Call me too sensitive, but since we had our fourth child last August, my wife and I have been getting lots of unsolicited feedback on our family size. People who wouldn’t dare the affrontery of asking what I make in a year, or what our house is worth, feel emboldened to preach to us the gospel of better living through smaller litters.
A Christmas card comes from an old Catholic school chum: “Congratulations on your fourth—You’ve got your boy, now ENOUGH!”
“We’ve got to get you some birth control, girl!” says my wife’s hip ob-gyn, announcing her plans for the obsolescence of our proclivity to fertility (a generous gesture considering it would result in the loss of one of her steadiest baby-delivery customers.)
It seems we’ve been engaged by a citizen militia sent to enforce the great unwritten American law that families will consist of no more than two children, except in cases where two children are of the same sex and a third is permitted to break the tie.
But I’ve heard, too, the same story in reverse from couples who can’t conceive, and from couples who’ve had one child but are unable to have more. These folks feel they’ve run up against a rising neonatalist mentality in the Church, enforcing some man-made commandment that all Catholics be fruitful and multiply lest they be branded practitioners of the black art or artificial contraception.
Sure it’s true, as the Catechism of the Catholic Church states, large families are “a sign of God’s blessing and the parents’ generosity.” But nowhere is it written that the model Catholic family is the Old Woman in the Shoe (who had so many kids she didn’t know what to do). Nor is it written that we must be peering into the bedrooms of the childless looking for reasons to anathematize.
Childless women are the heroines of faith in the Scripture. Think of Hannah pouring out her soul in the temple, a prayer so powerful that it echoed down through the centuries, until it was uttered in a new way by the Mother of Christ in her Magnificat (see 1 Sam. 2:1–10; Luke 1:46–45).
It’s that kind of faith, that kind of self-abandonment to God’s plan, that’s missing in all the kid-counting going on today. From what I’ve heard on both sides of the baby abacus, many people would just as soon take these matters out of God’s hands. And in a culture obsessed with technological fixes, there’s a certain logic and allure to trying to control your reproductive destiny through injections, surgery, pills of other devices.
Much to the surprise of even many Catholics, Catholic teaching also offers ways to plan family size and growth, and the Catechism goes so far as to say there can be “just reasons” for putting some space between births of your children.
It’s up to the couple to be sure they’re not just being selfish, but they’re responsible for considering the impact more children might have on their marriage, on children they already have, on the community they live in, and importantly, on their relationship with God.
The one thing the Church says they can’t do is separate through the use of artificial means what God has joined in his divine plan for sex—namely, the pleasure and communion of body and soul that sex brings and its mysterious and holy power to possibly create life.
This is asking a lot —that couples respect God’s plan for sex by regulating births solely by self-observance of the nature cycles of fertility and in fertility.
The Church asks even more from infertile couples, who are called upon to see their disappointments and suffering in light of Christ’s cross, to resist the temptation to turn to technologies or surrogates to create their children, and instead to find other ways to express their holy urge to nurture new life—in adoption, for instance, or in other kinds of sacrifice and service.
It’s hard to remember all this when you’re being stared down by some Catholic woman in a babushka with seven kids in a minivan or being scolded by a kid-counter in the checkout line. But they’re both wrong.
The way I do the math, it adds up to this: kid’s aren’t “things” we should be counting the cost of, or measures by which we can judge the soul or faith of another; they’re not something we can demand as a “right” or create out of whole cloth when it suits or needs or fits our schedule.
Kids are just this — a gift from God, born out of heart of that human love that gives us a small taste of what the love of God must be like.
By the time we’re ready to have our next one, I hope all the baby monitors on both sides will have started really believing this. But I’m not counting on it.
Originally published in Catholic Parent (May-June 1997)
© David Scott, 2010. All rights reserved.
