, try, try to separate them
It’s an illusion
Try, try, try, and you will only come
To this conclusion

Love and marriage, love and marriage
Go together like a horse and carriage
Dad was told by mother
You can’t have one without the other

But today far too many people think you can have one without the other. Modern contraceptives, including the 1960 development that shook the world, the Pill, managed to separate sexual intercourse from reproduction. One could have sex with reckless abandon, and not worry – at least as much – about the consequences (babies).

And soon afterwards reproduction was separated from sexual intercourse. With all the various new Assisted Reproductive Technologies we could create (manufacture) babies without human sexuality, or at least several steps away from it.

What had gone together like horse and carriage for millennia had now been radically put asunder. All this has opened up a can of worms which continues to spiral out of control. The sexual revolution of the 60s has unleashed tremendous damage on everyone: women, men, children and society.

I have written on the negative consequences of all this often. And in my forthcoming book on IVF and surrogacy I will spend a whole lot more time documenting the many real harms of all this. But on a daily basis we see the headlines in the media about where this sexual Brave New World is taking us.

Let me just offer a few vignettes as recently reported in our newspapers. Consider first this bizarre headline: “Rise of the virgin birth”. The story begins as follows:

Dozens of young heterosexual women have had virgin births after undergoing IVF in Britain, it has been reported.
Four major British IVF firms said they had assisted in such cases, with doctors suggesting there have been at least 25 such births in the past five years.
Fertility doctors said single women who had never had sexual intercourse were seeking donor-assisted treatment – at a cost of around £5,000 – because they wanted to have a child now and save sex for a “special relationship”. Others said most of their cases involved women with a fear of sex.
The decision to provide fertility treatment in such cases came under fire from religious groups, who said it undermined the importance of bringing up children in stable marriages. Psychotherapists questioned whether children would be damaged by being brought up by mothers who had never had a relationship.
Care Fertility, which runs five centres across England, is among those reporting such cases. Maha Ragunath, medical director of its clinic in Nottingham, said: “The number of single women I see has doubled over the last decade and single women now account for at least ten per cent of my patients. A lot of them are very young, in their 20s, sometimes studying or doing very ordinary jobs and often living with their parents, rather than career women who have been driven and focused too much on their work.”
“When I ask them why they are coming for treatment, very often the response is that they are ready to have a child and they don’t want to wait around for the right partner to come along,” she told the Mail on Sunday. “A small percentage have never been in a relationship and never had sexual intercourse,” she said.

Children are now merely a commodity. Singles may want a new downtown apartment, a flashy new sports car, or a new baby of their own. All they need is the money and all this can be theirs. Never mind the rights of a child to be raised by his or her own biological mother and father.

Selfish adults aided and abetted by the new ART can simply order a baby as they would a milkshake at McDonald’s or a book at amazon. Single-parent families by demand are now in, and who gives a rip about the wellbeing of the child? As long as the adults are happy.

As another case in point, I just recently wrote about the notorious one-child policy of China, and how they have just ‘relaxed’ this to a two-child policy. This coercive population control program was of course accompanied and carried out by horrific forced abortions and forced sterilisations.

As bad as it all was, we still have human-hating elites in the West who fully support such aims. One US academic thinks it is a shame that China has abandoned this policy, and claims that all people have a moral obligation to have no more than one child.

Bowdoin College philosophy prof Sarah Conly recently had a piece in the Boston Globe entitled “Here’s why China’s one-child policy was a good thing”. She offers the usual alarmism about an overcrowded earth with not enough resources and says we must act now.

While she pays lip service to China’s “unacceptable ways” of enforcing its policies, she obviously thinks China was the role model here, and we all should follow suit. After offering the usual list of gloom, doom and catastrophe if we don’t act immediately, she writes, “Given the damage we are causing, and the suffering we foresee for all those who live after us, it is clear that having more than one child is just something that none of us — Chinese or American — has a moral right to do.”

Of course alarmists like Paul Ehrlich made false predictions a half century ago along the same lines as Conly, and both have recommended extreme measures to save the planet. And both used emotive and chicken little language to push their radical coercive agendas. Conly closed her piece this way:

It’s new for us to think of something as immediately joyful as childbearing as harmful, and it’s hard to change our ideas when we are confronted with new circumstances. This is natural. Natural, but dangerous. We’re in a different world, a world of 7.3 billion and counting, and we need to recognize that and act accordingly. The job of government is not just to give present citizens anything they may want, but to pave the way for a prosperous, stable society for future citizens. Any kind of one-child policy will be unattractive, but the alternative looks to be worse.

Leave it to our elites to pretend to love humanity all the while really showing how much they hate humans. Commenting on her proposal, Wesley J Smith replied: “China has ended its tyrannical one-child policy. Not because it was a profound violation of human rights. The Chinese Communist Party could give a fig about human rights. No, the policy was ended because it hurt China.”

He concluded his article this way:

Even the barbarous abuses in China (far worse than “unacceptable”) did not reduce the number of people in that country. Just slowed the rate of population growth. To really reduce the world’s population would require unremitting tyranny and population cleansings. And here’s the thing: I fear that liberal want-to-be population controllers would willingly engage the most brutal forms of coercion, as we saw last century in the eugenics movement, which was a progressive cause. After all, there’s a planet to save! They just won’t say it.

Yep. On the one hand we have singles demanding their right to a baby with no strings attached, while on the other we have academics telling us how evil we are to want to have babies. This is one seriously messed up world we have, and in both cases babies are the real losers.

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/health/news/11894571/Rise-of-the-virgin-birth-four-IVF-clinics-admit-taking-on-such-cases.html
http://www.nationalreview.com/corner/426406/professors-calls-world-one-child-policy-wesley-j-smith

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