All My Children

While we are talking about the experimental, physical kind of sexual affair which fairly often goes on to intercourse nowadays, without any real love, I want to speak of illegitimate pregnancy. Many people assume, now that there are `the pill’ and other efficient forms of contraception, that unwanted pregnancies don’t occur. This is not so. In fact illegitimate pregnancies have tripled in the United States in the past twenty years. You wonder why it happens. In one type of case the boy and girl say it was because ‘one thing led to another’, without the young couple’s ever having planned it that way or taken any precautions. They may firmly decide that it was all a mistake, that they won’t let themselves do it again and so won’t have the need for any contraceptive. Yet they may succumb repeatedly. Such people are quite immature. Those with a sense of responsibility manage to control their feelings. Or if they make the very serious decision to carry on an affair, they carefully take the precautions.

In another type of situation, a much more common one, a girl involves herself in an affair, not carried away by love or passion but almost coldly, with a man who means little to her, and still takes no contraceptive precautions. When a psychiatrist or social worker is later trying to help her find out the psychological meaning of her pregnancy, so that she won’t repeat the tragedy, it often turns out that she has been very hostile to her father and mother—feeling that they have been unfair and unloving to her—and that, in the unconscious layers of her mind, she had permitted the pregnancy to occur as a way of embarrassing and shaming them in the community. Of course in hurting them she hurts herself much more. This is why the psychiatrist calls her act a neurotic one. You wouldn’t believe that people who are otherwise intelligent and sensible could punish themselves so harshly, unless you had worked professionally with such problems.

Some of the girls who let themselves be easily involved in physical affairs without love or meaning and who then carelessly become pregnant are individuals who simply don’t think much of themselves and don’t expect others to think much of them either. When a man wants to make love to them, they are pleased to think that perhaps they are more attractive than they had realised. To put it another way, the girl with self-respect doesn’t throw herself away and threaten her whole future in a shallow affair.

Some young people think that an illegitimate pregnancy doesn’t have to be a serious problem in these tolerant days. I believe that they are mistaken. The talk is a lot more permissive today. But the girl who has to go through with a pregnancy will find that the secrecy still has to be as strict as in former times. The neighbours and relatives will be almost as suspicious and almost as disapproving. The girl and boy themselves will lose a lot of the respect of their friends. More important, they will lose a lot of their self- respect. Some young people think that by refusing to take the pregnancy too seriously themselves and by laughing off the neighbours and relatives as old fogies, they themselves will be able to brush off the disapproval. But it’s impossible for anyone, unless he has an elephant’s hide, to ignore that much criticism. Either the boy and girl will feel depressed and ashamed for a long period, or they will have to become cynical as a defence against the disapproval. Neither attitude is comfortable to live with. The cynicism, if it goes deep, can interfere very seriously with a person’s career and his happiness in life.

If there is true love, a hurried marriage will solve a majority of the problems. But it is too bad to begin a marriage and a baby’s life amidst the raised eyebrows and sniggers of the neighbours.

If there is little love between the boy and girl, deciding the marriage is the only solution will tend to foster cynicism in the couple—about themselves and about matrimony in general.

Life will be harder on the baby than it should be, whether he merely has a birthday embarrassingly close to his parents‘ wedding, or has to make his way through childhood without a father or even a father’s name, or be adopted.

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