Pregnant by whom?

I PRAY that journalists, editors, publishers and other media practitioners give special attention to the finer points of propriety and good taste when doing their work.

Some check-and-balance mechanisms should be put in place to guarantee this ideal. Many media workers seem to work solely on their own, unsupervised, vulnerable to be frivolous, flippant, fetishistic, and end up becoming like loose cannons, especially where morals are concerned.

Everyone, of course, has to be concerned about this. But those in the media, particularly those in the entertainment section, should feel specially referred to when questions of correctness and decorum are raised.

They shape public opinion, they exert tremendous influence on social sentiments. They cannot take refuge in the alibi that no one is forced to read or listen to them if he doesn’t want to.

Truth is whether people want to read them or not, they are on flagrant display. Besides, they do everything to grab attention, screaming and ruthlessly using all the tricks of sensationalism. They can easily victimize and prey on the young and naïve, and on the weak in general.

It’s well-known that nowadays, the right to expression and our need for information are often corrupted by vanity and pride, plus greed. These capital sins usually go together, forming a formidable force, both soft and hard, making it hard to resist.

The other day, I was struck to see on the ear of the front page of a local paper, an item entitled: “Halle Berry pregnant by Gabriel Aubry” I immediately felt something was gravely wrong in that piece of pure gossip.

The first thing that came to my mind is that pregnancy is a very delicate topic that is treated with a lot of discretion. Unless one is a public figure, that condition is usually held from public knowledge.

Of course, Halle Berry is a star of some caliber. We can give her the benefit of the doubt that her pregnancy deserves to be known by people, especially her fans.

But the next information jarred me. She is “pregnant by Gabriel Aubry.” Why should the by-line be made? Is it not automatically understood that a woman
gets pregnant by her husband? There’s an implicit suggestion she can be pregnant next year by another man, if she chooses to.

As I started to read the story, I learned the man is not her husband, but just a boyfriend of two-year standing. Rubbing it in, she is quoted as saying that she “was waiting for this event to happen” and that she’ll never marry him, as if to dismiss any incorrectness of her actuation.

It would seem that nowadays, pregnancy can be detached from marriage. Of course, that’s nothing new. Since time immemorial cases like this abounded. What’s new is to consider it just ok, nothing to worry about really.

Is this the message we want to convey to the people, especially to the young? This clearly violates our natural sense of morality, not to mention, Christian morality, and I think it is still very offensive to our culture.

As chaplain of technical schools for boys and girls, I cannot help but feel disturbed whenever items like this appear in the papers. They clearly contribute to the corruption of young people’s minds.

Through the years my task of teaching about the nature and purpose of human sexuality, marriage, love, family, and virtues like chastity and modesty is
becoming more and more difficult.

I see a lot of ignorance and confusion, where things were not as bad before. The youth then in general knew the fundamental morals on sexuality and love. Now, I notice a more lax and erroneous attitude toward sexual ethics, and justified at that, even among the young girls.

I think we have to acknowledge the problem in its objective condition. It’s
getting to be very terrifying. All of us should try to do something to help solve it.

In this regard, those in media play an important role. For one, media officials can make an audit of the kind of persons manning the entertainment sections. These should be impregnated with the proper values first.