Shotgun wedding
A shotgun wedding is a wedding that is arranged to avoid embarrassment due to an unplanned pregnancy, rather than out of the desire of the participants. The phrase is an American colloquialism based on a supposed scenario (hyperbole) that the father of the pregnant daughter, almost by accepted custom, must resort to using coercive force to ensure that the man who impregnated her goes through with the wedding.
More generally, a shotgun wedding is any hasty marriage arranged due to unplanned pregnancy. The use of duress or violent coercion to marry is no longer common in the U.S., although many anecdotal stories and folk songs record instances of such coercion in 18th- and 19th-century America. Often a couple will arrange a shotgun wedding without explicit outside encouragement, and some religious teachings consider it a moral imperative to marry in that situation.
One purpose of such a wedding can be to get recourse from the male for the act of impregnation; another reason is to ensure that the child is raised by both parents. In some cases, as in early America and in the Middle East, a major objective was the restoring of social honor to the mother. The practice is also a loophole method of preventing the birth of legally illegitimate children, or if the marriage occurs early enough, to conceal that conception occurred prior to marriage. In some societies the social stigma attached to pregnancy out of wedlock can be enormous, and coercive means (in spite of the legal defense of undue influence) for gaining recourse are often seen as the prospective father-in-law's "right", and an important, albeit unconventional, coming of age event for the young father-to-be.
The phenomenon has become less common as the stigma associated with out-of-wedlock births has declined and the number of such births has increased.
In former times when a divorce was much harder to get than now, conceiving a baby before marriage was a way to ensure that neither partner was left for life married to an infertile partner.
Sometimes a woman who marries while pregnant, regardless of the situation, is simply referred to as a "shotgun bride".
In Japan, an equivalent slang term dekichatta kekkon (できちゃった結婚) emerged in the late 1990s among young people.
Shotgun wedding in popular culture
- A joke in the computer adventure game Sam & Max Episode 205: What's New, Beelzebub? is based on Max's literal interpretation of the term.
- Comedian Jeff Dunham has a puppet named Bubba Jay who was forced to have a shotgun wedding due to getting his girlfriend pregnant. "I went over to her house one night, was supposed to pick her up at seven, showed up at seven thirty. Her daddy was out on the porch with his shotgun, he said, "Hey, Bubba J! Guess who else is late?""
- Panic At The Disco's 2005 song Time To Dance includes the lyric "When I say shotgun you say wedding. Shotgun Wedding, Shotgun Wedding".
- A major plotpoint of Edu-macating Lucky, a 2006 episode of King of the Hill involves a shotgun wedding.
- In Billy Idol's single "White Wedding", the concept is broached by the lyric "Hey little sister shot gun!"
- Actress Gwyneth Paltrow referred to her wedding the singer Chris Martin of Coldplay as a shotgun wedding on the Oprah Winfrey Show.
- The end of the music video for the Georgia Satellites' hit 1986 single Keep Your Hands to Yourself shows a textbook shotgun wedding, complete with a father jabbing a shotgun into his mullet-headed future son-in-law's back as the groom marries the shotgun toter's heavily pregnant daughter.
- In an episode of The Simpsons Homer is forced into a shotgun wedding in a story.
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