This story, as told by my friend Jaynann Payne to a BYU assembly, portrays the sorrow of sexual transgression:
We will never forget that sweet young girl of sixteen who came to live with us one summer for the remaining months of her unwed pregnancy. My husband is an attorney and was handling the adoption of her baby. She hadn’t wanted to marry the boy who was the father of her unborn child. She had been beguiled and had partaken of the bitter fruit.
In September she gave birth to a beautiful little boy, and the day she was to leave the hospital, Dean and I had to go to Salt Lake City. We stopped at the hospital long enough to meet the couple who were adopting the baby. Under hospital rules, this young mother, sixteen years old, had to take her beautiful nine-pound boy from the arms of the nurse and hand him over to my husband, who then stepped outside the room and gave the baby to the adopting parents. It tore me apart to watch her and to see that young couple leave with her baby.
She said to me, “Sister Payne, he lied to me when he said nobody would get hurt, and that because we loved each other, anything we did was all right. He didn’t really love me. That is why I didn’t marry him, because he wasn’t worthy to be the father of my little boy. It’s all a great big lie, and I don’t want to live a lie!
“Oh, if only I had known five minutes before I was immoral how I would feel five minutes after I gave my baby away!”
For this girl not to have thought ahead about the consequences of her actions and not to have realized that lust is the mere image of love is indeed heartbreaking. It is so important to keep in tune, keep in touch, to receive the Spirit each and every day. We never know what is going to happen; and if we make the commitment in our private rooms, by the side of our beds, to our Father in heaven, of what we want to be in life—what we will do and what we won’t do—and then ask for his help in keeping our commitments, he will help us in public and private. (Jaynann Payne, BYU Speeches, 10 February 1970.) (Ed J. Pinegar)