A gamin-faced schoolboy who has apparently fathered a child with his 15-year-old girlfriend is the talk of Britain, a country with the highest rate in Europe of pregnancies among unmarried teenagers. Alfie Patten, who is just over 4ft tall and looks younger even than his 13 years, was only 12 when he got Chantelle Stedman, who was then 14, pregnant. The birth of their child, Maisie Roxanne, last week has occasioned outrage and hand-wringing in equal proportions. The consensus among the more enlightened commentators is that the event is no surprise in a society saturated with sexual messages, including a type of sex education that talks almost exclusively about having sex “safely” and barely mentions “relationships” let alone the marital meaning of sex or abstinence.
A thought experiment about marriage
24 May 2012
A world in which sexual intimacy could not produce children would never have come up with the idea of marriage.
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12:55:40 PM
A gamin-faced schoolboy who has apparently fathered a child with his 15-year-old girlfriend is the talk of Britain, a country with the highest rate in Europe of pregnancies among unmarried teenagers. Alfie Patten, who is just over 4ft tall and looks younger even than his 13 years, was only 12 when he got Chantelle Stedman, who was then 14, pregnant. The birth of their child, Maisie Roxanne, last week has occasioned outrage and hand-wringing in equal proportions. The consensus among the more enlightened commentators is that the event is no surprise in a society saturated with sexual messages, including a type of sex education that talks almost exclusively about having sex “safely” and barely mentions “relationships” let alone the marital meaning of sex or abstinence. 