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I certainly don't consider myself to be an expert on this complicated question. However, I can't help but think back to the past. Were our ancestors so stupid after centuries of going over this subject? Perhaps, the old solution of a shot-gun wedding was, after all, the best. Baby has two parents. Mother and father have to reconcile their differences for baby. Single people who do not curb their appetites know what the future can bring, and it may possibly curtail their immediate urges; or face the fact that they are making a lifetime commitment when they go ahead with the urge of the moment. Many, many people have managed to control this all-important urge in many hundreds of years in the past. Is it really all that difficult?--and if they couldn't, they did manage somehow to make the best of it, by marrying the person they thought was so great at the moment. After all, there are people who marry for reasons other than love who manage to live a civil life, and raise healthy, productive children. But, consider the alternative. Children who live with the hatred of one parent to the other, who live under substandard conditions because of the hostility between the two birth parents, or at the worst case, see the hostility of the parents broadcast over the vast spectrum of the media today? Don't forget also the interaction of the extended families that is missed by the child; the grandparents, and other family members who are deprived of the relationship of the natural parents and their child. Can an abortion solve any of these problems? Not unless both parties are completely devoid of responsibility, caring, and pride in their offspring. I believe that makes one a sociopath, doesn't it?

Just for the record, I think elective abortion is always wrong.

But I disagree with respect to forcing two people to get married or stay married. It is an illusion, I think, that this so clearly benefits the children that it is worth mandating.

1. It is possible for the parents to be good parents to the child without being married to each other.

2. It is possible for the child to be neglected or in the middle of constant fighting even if the parents are married.

3. Staying married to someone you can't stand not only makes for misery but it also costs the opportunity to find someone more suitable.

Case in point - my life: I can understand why my parents got married. Two small town kids -conservative baptists who both went to college in Atlanta and fell in love. But in spite of similar backgrounds they wanted different things, they have utterly different goals and they wound up not loving or even liking each other.

So they divorced. And it was painful. But with the wisdom of being adults rather than college kids they both wound up married to someone new who was perfectly well suited. And I got two wonderful step parents who were good to me but never tried to replace my genetic parent.

So I would oppose forcing anyone to be married.