JAMES N. writes:

My wife and I were sitting by the fire, with the five girls enjoying a snow day, when I took the opportunity to go through your archives, and I read “Emmie’s Future.” For me, the money quote is yours: “The sexual revolution did not free people from inhibitions and guilt. If it had, there would be pregnant women everywhere.”

Of course, there would be – thousands and thousands – of Ivy League pregnancies if nature were to take its course. Of course, the absence of those pregnancies is caused by shame and guilt.

Thank you for lighting up the darkness with simple declarative sentences. “In a time of universal deceit, telling the truth is a revolutionary act”

Laura writes:

Thank you for writing.

Only shame could explain the glaring absence of pregnant women on college campuses. After all, many students are sexually active. Some do get pregnant despite the availability of contraception. You would think in an age of  individual freedom, when people proudly boast of their lack of inhibition, some women, if they could not immediately marry, would openly live out their pregnancies as students and give birth. They could give their infants up for adoption and proclaim themselves to be helping infertile couples who are so desperate for children, publicizing their generosity the way college students do when they travel to Third World countries and build sewer plants or dig ditches.

Why is this never ever done? Because pregnancy is shameful. But it is shameful for entirely different reasons than in the past. It is not shameful because it is proof of illicit sex. It is shameful because it shows a lack of ambition. It exposes a student for what she is: a woman.

In that former post, I wrote:

Here we see the hypocrisy of the sexual revolution. It is not about freedom from repression. Not at all. It’s just that different things are repressed. Maternal instincts are repressed. A sense of awe in creation is repressed. Hope for the future is repressed. Piety and gratitude are repressed. The sexual revolution did not free people from inhibitions and guilt. If it had, there would be pregnant women everywhere.

We might not see pregnant women everywhere, but there certainly would be more of them at, say, Duke University where Karen Owen had sex in the library stairwell.

— Comments —

Julia writes:

A few thoughts about this:

While pregnancy may seem “shameful” on college campuses, I do not think the root cause is that it shows “lack of ambition,” or that it “exposes the student for what she is: a woman.” I’d say that the best explanation comes from John Paul II. When he speaks of intimate relations between a man and a woman, he rightly acknowledges that the only adequate context for such relations is committed love within marriage. In that context, the woman is delighted to be pregnant–even proud of her swelling belly–because it means that her husband loves her and that she willingly and fruitfully receives his love. It also means that both the husband and the wife love the baby.

As regards pregnancy outside of marriage, this part of your post is true: ” Maternal instincts are repressed. A sense of awe in creation is repressed. Hope for the future is repressed. Piety and gratitude are repressed. ” But when committed love within marriage is the context for pregnancy, maternal instincts are free to be genuinely expressed; a sense of awe in creation is a daily experience; hope for the future is the only attitude that makes sense; and piety and gratitude bring a woman to her knees.

Laura writes:

I would be inclined to agree with you except that I have seen single mothers, not students at elite campuses, who are not ashamed to be pregnant. Illegitimacy is high today among the less-educated.  For instance, I know a woman whose daughter recently had a baby. While the woman would prefer that her daughter be married, the event is not shameful. The daughter, similar to Bristol Palin, is raising her baby at home. I have heard of quite a few cases like this among what you might call the lower middle class, and the illegitimacy statistics show it is common. If you go into small rural towns, you will see this phenomenon of young unmarried women having children. My impression is that abortion is much less acceptable among the lower ranks of society, and that is why pregnancy and single motherhood are more acceptable there. They are seen as an honorable alternative to abortion.

Strikingly, I have yet to see a single case like the one above among families who send their children to elite schools, and the illegitimacy statistics confirm the rarity of this. Unplanned pregnancies are less common in elite families, but they do still occur. 

James P. writes:

You wrote,

“Only shame could explain the glaring absence of pregnant women on college campuses.”

I think it is not the shame so much as the sheer inconvenience of having a baby. A baby would interfere with the ongoing life of promiscuous hedonism, and with the future life of graduate school and a professional career that women at elite colleges think they “need” to have. These women all “plan” or hope to have a baby at some future “right” time – though for all too many of them, the “right” time never comes – but having a baby in college is simply not expedient.

Laura writes:

I would be inclined to agree with you too but when we look more closely at the matter, inconvenience alone cannot explain the total absence of pregnant students on campuses. The truth is, nine months of pregnancy and childbirth for a healthy young woman are not very inconvenient. 

College women are always looking for humanitarian causes. Why isn’t the cause of the many thousands of infertile couples who are anxious to adopt babies important to them? Why isn’t it seen as noble to help them if it is true that college women are anxious to help the needy? I realize that giving up an infant for adoption is emotionally traumatic, but abortion is traumatic too. In any event, the trauma of giving up a baby need not interfere with education or career plans any more than the trauma of an abortion does. 

Our culture celebrates nature and everything “organic.” Pregnancy is healthy, natural, organic. Premarital sex is seen as healthy and natural. Why not pregnancy when it accidentally occurs in the minority of college-age women, especially now that we know of the link between abortion and breast cancer?

It seems young women do not acknowledge that there are couples who want children and young women do not want to experience pregnancy, or see others like them experience pregnancy, because it is shameful, as well as inconvenient. If college students could recognize the hypocrisy here they might not pride themselves so much on their liberties. Sexual freedom brings its own type of conformity.

Whenever I visit a college campus and pick up a copy of the college newspaper, there is almost always an article about the wonders of free sex. I went to one small, private liberal arts college and the newspaper included an article about how sex is good exercise, with a chart comparing how many calories are burned in sexual intercourse compared to other physical activities. Why, when sex is celebrated as healthy, is there not the slightest recognition that pregnancy is healthy too and that the individual who is really uninhibited and natural would feel free to be openly pregnant?

James P. writes:

To be sure, when I said “inconvenience”, I principally meant actually raising a child, not merely bearing one. Yet I would not be surprised at all to learn that elite college women would regard even bearing a child as unacceptably inconvenient — no drinking, no smoking, some degree of physical discomfort, ungainliness, loss of figure, repeated visits to the doctor, etc.

Of course, a major “inconvenience” during the pregnancy itself would be all her friends, and possibly also her professors and even her parents, constantly asking, “Why didn’t you get an abortion? Are you some sort of fundamentalist? Don’t you support a Woman’s Right To Choose?” She would have to be quite strong to resist this pressure. I did meet women in college who insisted that if they got pregnant, they would keep the baby, but this assertion was never put to the test.

Laura writes:

All that you say is true.

But, of course, if these people were all consistent with their ethic of nature-worship – their love of organic vegetables, healthy exercise, non-toxic furnishings, solar energy, bicycles instead of cars, the outdoors, etc. – they would celebrate a pregnancy in their midst.

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