What Lies Beneath The underlying heartbeat of this book is, as my heroine Margaret Sanger, said: “No woman can call herself free until she can choose consciously whether she will or will not be a mother.” Well said, Maggie. And, of course, that same sentiment applies to men and fatherhood as well. The other guiding principles—beliefs, philosophy, opinions—which form the framework of this book include: We are all in this together. First and foremost, this book rejects the misguided notion that preventing a Knocked Up pregnancy is a “woman’s issue.” My belief is that both women and men gamble against the odds of a pregnancy or experience contraceptive failures that can result in an unintended pregnancy. With rare exception (the most …show more content…
Being a moral scold about the fecklessness of a single mom, one who cannot adequately provide for the needs of a child, doesn’t do anything to solve the problem. (Not to mention my mantra: she didn’t do it all by herself.)
We are sailing into the unexplored territory of couple-hood. Notwithstanding the lessons taught by Frank Sinatra in the once popular ode to “Love and Marriage,” it turns out he was wrong: you can have one (love) without the other (marriage). And you can don’t have to be married to have a baby either (no matter what you learned in mid-school.) Often I hear that the simplest solution to preventing the problems linked to Knocked Up pregnancy, especially fragile families, is that, we, as a society, return to the ideal of expecting people to be on the solid ground of marriage before venturing out to the uncertain hills and valleys of parenthood. As much as I believe that is one excellent piece of advice, I doubt we will see a large-scale revival of traditional marriage before parenthood. Although marriage (usually before parenthood) remains strong among the college educated, overall about 50 percent of kids born today are born to unwed