The Tribune

EDITOR, The Tribune.

While Richard Lightbourne’s recent comments regarding mandatory sterilisation of unwed mothers were neither tasteful nor tactful, there is no denying the message he was attempting to articulate however repugnant it might seem for many of us.

It is said that ignorance is bliss and we as a people have for the last forty odd years blissfully ignored what has perhaps evolved, aside from the recent scourge of the web shop industry, into one of the elements most destructive to our society’s moral and social fibre.

Since 1970, births to unwed mothers in The Bahamas have soared from twenty-nine percent to over sixty-two percent in 2010 and that percentage is without a doubt higher today. The traditional Bahamian home where both parents, regardless of economic circumstances or skin colour, equally shared the responsibility of raising and nurturing their children has become all but extinct.

It was these very real concerns that Mr Lightbourne was attempting to communicate. Therefore if we are to arrest our country’s and people’s ever deepening decent into moral and civil disorder, we must find ways to educate the less intelligent among us to their parental responsibilities and to the consequences that their licentious and profligate lifestyles have on, not only their own lives, but the lives of their children and on our society as a whole.

IAN MABON

Nassau,

August 5, 2016.