Abstinence Before Marriage

Wayne D. Leeper

“For out of the heart proceed evil thoughts, murders, adulteries, fornication, thefts, false witness, blasphemies.  These are the things which defile a man…”  Jesus: Matt15:19

“But fornication and all uncleanness or covetousness, let it not even be named among you, as is fitting for saints.”  Apostle Paul: Eph.5:3

Although there are a few exceptions the word “fornication” refers to all sexual acts of unmarried persons while the word “adultery” refers to sexual acts of a married person committed outside the marriage.  Therefore, the word fornication refers to and includes pre-marital sex. The Bible is full of admonitions against pre-marital sex.  It is not my purpose here to judge or condemn this activity, but just to evaluate its consequences.

The average adolescent begins feeling sexual urges in their early teens if not before.  As a result teens, and even younger in some cases, have been involved in pre-marital sex from time immemorial and will continue to be so as long as the world stands.  I am not naive enough to believe that this article or any other is going to change that fact.  But that is not the point.  There is no correlation between the wisdom of the Bible and human conduct.  The hypothetical question I want to address is not can premarital sex be eliminated, but what the results would be if it was eliminated? In other words, what would be the effect on the individual, the family and our society if the Biblical injunction against pre-marital sex were in fact followed by every person?

The first result would be the fact that there would be no unwed mothers.  There is absolutely nothing good that be said about un-wed motherhood.  These young girls almost always find themselves at the bottom of the economic ladder.  Unless they come from affluent families most of them wind up on welfare.  They are often forced to drop out of school in order to support themselves and their child.  The lack of education relegates them to the lowest paying jobs which only compounds their problems.  They have more difficulty finding a husband because many men do not want to take on the responsibility of raising another man’s child.  I have never known an unwed mother that chose to be that way. Yes, I know that there are some out there but they are the exception, not the rule.

The second result would be the fact there that there would be no sexually transmitted disease.  By definition a sexually transmitted disease can only be acquired through sex with an infected person.  If the boy and the girl both enter marriage as virgins there is no way that either would be infected thus neither could infect the other.  A society where every member abstained from pre-marital sex would be totally free of these dreaded diseases, many of which are disabling or even worse, deadly.

A third result would be that the number of abortions would plummet.  The vast majority of abortions are performed on unmarried girls and single women who do not want the child.  There a certainly exceptions to this rule but they are few and far between when compared with the total number of abortions performed in this country.

No un-wed mothers would mean no illegitimate children.  Illegitimate children suffer many handicaps that are unknown to children who have both parents raising them.  One is the absence of the male influence in their lives.  A second is the knowledge that they are “different” from their peers who have a loving home with two parents.  Because of the economic limitation of the mother the children usually have less in material things than their peers.  These children are also more susceptible to emotional problems than children with both parents at home.  What is even more unfair to the child is that studies show that children from one parent homes are more likely to become an unwed parent themselves than other children so the cycle repeats itself.

I am sure that many other good reasons could be added to the ones above, but just these few are sufficient to show the wisdom of the Bible.