When Catholics praise single parenthood

By Thomas V. Mirus ( bio - articles - email ) | Feb 18, 2025

When conservative Catholics line up to congratulate a woman who announces she has had a baby out of wedlock, there is something wrong.

Last week, conservative influencer Ashley St. Clair made a startling announcement: “Five months ago, I welcomed a new baby into the world. Elon Musk is the father.”

Right away, quite a number of Catholic figures congratulated St. Clair, most of them in the world of conservative politics (Ryan James Gidursky called her “amazing”) but also including some prominent pro-life leaders. In the ensuing controversy, Students for Life president Kristan Hawkins declared, “Every pregnant mother should be congratulated. PERIOD.” Lila Rose advocated a similar approach. I only saw a couple of comments encouraging St. Clair to get married.

Now, I know little about Ashley St. Clair except that she is not Elon Musk’s wife, and that she has another child from another father to whom she is not married. I also know that Elon Musk has (apparently now) thirteen children from four mothers, and that all but the first of his previous twelve children were conceived by IVF and, in some cases, surrogacy (so one wonders if this child was conceived by similar means). So far Musk has neither acknowledged nor denied that he is the father.

In the case of Ms. St. Clair, I wasn’t too surprised to see something like this from a self-described conservative, or to see many conservatives congratulating her. The right has become increasingly irreligious, while many in today’s conservative movement are, like Musk himself, really “anti-woke liberals”. Not only that, but I had already seen many “conservatives” congratulate anti-woke liberal Dave Rubin on acquiring twins for himself and his “husband” via a surrogate. And as I was putting the finishing touches on this article, President Trump signed an executive order expanding access to IVF. So, as much as I disapprove of Musk and St. Clair’s actions (assuming Musk really is the father), I am not shocked by them so much as I am dismayed by the response from some Catholics.

Congratulations for what?

I’m sure some of these Catholics would say they are not celebrating the immoral act that brought the child into the world, but just the existence of the child itself. And yes, every child deserves to have its life celebrated. But the child of unwed parents also deserves our compassion for being victimized from the very moment of its conception. And especially in the public sphere, morality must be clearly reinforced.

We Catholics have been saying all along that sex and babies cannot be separated. How, then, can we separate the sin of extramarital sex from extramarital procreation? The primary reason fornication is a sin is precisely that it is wrong to bring children into existence without a stable family. Though the stigma on fornication itself should be primary, lest there be a perverse incentive to abort to avoid one’s immorality being exposed, we cannot ultimately separate the two.

A crucial distinction, then: Every child is a gift from God, but culpably unwed parents do not deserve the congratulations due to spouses who follow God’s ordinance to be fruitful and multiply in honorable wedlock. God is the true benefactor here; the unwed parents’ first act towards the child, having gotten it dishonorably, was to harm it by depriving it of a true family. There is nothing to celebrate so far as their own part in the matter is concerned, at least until they repent of their crime against their child and do their best to repair the situation so that the child can be raised by its own parents in a lawful marriage. To neglect this reparation, where it is possible, is tantamount to abuse. If it is impossible, they should have the good sense to see the birth of their child as, in part, an occasion for weeping—tears of pity for the child and sorrow for their own irresponsibility towards it. Their consciences should not be dulled by applause.

Thus prior to the sexual revolution, there was always a stigma on having a child out of wedlock and on the behavior that leads to it. Such parents might embrace their child with love, but there was also a proper shamefacedness around the event—not the pathological shame which is the straw man of therapeutic Christianity, but a kind of moral self-awareness or even humility. Contrast this with how such mothers and fathers today shamelessly announce their unwed reproduction, expecting universal congratulation as their due.

It is true that a child is a blessing even to an undeserving parent. An unexpected pregnancy can confront unwed parents with the consequences of their sins, and with new responsibility that may lead them to change their lives. Absent social pressure and disapproval, however, many people do not learn this lesson, instead making the same mistake over and over again. And more outrageous than the thoughtless selfishness of compulsive fornicators is the arrogance of those who deliberately and clinically seek a child out of wedlock—the upper-class woman who decides she wants a baby but doesn’t need a man, the homosexual couple who rent a womb, or the tech overlord who treats his children as a science project.

In his sermon for the feast of the Purification of Mary, St. Vincent Ferrer mentions (by contrast with our Lady) that some mothers become puffed up with pride in their fertility, when they should be humbled by the thought of their grave responsibility to lead their children toward heaven rather than hell. If this is the case, then even greater sobriety and compunction are proper for a mother who has already given her child a profound disadvantage both materially and spiritually.

Social morality requires social pressure

I expect this will sound mean to some pro-life Catholics. We have placed such an emphasis on (rightly) “supporting the mother” and begging women not to abort their children, that we have (wrongly) assumed this is incompatible with retaining a strong social stigma against having children out of wedlock. We have (rightly) emphasized the goodness of every child so much that it jars us to speak of the birth of any child as, in any respect, a tragic event. In addition, the combination of our therapeutic culture with recent feminist influence on the pro-life movement has led to the bad habit of coddling women, treating them purely as victims of abortion and the sexual revolution.

Many in the pro-life movement like to emphasize addressing the “root causes” of abortion. Often they mean poverty, lack of education, or women in crisis pregnancies lacking the support they need. But as Ryan Anderson pointed out, “Nonmarital sex is the main cause of abortion.” 87 percent of women who have abortions are unmarried. If we are serious about solving the “root causes”, we are going to have to look at the eras prior to the sexual revolution, when out-of-wedlock pregnancy was much less common, and learn from the “social technologies” that were used successfully to deter this behavior.

In this respect, I fear some “pro-life feminists” have begun to be a liability in the spiritual and cultural battles we face. Some of their concerns are valid: we must avoid a double standard where the unwed mother is condemned more than the father, and likewise avoid the hypocrisy which is more ashamed of being “found out” by pregnancy than of the sexual sin that led to it. But refusing to criticize women’s behavior is not going to move the ball forward.

Those who think social stigma is unnecessary to protect marriage and the family, and that we must only be positively “supportive” lest moral opprobrium tempt someone to seek an abortion, are in my view naively underestimating our need for social guardrails. The protection of social mores will always require positive reinforcement for good behavior, shame for bad behavior, and compassionate assistance for those struggling under the consequences of their past faults—all three, not just two of those. We must find the right balance, especially when dealing with individual cases, but when it comes to the public sphere, public morality must be reinforced with firmness and clarity. Mere positivity is not adequate, for even if one might sometimes justify the social tact of congratulations as shorthand for “babies are good”, silence on the other relevant points is a scandal.

In any case, Ashley St. Clair is not some poor unwed teenager who was pressured into sex by her boyfriend and is now being pressured to have an abortion by her family. She is a wealthy adult with a full-time nanny, and she sought out and chose to reproduce with the richest man in the world. If the sheer goodness of babies is enough justification to offer our unqualified public congratulations to those who beget them by an evil act and subject them to harmful circumstances, then we may as well congratulate Dave Rubin too.

Catholics need not show our compassion by offering public congratulations which are unsolicited, unnecessary, digital, and in the end rather cheap. If we are simply congratulating for the baby’s sake, we might spare our tweets altogether, as they are of no use so far as baby’s quality of life is concerned. Baby’s life might be improved by social pressure to give baby a loving family.