MAKING LOVE MAKES BABIES: Maggie Gallagher in Nat'l Catholic Register


This begins a series of Register articles in which author and syndicated columnist Maggie Gallagher explains love and marriage to her grown son.

Here's the place to begin. Every time you make love, you could be making your first-born child.

This is not a moral argument. Not yet. It is just a fact of life. Burn it into your memory.

Every time you make love, you could be making your first-born child.

Sex makes babies. How could such an obvious truth have gotten lost? But it has. Never underestimate the capacity of human beings to fool themselves. ...

So since I was a teen-ager, smart people have said things like "we have separated sex from reproduction." I've gone to countless conferences where men with Ph.D.s intone similar kinds of statements.

And yet, what I found was: The scholars kept saying this, but the girls kept getting pregnant. At Yale, where I went, most girls who got pregnant had abortions. Nobody but they, and maybe their best friends, knew about it. Not even the guy was told, unless the guy was a steady boyfriend. (Another dear friend told me about getting a surprise call from a guy three months after their brief one-night stand had resulted in an abortion. She was weirded out. How do you talk to a guy you barely knew whose child you have just aborted?) ...

The natural end of sexual desire is not just "procreation" as a bald mechanical device, a mechanistic means for the production of infants. The natural end of sexual desire is the human family, the kind that can only be created by coupling in the deepest sense of the word.

The alternative, which you see all around you, is to create a culture in which our bodies are our enemies. The fact that sex produces babies becomes a fact to be fought, and worse, a fact to be repressed from consciousness in order to create space for the odd, new sexual right (where did they find it?) to have sex whenever and with whomever one wants, without producing any children. That's the sexual revolution in a sentence: ABR, anything but rape.

More on this later. What I'm asking from you now is simply to have the courage, the manliness to face this one simple fact:

Every time you make love you could be making your first-born child.

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