In Them Before Us: Why We Need a Global Children’s Rights Movement, Faust seeks to vindicate one of the old six links in the triangle: the necessity of marriage to offspring. Children, she contends, have an affirmative right not only to life in the womb, but also to the joint care of mother and father in one common home. That is to say, the young have a right to be conceived, received, and raised by married parents. If a male and female choose to reproduce a child, the two parents should get hitched—and stay hitched. …

The parts of the iron triangle were mutually reinforcing. By rejecting human dominion over human fertility, Christian morality fostered the virtue of receptivity to the child. Conversely, by endorsing parental dominion over fertility, we foster dominion over the child. To dodge children by artificial contraception, or to manufacture them by artificial reproduction, we adults emphatically place “us” before “them” from the moment of conception.

Second, by disavowing any religious argument, she undercuts the reverence that, in turn, seems necessary to this receptivity. The old morality was indeed “reverent.” God was involved—and perhaps for good reason. Thomas Jefferson famously asked, “Can the liberties of a nation be secure when we have removed a conviction that these liberties are the gift of God?” We might likewise ask: Can the rights of any child be secure when we have removed the conviction that this child is the gift of God?

[“Chastity” is not really the right term, especially since it tends to be directed more to females than males. “Continence” is less used but perhaps more appropriate, and accounts for momentary failures. Either way, Upham is correct — you can’t argue for childbearing being limited to marriage without also arguing that procreative activities be similarly limited, at least in terms of cultural incentives and disincentives. The problem is that one cannot get to that state merely through sociological argument. The reason for continence is not just to avoid pregnancy (and disease and tearing of social fabric) but for respect of the power of creation that God grants us. Without that recognition, you might just as well try to tell people to give up dancing. — Ed]