God. Real. Right.

How should Christian parents, church leaders, friends, and strangers react when they hear about the pregnancy of a young woman who is not married? This issue is very easy to address once confusion over it is resolved.
Where is the confusion? Well, when an unmarried teenager gets pregnant, there are actually two distinct issues influencing people’s behaviors and opinions: the sexual activity which brought about the pregnancy and the pregnancy itself.
Now there really should be no controversy regarding the sexual activity itself. Sex outside of marriage is precluded for those who follow Jesus. Admittedly, the presumption and even pressure of society is toward exactly what is precluded by New Testament Christianity, but there is no getting around passages against “promiscuity”, “fornication”, and the activities referenced by other lead-up and descriptive terms throughout the New Testament. But those prohibitions apply whether pregnancy is possible or not; even whether STD’s exist or not (and, duh, of course they do). So if an observer is not the parent of the pregnant teenager and does not have knowledge of the sexual activity of every non-pregnant teenager she is around then there is no sense at all in presuming authority to scold or correct the one that happens (from the human perspective) to be pregnant; because regardless of the actual words which are spoken, what will be heard and what will really be said is just that the pregnant girl should not have gotten pregnant. But getting pregnant was not the problem. Sexual promiscuity was the problem, and it should have been addressed independently of the pregnancy. Why independently?
Pregnancy simply means expecting a child. Despite some recent political statements, pregnancy is not like an STD, and a child is not a punishment. For Christians it is simple. All life is given by God. Sexual promiscuity should not be celebrated. But life should be.
And there is the dilemma faced by some: how to celebrate the life without appearing to endorse the immoral sexual activity which brought about the pregnancy. But it is not difficult at all for Christians to deal with such things in light of the core of Christian experience. For example, when Paul points out that where sin used to abound, grace abounded even more, he must then address the presumption that if grace can follow sin, the sin might itself be considered good. “Why not sin the more, so that grace could abound the more?” But his point is, of course, that such a sentiment is absurd. In such wrongful thinking every act of forgiveness would be an encouragement to more sin. But such is not the case. Forgiveness and grace are instead invitations to transformation and freedom from the previous motivations to sin.
The point with an “unwanted” pregnancy is the same. (Obviously, “unwanted” may be the right term for some people, but the better attitude and term would be “unplanned”, or “unanticipated”, or “unexpected”. It is the “want” that ought to change, not the pregnancy.) Every pregnant teenager knows the guilt presumed about her. What she needs to be reminded of, what this society needs to be reminded of, is that her pregnancy is NOT her punishment. It is instead the beginning of a life which, while she may not have intended, God did. And God’s intention is for good, not evil.
Normal people, those who are not following Jesus, may frown upon or even condemn the pregnancy itself. They might even take glee in the “sexual freedom” evidenced. But their reactions should not define the followers reaction. And followers must always be defined first by mercy and grace when dealing with sin, and confidence in God’s intent when dealing with life.