Does Marriage or Sex Create Babies?

By Wendy Wright | August 8, 2012


When is the one – and only – time that abortion and family planning advocates acknowledge the procreative aspect of marriage? Not in the debate over same-sex marriage, where they scoff at such notions. Nor in conversations on the sanctity of marriage.

There is one time, however, in a twisted fashion they link marriage as the appropriate venue for childbearing. But, to do so, they bizarrely ignore biology.

Abortion and family planning advocates have so divorced sex from procreation in their minds that they now claim, when it suits them, that marriage – not sex – is the cause of conception.

This novel concept arises as an argument against early marriage. Here is an example.

The news site The Africa Report published a brief debate on The Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation Summit on Family Planning. On one side is the Director General of International Planned Parenthood Federation (which, as the old saying goes, only has a hammer – one tool in their toolkit – so to them everything looks like a nail). On the other is a doctor in Africa, someone who treats the whole person, not just their ‘sexual and reproductive’ health.

The question posed to both is “Does Africa need more investment in family planning?”

Planned Parenthood’s Tewodros Melesse answers “Yes.” His foundational argument is:

“In some communities, girls get married at a very young age, their bodies are not ready for childbearing, they can develop fistula and their chances of dying are much higher. And if the young woman dies, her child is an orphan.”

Umm, then shouldn’t Planned Parenthood advocate against early sexual activity? Au contraire. Planned Parenthood aggressively, unapologetically, even maliciously demands that young people be introduced to sexual experimentation at young ages. It is a child’s right, they argue, to engage in sex, claiming that children are sexual beings from birth. Yes, that includes infants.

To them, the inappropriate behavior is . . . marriage. They may distinguish by saying “early marriage” is the problem. But the absolute silence, nay, censoring of the connection between early sexual activity outside marriage, which they condone, and pregnancy – which they disparage both inside and outside marriage – is baffling.

Dr. Obielumani Ideh provides a terrific response to the question posed.

Contraception is a distraction: $4.6bn was committed at the Family Planning Summit in London; imagine what you could do if you invested this money in improving health care systems as a whole. Contraception will not help reduce deaths in childbirth or infant mortality: it is just a population control tool . . . Africans do not need one more pill, condom or implant to successfully plan their families. NFP [natural family planning] teaches women and their spouses to understand their own bodies and use that knowledge to both achieve and prevent pregnancy

But Planned Parenthood and their allies can’t make boatloads of money off NFP like they can from pills, condoms or implants. There would be no need for their aggressive political advocacy if people relied on natural methods or acted with dignity toward themselves and others and treated sex with holy regard.

More importantly, NFP does not fit in their radical sexual agenda that, at its heart, pits people against one another. Men and women are not humans with spirits that bond through intimacy but objects that use one another. Thus, their view of marriage itself is distorted.

Fistula and other complications of child-birth are serious problems and adolescent pregnancy can have societal as well as physical drawbacks, as Melesse notes in his full response. But this is true whether a girl is unmarried or married.

We’re just not likely to hear the family planning crowd acknowledge this. The way they deal with the consequent problems of early sexual activity is to blame marriage.

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