October 28, 2013

Dear Sir,

I recently wrote about the need to have a license to have children.

Any child born to unmarried people is out of wedlock, if they are not married. Notice I have used the word ‘people’, not ‘parents’.

Parents look after their children. Fathers, look after their children; they teach them; support them; discipline them; love them — otherwise they are but ‘sperm donors’!!!

I do not know my father, I was brought up by my grandparents, in their house; they fed me; clothed me; paid for my schooling. I am not being ‘judgmental’, I am just stating facts.

There are approximately 6,000 children under the age of twenty, in Bermuda, that are ‘out of wedlock’ — that is, there are approximately three hundred born every year.

There are about 50 pregnancies every year to girls under the age of sixteen. A number of these, which I am not going to discuss, are terminated. Under Sections 80, and 81, of the Criminal code, it is an offence to have ‘sex’ with a girl under the age of sixteen.

My wife was the prison’s doctor for nine years; she did a little correlation between the inmates, and the number of ‘parents’, especially ‘fathers’. Does anyone want to guess the numbers?

I, having been brought up by grandparents, realise the input from my grandmother. When I was young, and I am sixty nine now, many, if not most children were raised in families with grandmothers. The reality of our affluence is that many grandmothers have separate houses, and in the Housing Corporation, the policy is not to let the young, single mothers have their mothers living in the same unit. This is sociologically stupid.

In my prior letter, I made reference to the churches in Bermuda. Again, the Bible makes many references to having ‘sex’ when not married.

Except for one exception, if a child is born, someone had sex. Again, these church people seem to get ‘bent out of shape’ about homosexuals getting married. They do not seem to worry so much about heterosexuals getting married.

I am curious about how many of these gang members have fathers. Can this new Statistics Department of our Government shed any light on these numbers?

Sincerely

Sanders Frith-Brown