Authors-choice: Hope & Revival

That’s a social revolution of unprecedented proportions. Never in the history of mankind has the divorce rate doubled in a short 10 to 15 year period. Why did it? Robert Michael, an economist from the University of Chicago, studied this phenomenon. As an economist he was interested because divorce, just like unwed pregnancy, is terrible for the economy. For some extended period of time people who are in divorced households often live on about half the income they had prior to the divorce. As an economist Professor Michael finds financial explanations most persuasive for explaining the increase in the incidence of divorce. He says that he has the data to show that couples who have a baby in the first two years of marriage and another one in the next two years – two babies in the first four years of marriage – have marriages that will last a lot longer than those who don’t. He explains that women who have babies early in the marriage become financially dependent upon their husbands. Even if things are going badly in the marriage, they’re going to stick it out and work at the marriage because a woman with babies at home needs the support of her husband. Now women are delaying childbearing until four or five years into the marriage. By that time a woman is established in her own career. She’s financially independent and so if the marriage goes badly and there are no children, she can kick her husband out. Even if they do eventually have children, she’s established herself in a career and she can take care of the children.

I suspect there is great deal of truth in Professor Michael’s explanations but I would like to suggest a few others. I think that when people have babies, they become much better people. In another talk I claim that the purpose of children is to make adults out of their parents. In fact, a person married to a parent is married to a better person. Being a parent nearly forces the parents to acquire certain virtues. Parents must become more disciplined, more charitable, more responsible, more hard-working. It’s hard work to get up in the middle of the night to take care of someone who’s crying and to change diapers and to plan for college and all the rest. That’s hard work. Both spouses take life more seriously. It’s as natural as can be.

One of my favorite people on the face of the earth is the first time father. I have had the great privilege and pleasure of seeing several of my male friends shortly after their first baby was born. Within about three sentences they all say the same thing. They float about 2 or 3 feet off the ground, they’re kind of dazed and they say: “Everything is different now.” And they mean it. Yesterday they didn’t care how good the school system is, who the chief of police is, whether the playgrounds are safe. Now that they have a baby, they do. They want to make this world safe for their children.

Robert Michael also says that adultery has skyrocketed since contraception has come on the scene. Can anybody figure out why that might be the case? If 80 percent of women are using some form of contraception, that makes a lot of women and a lot of men think that there is no problem with having sex with someone who is married to someone else. Many people had multiple sexual partners before they married. They don’t see any particular reason to stop after they get married. Because, you see, sex was no big deal before they got married. There’s no particular reason to think that it’s a big deal after marriage. Before marriage, sex was not an expression of lifetime love. Sex was not exclusive before marriage. It was just a fun thing to do with another person. How, when you get married, do you all of a sudden turn sexual intercourse into something that is profound, something that is a deep, intimate, exclusive expression of love for one person? How to do that 180-degree turn?

That’s why I want to talk about natural sex – which is not what people in our culture are having. The pattern in marriage in our culture is this: people have generally three sexual partners or more before they get married. Most people have sex in high school. If not in high school, certainly before they leave college. Maybe by the time they leave college, they are on their second or third partner. They split up with their current partner because there’s no real relationship there. Now they are out in the real world and it’s hard to find somebody. They start dating, pretty quickly they have sex, if not right away, eventually. Before long they are spending all their time at his place or hers. So they move in with each other. Why pay rent on two places? After a period of time people are saying: “When are the two of you going to get married?” The couple looks at each other and say: “Why don’t we get married? The sex is pretty good; we don’t fight that much; and who wants to start all over again?” That’s what I call “sliding into marriage.”

Currently people have had several sexual partners before marriage: some of those break-ups were accompanied with some degree of heartbreak, probably much confusion, perhaps some regret and guilt. Nearly everyone brings some sexual “baggage” in a marriage. Nearly all of the sexual intercourse they have ever had and will ever have is contracepted sexual intercourse. They contracepted before marriage and after marriage. Within marriage, they stop for a short period of time to conceive a child and then contracept again. Then they stop for a short period of time to conceive child number two. Then they get sterilized and then they get divorced. That’s the pattern in our culture, over and over again. People have had a very short period of time, if any, of what I want to call natural sex. They have never had a prolonged period of sex with someone whom they deeply love, to whom they have made a lifetime commitment, and with whom they are open to having children. Most of their sex life is contracepted, some of it in an uncertain relationship.

After one of my talks a man came up to me and said you missed a step in that little story you told. He said after the vasectomy or tubal ligation, one or other of the spouses often engages in an adulterous affair. He said he saw it at his place of work all the time. Man after man came in after he had a vasectomy and before long he was having an affair and before long he was divorced.

What you need to know is that couples using natural family planning almost never divorce. This is the biggest selling point of natural family planning when I’m talking to college students. The fact is, young people hate divorce. Either they’ve grown up in divorced households and they know the pain of divorce very personally or their friends have. Even if a couple has been married for 25 or 30 years and they think they are never going to get divorced, their kids don’t think that. The kids know someone else at school who went home and dad was packing up or mom was gone and they think it could happen to anybody. And so they’re living in this very fragile world. “Yeah, I don’t think Mom and Dad are going to get divorced, but Kevin didn’t think his mom and dad were going to get divorced either and they did.”

There is also an amazing difference for couples who don’t have sex before marriage. People who don’t have sex before marriage have an immensely lower divorce rate. Abstaining before marriage is one of the surest predictors of not getting a divorce. There is a study that shows that of people who were born between 1933 and 1943, 83 percent of the males were virgins when they got married and 93 percent of the females were virgins when they got married. And every decade thereafter it goes down about 10 to 15 percent of those who were virgins when they got married. Staying a virgin until marriage is one of the surest predictors of a long lasting marriage. Is that bizarre? Why would it be bizarre? You’ve waited for this one person. You probably chose this person fairly carefully. You said I’m saving myself for marriage, so I’m not just going to slide into marriage. I’m going to be very careful about this relationship. I am going to get to know someone slowly, let someone get to know me. The sex isn’t going to be at the beginning of the relationship; the sex is going to be at the beginning of the marriage. We’ve got a lot to know about each other before we can even begin to think about making that commitment.

Contraception’s Bad Consequences

What are the bad consequences of contraception?

• It facilitates sex outside of marriage.
• It increases the incidence of sexually transmitted diseases.
• It leads to unwanted pregnancy and single parenthood.
• It causes and leads to abortion.
• It contributes to divorce and it contributes to social chaos.
• Does anybody think there might be a reason to rethink our enthusiasm for contraception?

This article is an extract from “Contraception Why Not” by Janet Smith

You can also read the whole article here

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