Answer

Why Does the Possibility of Creating a Child Make Sex So Serious?

You may have heard sex described mainly as something private between two consenting adults. That framing makes God’s boundaries around sexuality hard to understand, because it leaves out the one feature that makes them make sense.

Sexual intercourse is unlike other expressions of affection because it is the kind of bodily union through which a new human life can be created. Pregnancy does not happen every time. The possibility is still part of what the act is, and that is why God treats it with the seriousness He does.

Eternal Truths

Scripture connects male and female, marriage, and the arrival of children from the beginning. In the Creation account, God created Adam and Eve male and female and then commanded them to “be fruitful, and multiply” (Genesis 1:27–28). The Family: A Proclamation to the World makes the same connection when it teaches that the means by which mortal life is created are divinely appointed.

If a child is conceived, the choice stops involving only two adults. A new person has entered mortality — a son or daughter of heavenly parents with physical, emotional and spiritual needs and an eternal future. Elder Jeffrey R. Holland taught that sexual morality involves the very plan of life itself, because God has entrusted men and women with the power to participate in creating human life (Personal Purity). His point was reverence, not fear.

What Can Make This Confusing?

It is easy to lose this when sex is treated mainly as recreation, especially where pregnancy is not intended and contraception is being used. Intention matters, and it does not change what the act is. God’s law of chastity asks that intimacy stay within marriage partly because creating life brings responsibilities reaching far beyond the moment.

What Research Shows

Economist Melissa Kearney has studied unintended and nonmarital childbearing extensively. In the national data she summarised, unintended pregnancy was especially common among young unmarried women in their twenties, and contraceptive failure rates in ordinary use are higher than most people assume. That is a description of behaviour rather than an argument about doctrine. It does make the procreative possibility harder to treat as theoretical.

Questions to Think About

• Have I mostly thought about sex in terms of what two adults want from each other?
• How does the possibility of creating a child change what responsibility means here?
• Why might God connect intimacy with marriage, permanence and family?

What You Can Do

Read Genesis 1:27–28 and the Proclamation’s paragraphs on procreation this week, then read Elder Holland’s “Personal Purity” and notice how he links chastity to God’s power to give life. The essay behind this answer takes it further.

Jesus Christ can help you see sexuality as God intended it: not as something shameful, but as a sacred power meant to be joined with covenant love and responsibility.