THE Church of England has recognised the wrong done to many unmarried mothers in the post-war years. In the moralising atmosphere of that time, they were made to carry a weight of guilt and shame. Sex outside marriage was taboo, and many young mothers were compelled to have their babies adopted.

The C of E could certainly claim to have tradition on its side in condemning extramarital sex: fornication is regarded as being as sinful as adultery. The first reason given in the Book of Common Prayer for the institution of holy matrimony is the procreation of children; the second is as a remedy against sin and for the avoidance of fornication. No wonder, then, that it was part of the C of E’s social responsibility to provide mother-and-baby homes for unmarried pregnant women to give birth under supervision, and to facilitate the adoption of the babies into conventional two-parent homes.

Adoption itself had become more frequent after the deaths of many eligible men in the two world wars. Unconventional arrangements were not uncommon; an unmarried former editor of the Church Times, Rosamund Essex, adopted a little boy, who became, like her, a Reader. But these adoptions were “respectable” — unlike those of babies born to those who had had illicit sex.

Attitudes changed with the arrival of the contraceptive pill, which became available for unmarried women in 1967. I can remember the fuss that this caused and the debates in the C of E Youth Fellowship that I attended about whether sex outside marriage could ever be OK. It was only gradually that attitudes changed. Michael Saward, the hymn-writer who at the time was Vicar of St Mary’s, Ealing, dared to suggest in And So To Bed? (1975) that there might be good reasons for couples intending to marry to have sex before settling down. Even then, this seemed preposterous to many church people.

Much later, when I was in pastoral ministry, I usually assumed that prospective wedding couples were already intimate, and was mildly concerned if it became clear that they were not. Some already had children and expected them to take part in the ceremony.

Yet, perhaps our more permissive age has lost out in unexpected ways by recent changes in attitude to sex. There is now a massive shortage of babies available for adoption, abortion having become, in effect, a form of contraception. The Church rarely comments on this, although some bishops have queried the recent extension of legal abortion. The Archbishops’ Commission on Families and Households’ 2023 report, Love Matters, affirmed the value of family life “in all its diversity”, without any real attempt to define what “family” might actually mean today, or what on earth we might mean or teach about “fornication”. Surely we should know what it is that we are still urged by scripture and the Prayer Book to avoid?