Author’s Thoughts:
Family life in Britain has over the centuries effectively undergone a 360 degree turn and currently is in the worst state of affairs it has ever been. Initially people formed relationships that could themselves have been affected by recurrent circumstances like war or pestilence forcing those involved to make the most of the time that they had together before the Grim Reaper wielded his scythe and dispatched them to the other world. Even so marriage wasn’t all that commonplace among the lower classes and was an institution that the rich and aspiring upper classes indulged in so they could legitimize their offspring, or supposed ones as cuckolding was just as rampant then among these wealthy and upper class “elites”, and therefore able in their minds at least to leave their wealth and property to these offspring when they personally died; mortality rates being pretty low overall among all sections of the population at the time.

However, as marriage became more fashionable among the rich and upper classes the lower class British Plebs and peasants began emulating their social betters. They had no wealth or property to pass on to their progeny but as is still current in class entrenched Britain they just toadying liked to replicate in their fashion the ways of their perceived social betters and often became even more hard-line in their social and moral observances than those whom they were looking up to on a class basis and endeavouring in social norms to emulate.

So marriage actively encouraged by the church became rather commonplace and saw Britain go through a number of puritan stages moralistically, on the surface that is and publicly so but privately it was invariably something a whole lot different. Anyway these pretences were religiously maintained and those who fell foul of them in the eyes of these hypocritical masses were summarily and publicly dealt with, ostracism and even death being the dire consequences for their perceived anti-social, immoral and irreligious conduct. And although modified over the ensuring years and centuries these strict public observances were nevertheless rigidly maintained.

One such situation was bastardy now codified as illegitimacy. Previously acknowledged without the bat of an eyelid among the wealthy, upper classes the aristocracy and even royalty illegitimacy was now publicly shunned and among Britain’s lower classes was severely ostracised and penalized. Consequently girls or women, who got pregnant without the benefit of being churched, namely married, or who couldn’t persuade or con some poor sod into marrying them whether the expectant child was his or not or in several cases this chosen and duped mug not even knowing that his intended bride was pregnant, was summarily dispatched to one of the plethora of homes for unmarried mothers that had mushroomed across Britain for the specific purpose of keeping these categorized fallen females out of the public spotlight and well away from their home neighbourhoods and the palpable public embarrassment and consternation of their close family members and friends and of course the female in question own public ostracism.

Sometimes though as frequently happened in Wales an already married family member: an older sibling for example or a young uncle or aunt, would take on the child and bring it up as their own supposed biological offspring and not uncommonly with the child itself totally unaware of let alone ever being told confidentially or otherwise of its biological parentage in terms of its real mother or father assuming that he was known. But customarily the pregnant and unmarried mother was surreptitiously dispatched to one of these unmarried mothers home well away from her neighbourhood and community where she was often patronizingly treated by supercilious staff members and steamrolled into having her child fostered or adopted; a measure embarked on it was told to her in her “best interests”.

Often with no moral, physical or financial support behind her and expecting none a situation compounded by the fact and her knowledge that none of these things would be forthcoming if she were to stupidly or ill-advisedly she was reminded keep her child the vast majority of these mothers predictably caved in and did what was demanded of them, namely agreeing to the relinquishment of their children to others knowing full well that when this act was completed mother and child would in all possibility never see each other again. And in exchange for doing so the fallen mother, daughter or female relative would occasionally be warily welcomed back among her own family on condition that she kept her mouth firmly shut about what had happened to her and so didn’t publicly embarrass or humiliate these “loving” family members of hers who couldn’t be any more non-supportive of her even if they had theoretically acquired a PhD in the subject.

But there was a group of females who fared ever far worse; white women or girls over the legal age of consent who’d consensually had sexual relationships with Black men or youths their own age and had gotten pregnant, even voluntarily so. And in such circumstances if her family members of the authorities who were racially horrified by what they saw as a carnal and despicable relationship were unable to coerce the female in question that she’d been “raped” by this Black man or he had coerced her into having sex with him obviously against her will and consequently had involuntarily got her pregnant and thus making that Black man unjustifiably but in racist terms none the less on their part and therefore acceptable from their point of view a moral degenerate and a criminal of the worst kind whose rightful place was in jail and for a very lengthy stretch of prison time and have this female go along with this abominable lie, then these endeavouring to get her do so if they failed in persuading her to do as they wished would then get pliable, unprofessional and equally racist psychiatrists, others in the medical fraternity and all other applicable like-minded “professionals”: social workers and the like, to section this allegedly “disgusting”, from their collective perspective, white female to a lunatic asylum as a severe danger to herself and additionally a corruptive influence as regards her community and from which, as with other such communities, she must be kept away from permanently for their own moral good. And imbued with this sick mindset those who were proscribing these unfortunate women then had them callously carted off to these lunatic asylums where they spent the rest of their natural lives as “psychiatric patients” when there was absolutely nothing wrong with them, while their children obviously taken from them and who they never saw again were confined to children’s homes and a life of childhood and subsequently because of how they were treated in these homes adult misery.

Then came the advent of the female contraceptive pill and with it a boundless sexual revolution with women rapturously ripping up the restrictive moral regulations they were supposed to adhere to and in their place instituting their own sexual codes of conduct which became a truly liberating influence, and without needing to employ any hyperbole in this matter, in the private and public lives of significant numbers and probably even the overwhelming majority of women. The era of the bra-burning, mini-skirts, free and non-committed sexual relationships with multiple partners often taking place simultaneously and conjoined with the voluntary jettisoning of previously held and society-enforced moral precepts like the advised retention of a female’s virginity until and after the attainment of marriage had arrived with a striking and effervescent panache all of its own, as was in noticeable contrast all the former publicly revered, uneasily accepted, grudgingly tolerated but always obligingly indulged in moral code of behaviour which was now massively and excitedly relinquished and likewise jubilantly discarded.

The ethics or otherwise surrounding British family life had done a 360 degree turn and from the ubiquitous extended family environment with all its varied characteristics to the nuclear family, then the single parent one and now to the thoroughly dysfunctional one of dykes, queers, so-called transgenders and what have you becoming “parents” what now exists does in my very honest opinion make a bloody mockery of what family and family values should be all about.