Shocking and Not So Shocking

Call it writing research if you will, but I was looking at the question of putting a father’s name on a baby’s birth certificate (not mine, I assure you) and became bombarded with websites in which unmarried women are asking about whether they should or should not put the father’s name on the birth certificate. Being naïve like I am, the thought had never crossed my mind that a mother who knew the name of the father would leave it off because she thought it would prevent him from laying claim to the baby or something like that. As I perused those websites, it shocked me how self-centered people can be. These women had not thought for what would be best for the father of their child. They had no thought for what would be best for what would be best for the child. All they cared about was what would make their own lives easier. You would think that the baby was nothing more than a possession and the baby’s father was nothing more than a means of obtaining that possession.

People find out that an unmarried woman is pregnant and they say, “She made a mistake.” That’s true, but pregnancy is not the mistake. To say that it is would be to say that a baby is a mistake and not child is a mistake. So what really gets me about these women looking to make things easier on themselves by leaving the father’s name off the birth certificate (which I doubt makes anything easier) is that they seem to think that they deserve life to be easier. The fact is that they chose to give up that right—not when they got pregnant—when they chose to have sex outside of marriage.

So many people have forgotten that it is God who designed sex and it is God who said it is only to occur within marriage. God designed marriage in such a way that the man and the woman are stuck together. They are no longer two people from different families but they are one. So when sex occurs and the woman’s midsection begins to swell, the man is stuck with her. He no longer has the option of going out and finding another woman who can get out and do the things he wants to do. When the children come and the doctor bill and the diaper bill and all the other bills start coming in, he no longer has the option of looking for a woman without children because he’s stuck with the one woman and the children that they share. While the laws require a man to pay child support, marriage is a woman’s assurance that the man will be there to take care of her. But it’s also the man’s assurance that the woman will be there for him. Whatever the laws of the land may say, when people have sex outside of marriage, it should come as no surprise when the other person up and decides to look for greener pastures. After all, they never actually committed to stay in the relationship.