Wendy’s one important lesson

The Editor: Given the stance of the Roman Catholic Church — and indeed all religions — on premarital sex, there is immense irony in Wendy Fitzwilliams’ announcement of her out-of-wedlock pregnancy in a Roman Catholic Church, to no less than an audience of students from Corpus   Christi College, an RC high school. When one considers the institutionalised misogyny of the so-called “Great Religions”, especially with regard to women’s reproductive rights, it seems painfully ironic that the students being lectured were young girls.

It’s one thing to hear the juicy news from the “Queen of the Universe” herself, but to hear it uttered in the hallowed halls of a church, where I imagine the clergy and government officials present would have expected this highly educated and successful role model to extol the virtues of chastity to the young listeners. I can only imagine their faces hit the floor when she dropped the bomb. The worry now among the morality police is, as our Minister of Education put it in a report carried in the Newsday of Friday 27, “a little bit unfortunate that she used the school to make the announcement since it was made to girls, and their minds are impressionable.”

They worry that Ms Fitzwilliams’ speech was an endorsement of the more liberal attitudes towards sex, marriage and child-bearing, namely that marriage is not a pre-requisite for a couple to have sex and produce children. Let me make it clear that I am in no way advocating pre-marital sex and single parenthood in itself, and I am not saying that sex and kids should under all circumstances wait until after marriage. However, it irks me when the fanatics claim that marriage is sacred when so many of the unions that they themselves bless are seething with anger, domestic violence and deep enmity between husband and wife.

Particular parental or marital arrangements would depend on the two individuals involved and their circumstances. Even when she was Miss Universe I never thought of Ms Fitzwilliams as a role model, however, I think she has one important lesson to teach young women of Trinidad and Tobago. In a country with so many young girls dropping out of school and becoming teenage mothers Wendy Fitzwilliams has furthered her education, become a lawyer and only after establishing herself has she taken on the challenge of motherhood. She has if nothing else demonstrated the ability of education to give women a greater freedom and power to choose and shape their own lives.

Rakesh Mohan,
Enterprise, Chaguanas