Cart before horse: If you got it backwards, don't rub it in.

I'm not an advocate for children out of wedlock or using them as pawns to catch a man.  If you want to be in a relationship, don't use a child to keep him.  He should want to be with you because he wants to.  If you have a child to rope him in, he's caught you.  You've given him everything he wants, and none of the responsibility.  At the end of the day, you end up as the laughing stock rather than you running the household. 

A child is an innocent pawn if used to catch a man.  If you have a child and then end up either ending the relationship, put your child in the middle of an abusive or disrespectful relationship, then you have no one to blame but yourself.

If you want to play the field, at least let chemistry not put you in that position (better living through chemistry, as my family has joked).  Otherwise, you have just put an innocent child in a position that they didn't earn or ask for.  You are ultimately the reason that child has the life they experience because of the choices you made.  

The flip side to it: If you did it, and you are now regretting the situation you find yourself in, don't rub it in other people's faces.  I had a friend who tried to justify every mistake she ever made, and then after she had been with a ton of men, had a baby outside of wedlock, she bragged that her husband-to-be had been with a "lady of the night" as she put it (a hooker for others).  I don't understand why she felt the need to make sure that I knew her husband was lower on the scale of respectability than she was, but she felt that she needed to make that point.  And then tell me later that they then broke their agreement not to sleep together until the wedding.

I don't understand why people who make poor decisions try to make it look okay to everyone else.  Babies are one thing, a single mom and a baby are another.  Babies within a marriage are a blessing, a baby to a woman who isn't married is a trap.  A woman who has a child hoping to catch a man has found herself in a catch .22, if he doesn't marry her then she has become a slave to that child and to making the best of the situation.  

For those of us who have blatantly chosen to not have children before we get married, it's really insulting to us that people validate a poor choice.  I get it that single moms need support too, but not in the face of those who have made something of ourselves and have followed the path that we have been asked to follow until we meet the right person.

I get it that children are a celebration, but when there is outright bias over a child, in the midst of a family of adults, and that child was created out of an incorrect situation, it becomes salt in a wound-the wound of having made the right choice and being socially flogged for it.  Parents all over the world hope that their children don't end up going down the wrong path and make poor choices, but yet they then celebrate those wrong choices by flagrantly preferring consequences out of poor choices.  Making a double standard for those of us who have made better choices.

I wish there was a different way that people treated that situation.  Not necessarily to shun, but to be more sensitive to the situation and be respectful of those who have made the best choice.  

I myself have worked so very hard to become a woman who has worked hard throughout her life, earning 4 degrees, the startings of a master's, alumni of simulations of global politics, can speak at least 4 or 5 things in at least 4 languages, traveled the world, traveled the US coast to coast and north to south, have published recipes of my own development rather than someone else's cookbook, live on my own, paying my bills, maintaining my car, have a lucrative job, and the comment I get when announcing my wedding was "You're not pregnant, are you?"  I simply responded that I didn't play that game.