Bristol Palin and her former fiancé, Levi Johnston, recently broke off their engagement three months after the birth of the couple’s son, Tripp.

Bristol Palin’s out-of-wedlock pregnancy became national news last September after the Alaska high-schooler’s mother, Alaska Gov. Sarah Palin, became the Republican Party’s vice-presidential nominee.

According to Levi, he and Bristol broke up after having an argument.

“We were just, we were in a fight,” Levi told ABC News, CNN reported. “And trying to see if we can make things work. But this is what it kind of ended up turning into.”

Is it right to deny a newborn baby the benefit of a stable, two-parent home just because of a “fight”? It should be remembered that even in the best marital relationships an occasional disagreement is a virtual inevitability.

The point? That children deserve the love and protection that can only be guaranteed when their parents make the lifelong commitment of marriage before engaging in sexual intimacy — with a clear understanding by both spouses that this commitment must be maintained in the face of whatever trials and tribulations that ensue.

When a new life is conceived and brought into the world by a couple without this authentic marital commitment, the likelihood of that couple breaking up over things like “fights” is vastly increased, according to a wealth of sociological data.

That’s not to say that this authentic commitment is always present among married couples. Divorces can occur when one or both spouses never made the commitment to a lifelong marriage or lost it somewhere along the way. That can even happen in some marriages involving faithful Catholics, as Register Executive Editor Tom Hoopes noted in this article he wrote for Crisis magazine.

One of the important things that Tom reported in his article: According to a University of Chicago analysis of data from the National Survey of Family and Households, even in marriages where both spouses say they are “unhappy,” more than two-thirds of such couples report they are happy five years later if their marriages survive due to the commitment of the husband and wife to stick together through thick and thin.

Surprisingly, the figure is even higher among spouses who say they are “very unhappy” with their marriage; 80% of such couples said they were happy five years later if their marriage remained intact.

This demonstrates the commitment of marriage can overcome temporary difficulties, even persistent ones. And this reinforces the reality that a committed marriage ought to be present before any new human life is conceived, for the sake of that child.

It can be argued that in the case of Bristol Palin and Levi Johnston their decision to split up after an argument indicates either that they’re too immature for marriage or they’re not really suited for each other. That could be true. But, if so, all the more reason they shouldn’t have been making babies outside of marriage.

The young couple may yet come to a decision to reconcile and enter into the solemn and joyous commitment of an authentic marriage. We can certainly hope that happens, for little Tripp’s sake.

We also can hope that their break-up, temporary or not, will serve as a reminder of why sexual intimacy should occur only in the context of marriage.