What are the reasons for chastity before and fidelity after marriage?

(1) The most glaring danger for a man in unchastity is disease.  The venereal diseases are among the most terrible known to man; they are highly contagious-one contact, and that not necessarily actual intercourse, sufficing for infection-and at present only very partially curable.  Practically all prostitutes become infected before long; the youngest and prettiest are usually diseased; the chance of indulging in promiscuous intimacies without catching some form of infection is slight.  The only sure way of escape from this imminent danger is by the exclusive love of one man and one woman.  Moreover, these diseases are, in their effects, transmissible from husband to wife and from wife to children.  Many women’s diseases, a large part of their sterility, of miscarriages and infant deaths, a large proportion of the paralysis, insanity, and blindness in the world, are due to the sins of a husband or parent.  Thus the penalty for a single misstep may be very grim; and the worst of it is that it must often be shared by the innocent. [Footnote:  See Prince Morrow, Social Diseases and Marriage.  W. L. Howard, Plain Facts on Sex Hygiene.]

(2) For a girl the danger of disease is not all.  There is the additional danger of pregnancy, which means, and must mean, for her not only pain and risk of life, but lasting shame and disgrace.  Even paid prostitutes, who are willing to employ dangerous methods to prevent conception, and soon become nearly sterile through disease or overindulgence, often have to resort to illegal operations, at the risk of their lives, and not infrequently come to childbirth.  The virgin who gives herself to her lover under the spell of his ardent wooing is very much more likely to conceive.  It cannot be too bluntly stated that the barest contact may suffice for conception; for a momentary intimacy two lives, or three, have often been ruined.

(3) The reason why society cannot afford to be lenient with illegitimacy is that there is no proper provision for rearing children born out of wedlock.  The woman and the child usually need the financial support of the man; they always need his love and care.  If the man marries the girl he has wronged, there is not only the disgrace still attaching to her (and rightly to him, still more), but the fact of a hasty and unintended and probably more or less unhappy marriage.  Certainly in every such case the girl has a right to demand that the man shall marry her; whether or no she will wish him to, or will prefer to bear her burden and disgrace alone, is for her to determine.  But this is sure that any man who takes the chance of ruining a foolish and ignorant or oversusceptible girl “and all for a bit of pleasure, as, if he had a man’s heart in him, he ‘d ha’ cut his hand off sooner than he’d ha’ taken it” [Footnote:  George Eliot’s Adam Bede, from which these words are taken, ought to be read by every boy and girl.]- ought to be despised and socially ostracized by his fellows.  Except for the penalty of disease, women have always borne the brunt of sexual follies, though men have been the more to blame.  It is high time that this injustice were remedied to such extent as law and public opinion can do it.