Pat Robertson to Pregnant Woman: Give Baby Up for Adoption and Dump Boyfriend

Yesterday, a pregnant, unmarried woman asked televangelist Pat Robertson whether it’s a good idea to move in with her boyfriend to raise their baby together. Given the alternatives, the answer seems fairly obvious… But Robertson offered a predictably bad response: No. Cohabitation is a bad idea even if a baby is involved.

Then he threw in a twist.

You know… the old saying is “Two wrongs don’t make a right.”

Here is the deal: If you don’t like what is going on, you can always kind of say, “I’m leaving, good-bye.” But if you get married, and then you get divorced, all of a sudden, it is a totally different scenario.

You don’t have a job that is adequate. Your boyfriend doesn’t. You made a mistake.

Why don’t you get some adoption agency to take the baby, and you two go your separate ways?

You know, you want to move in together, well, “My boyfriend and I are pregnant.” He’s not pregnant. You’re pregnant, you know? It’s your terminology that’s screwed up. But hey, two wrongs don’t make a right. And I don’t know how old you are, but you sound like you’re just a youngster. And you’re not capable of getting into marriage. You’re not capable of raising a child. You don’t have the time or
the patience… And all of a sudden, when the pressures of marriage and motherhood come upon you, you won’t be able to handle it.

Don’t do it, all right?

We’re not given any background information about this couple, yet Robertson assumes they don’t have “adequate” jobs. He assumes their relationship isn’t strong enough to handle a child. He assumes she’s incapable of caring for a child on her own. It’s a lot to infer from a simple question.

And that’s before we get into the suggestion to give the baby up for adoption.

Conservative Christians are always eager to tell us how badly a child needs both a mother and a father. Yet here we have a mother who wants to keep her baby, and the biological dad still in the picture, and Robertson’s advice is for them to break up and hand their baby to strangers.

That advice is especially interesting coming from Robertson, whose girlfriend was — wait for it — pregnant with their child months before they got married. It became a scandal in 1987, as Robertson was running for president, when journalists discovered that his stated date of marriage was actually five months earlier than legal documents said it was. In other words, he lied about when he got married to hide the out-of-wedlock child.

He didn’t give that baby up for adoption.

(via Right Wing Watch)