Since the original posting of this piece, multiple people have misunderstood my position. This led me to add the some clarifications to the comment thread. I thought it might prevent further confusion to include them here as well. The original post follows these points.

1. The purpose of my post was to address our attitude toward children, NOT to advocate “producing as many children as humanly possible,” or “maximizing your output of babies.” The point of this post is that children are a blessing. That is all. And that is why I chose those verses (Psalm 127:3-5, Psalm 128:3-4). I do not think that those Psalms command anything. They are statements of fact.

2. There is NO command in Scripture to have as many children as possible.

3. If it were the goal to have as many children as possible, then I would be writing blog posts about how we should all stop breastfeeding, or at the very least stop nursing at night so that we can get our fertility back sooner and produce more babies. And while we’re at it, maybe we should all be taking fertility drugs to ensure that we have twins or triplets every time. Notice, I do not advocate any of this.

4. A woman is not an inferior Christian if she doesn’t have as many children as someone else. She is not sinning if she doesn’t have as many children as someone else. She is not serving God less, or whatever else. I do not use the number of children anyone has as my “measuring stick of the godliness of other believers.” This is why I talk in my post about “Jane,” the godly woman, who for some reason does not appear to be blessed in the area in question.

5. If a woman and her husband aren’t able to have any kids at all, I have nothing even remotely negative to say about them. That would be why I said in my post, “not all of us are actually capable of giving birth to ten children, or five, or any.”

6. BUT, WHY does “normal” in the area of childbearing mean, “go on birth control, and then ask God IF you should have kids”?

7. Having babies is the biological default. It is the normal function of our bodies. NOT having babies is proactive. Using birth control is intentionally doing something to stop your body from behaving the way God made it to. That makes avoiding children the extraordinary act, NOT having them.

8. If younger women are supposed to marry and bear children, then why do we today take as our baseline the prevention of children?

I will therefore that the younger women marry, bear children, guide the house, give none occasion to the adversary to speak reproachfully. –1 Timothy 5:14

9. I am not advocating Quiver-stuffed parenting, but I am wondering why most of Christendom feels that Quiver-empty is the right thing until “we’re ready,” or until “we feel called,” etc.

***

Lo, children are an heritage of the LORD: and the fruit of the womb is his reward. As arrows are in the hand of a mighty man; so are children of the youth. Happy is the man that hath his quiver full of them: they shall not be ashamed, but they shall speak with the enemies in the gate. –Psalm 127:3-5

Thy wife shall be as a fruitful vine by the sides of thine house: thy children like olive plants round about thy table. Behold, that thus shall the man be blessed that feareth the LORD. –Psalm 128:3-4

Whenever I bring up birth control, I witness a strange phenomenon. I call it “Blessings, But.” This is how Christians attempt to reconcile what the Bible seems to say about children with something else, something their hearts are telling them, something born of suffering and struggle, something they’ve seen in others, or experienced themselves, something that tells them that children are one blessing they’d actually rather not have, or at least not in the abundance that the “Quiverfull” camp would celebrate. It goes like this, first you agree with the important sentiment that children are indeed blessings, and then you add your “but,” your reason for not wanting to be blessed at this time, or blessed very much, or for having anyone talk too much about the blessing. “Children are blessings, but they aren’t a requirement.” “Children are blessings, but we don’t want any more. We love the two we’ve got, of course, but we’re done.” “Children are blessings, but I think God wants us to use common sense.” “Children are blessings, but we need time to establish our marriage first.” “Children are blessings, but my friend, Jane, had an emergency hysterectomy and can’t have any more. Are you implying that she’s somehow less godly than women with ten children?”

Do you know what is implicit in all this? It’s the idea that children actually aren’t such blessings after all. If we really thought they were blessings, most of these “buts” would sound kind of hollow. To illustrate what I mean, imagine applying these same arguments to another blessing, good health.

“Good health is a blessing, but it isn’t a requirement.” Would any of us want to add under our breath, “And thank God it isn’t because I sure didn’t want to be too healthy!”? I’m guessing not. The fact is, most of us don’t really care whether we’re required to be healthy or not. We just know we hate being sick! Few of us would choose to have a cold or the flu, let alone cancer, or Alzheimer’s, or Parkinson’s disease. Never mind requirements. When it comes to being healthy, we’re quite happy to just go ahead and be blessed. It’s kind of like asking a kid whose parents took him out for ice cream if his dad was going to require him to eat his banana split. If the kid likes ice cream, then it’s totally irrelevant.

“Good health is a blessing, but I don’t want any more. I loved the health I had, of course, but I’m done.” This is like saying, “I was happy being healthy for a few years, but now I’m looking forward to hypertension and bad knees.” Nobody would say this. Those of us who like being healthy would like to continue to be healthy for a long, long time. We’ll take all the health we can get.

“Good health is a blessing, but I think God wants us to use common sense.” You know, because going to the gym is just too expensive; and cooking fresh vegetables is too time consuming; and some families run themselves into the ground financially trying to pay for vitamins and check-ups; and I know people who are always exercising, and it takes up so much time. Being healthy is great and all, but there are a lot of other things that are way more important. This is really just saying that good health isn’t actually so important at all, or isn’t really worth sacrificing, or prioritizing, or getting creative about. If there are problems with exercising and eating well, rather than solving them because taking care of ourselves is crucial, we’d rather just use “common sense” and forget about it.

“Good health is a blessing, but we need time to establish our marriage first.” This implies that good health gets in the way of a healthy marriage, that health is somehow at odds with a marriage, or that it unduly stresses a marriage in some way. Again, nobody would say this. Nearly all of us think that the blessing of good health is a benefit to anything we want to do, including establishing a marriage.

“Good health is a blessing, but my friend, Jane, has chronic fatigue syndrome and never feels good. Are you implying that she’s somehow less godly than healthy people?” Whenever we talk about a blessing, we have to confront the cases of people who love the Lord, but who appear not to be “blessed” in this particular area. And when that area is physical, either good health or the ability to bear children, we always have to come up against the Curse. We live in fallen bodies. They break. They get diseased. They’re susceptible to mental and physical illness, hormonal imbalance, and injury. Not all of us are going to have radiant health, just like not all of us are actually capable of giving birth to ten children, or five, or any.

What’s telling, here, though, is our attitude toward the blessing itself. When this problem of unequal blessing is brought up about children, the implication is usually, “So, quit putting so much emphasis on them!” But how does this sound for health? Would anyone conclude that since godly women like Jane don’t have all the health that others have, that health really isn’t such a blessing after all, or that if God doesn’t give it in equal measure to everyone, then it isn’t something to be desired? In the case of health, when we see a godly woman who is chronically ill, most of us are impressed by her faith, her love for the Lord, her steadfast perseverance in the face of a hard circumstance. “Wow, it’s really hard to be joyful when you’re denied the blessing of good health. But look at Jane! She’s such an example to us.” Few would take her case as proof that health isn’t beneficial, and we certainly wouldn’t consider it license to eat all our meals at McDonald’s or never leave the La-Z-Boy.

So, what does the fact that we do make all these statements about children really mean? I think it means that we don’t really think children are blessings. Even parents who ferociously love the ones they have, still may not think that all children and any children, including those born third, or seventh, or tenth, would actually bless them.

Why is that? Is God wrong about children being a blessing? How come the Bible doesn’t have any “buts” about this? It’s not because the idea of preventing unwanted children was unheard of. The story of Onan way back in Genesis proves that. What about families that are strapped financially, or mothers who are worn out, or parents who can’t seem to control the monstrous blessings they’ve already got? What about people who just “don’t like kids,” or who want to do things with their lives that children get in the way of (like climbing Mt. Everest, or becoming a CEO, or even spiritual things like mission work)? Would another child really bless these people? Are all children blessings, or only some, the ones we “want,” the ones that are “planned,” the ones that have handsome trust funds established at birth to cover Ivy League tuition, the ones that don’t disrupt our sleep and our lives, make us morning sick, or get in the way of our careers? Does the blessing vanish if another child means we have to shop at the thrift store, grab “dates” at home on the couch, or give up our dream of touring with Yo-Yo Ma? Are we only blessed if we are spared hard work and sacrifice? We can’t have it both ways. Either children are blessings or they aren’t. There are no such things as “Blessings, But.”

When I was in college, one of my assigned projects for math class was to write a paper on a population model that predicted a horrible future for planet Earth as unchecked population growth rapidly consumed all our resources and eventually outpaced farmers’ ability to provide food. The teacher failed to provide any information besides the terrifying population model and left us to form our own conclusions. I’m guessing that the majority of her students left her class believing firmly in the need to prevent this catastrophic future through the use of birth control. I knew at the time that something wasn’t quite right, but being entirely wet behind my ears, I only managed to suggest lamely that humans would find ways to deal with it–like maybe we could colonize the moon?

And now here I am, pregnant with my fourth, with no plans to slow down, glibly contributing to mass starvation and the total depletion of all the Earth’s resources. Hmm. Time to look into lunar real estate?

Well, maybe not.

Actually, as it turns out, far from destroying the world by our fruitfulness, it could be that we’re helping to save it.

This Christmas, I received a DVD of the film, Demographic Winter: the decline of the human family. This is a startling, sobering must see film for anyone who cares about the future of humanity. It details a different kind of population bomb, one caused not by soaring birthrates, but plummeting, death spiraling birthrates. All over the world people are having fewer babies, and in the West, we are having so few that many, many countries are well below replacement level (2.1 children per woman). As Demographic Winter’s website explains:

Worldwide, birthrates have been halved in the past 50 years. There are now 59 nations, with 44% of the world’s population, with below-replacement fertility.

Sometime in this century, the world’s population will begin to decline. At a certain point, the decline will become rapid. We may even reach population free-fall in our lifetimes.

For some countries, population decline is already a reality. Russia is losing three-quarters-of-a-million people a year. Its population (currently 145 million) is expected to fall by one-third by 2050.

What does population decline mean for society? According to the film, it means a mammoth tax burden on the workers of the future as aging societies divert more and more funds to programs for the elderly such as social security and medicare, it means deserted neighborhoods and closing schools, it means struggling economies since there will be fewer customers for nearly every kind of business, and it means major labor shortages. Again from Demographic Winter’s website:

If present low birthrates persist, the European Union estimates there will be a continent-wide shortfall of 20 million workers by 2030.

Who will operate the factories and farms in the Europe of the future? Who will develop the natural resources? Where will Russia find the soldiers to guard the frontiers of the largest nation on Earth?

Who will care for a graying population? A burgeoning elderly population combined with a shrinking work force will lead to a train-wreck for state pension systems.

So far, as the developed world has produced fewer and fewer workers of its own, dependence has grown on immigration to fill the labor shortage, but as this film points out, this has a negative effect on developing countries as their best workers leave in droves. This exodus not only leaves poorer countries without the workers to develop industries of their own, but in many cases, it leaves families without fathers as often it is only the men who emigrate because they cannot afford to bring their families with them.

Some may argue that the world doesn’t seem underpopulated, and in fact, didn’t the population of the world go up dramatically in the last century? These are both quite true, but they ignore the facts about birth rate. The reason the population went up in the last century was not that we “started multiplying like rabbits,” as the film put it, “but that we stopped dying like flies.” In other words, this growth has been mainly due to advances in medicine, sanitation, farming, etc., not to any increase in birth rate. Since people are living longer and longer, the population in pure numbers is still quite high, but this can create a false sense of security. If we want to know what is going to happen to the population long term, we have to look at the number of children being born to replace this aging population. And right now, there simply aren’t enough of them.

I highly recommend this fascinating documentary. You can head on over to the Demographic Winter website and have a look at the trailer and the FAQ. You may even want to purchase the film.

As for me, I hope the Lord gives me more babies. And the moon can stay a barren rock for a little while longer. It’s kind of exciting to be saving the world.

In the twentieth century, society undertook a vast experiment. Women sought to free themselves from the pain, the work, the exhaustion of big families. They took “control” of their biological systems, and in the process, they put all their female organs on the shelf, refusing to breastfeed their children, and even refusing to bear those children in the first place, with the exception of one, or maybe two, when the timing was just right. Later, the small family philosophy was reinforced by the “Population Bomb” scare of the seventies, leading many women to think that having a large family was simply irresponsible. It was the century of birth control and formula feeding, when motherhood was placed in the hands of science, and women were liberated from the chains of their own biology.

But then, after a while, disturbing things began to surface. We discovered that science had not done such a good job at feeding our children. Year after year, new research came out on the miraculous nature of human milk, and slowly the pendulum swung back as more and more women returned to breastfeeding as the very best beginning they could give their babies.

Yet, the other part of the experiment, the part about refusing to bear those babies in the first place, has remained for the most part unquestioned. Sure, there have been a few “religious nuts” here and there who’ve preached that the Bible teaches that children are a blessing, but mainstream science never seemed to back up the idea.

Until now.

What’s going on, why the turn away from such a treasured idea as birth control? Well, to be blunt, women are dying. Those female organs we put on the shelf turned out not to have quite the shelf life we had assumed. They started to fall apart, victims of cancer. Breast cancer rates are soaring. A 2002 article in New Scientist proclaimed that modern women in the UK were facing breast cancer rates as high as those of childless nuns in the nineteenth century and said,

Western women could reduce their breast cancer risk by nearly 60 per cent if they returned to pre-industrial levels of fertility and breastfeeding….For each child a woman has, her risk of the disease declines by 7.0 per cent. On top of this, for every year that she breast feeds, her risk declines by 4.3 per cent.

Birth control is a strange issue. Like breastfeeding, it’s a matter of health. And for many women, it involves putting chemicals into their bodies, which ought to make us wary enough to talk a lot about it. But it also has to do with marital intimacy, and the highly personal and emotionally charged questions of family size and the timing of births, and because of that, there’s a general reticence to discuss it, a squeamish, hush hush feeling of “whatever you and your husband decide must be fine for you.”

But here and there, I’ve come across these alarming articles, tidbits of indicting information that have led me to the conclusion that birth control is not good for you. I’m of the quiver-full mindset, but I’ll save those “religious nut,” Biblical arguments on the blessings of children for another post. Today, I really just want to share what I’ve learned from a purely health related perspective, the kind of information that should be readily available for everyone to weigh whether or not they’re open to having as many children as God gives them.

You see, the choices we make for how we use our bodies, what we put into them, what we ask them to do day by day, all have an effect on our health. Most of us are used to hearing about how important it is to eat right and exercise. We’re aware of the research that shows that whole grains are better for you than refined flours. We may make the lifestyle choice to buy Wonder bread instead of Aunt Millie’s 100% whole wheat, but at least we don’t get offended at the idea that it should be an informed decision. Same for choosing not to exercise. When you choose not to exercise, you are choosing to put your health at risk. And it’s time we got over the squeamishness and were willing to talk about the fact that when you choose not to have children, you are also choosing to put your health at risk.

So how does this work? Why would a “return to pre-industrial fertility” help save women’s lives? Why is it that any decrease in childbearing, or postponement of childbearing increases your breast cancer risk? It’s because estrogen itself is a carcinogen. Every month a woman has a menstrual cycle, she is exposing herself to estrogen. That’s dangerous any time it happens, but it’s worse if she hasn’t had a full term pregnancy yet. This is why delaying childbearing “until you and your husband have gotten to know each other,” or “until you get your career established,” is actually risky business. The earlier you have your first baby, the lower your breast cancer risk. According to Daniel B. Kopans, M.D., Director of the Breast Imaging Center at Massachusetts General Hospital,

…a woman who has her first full-term pregnancy by the age of 18 has about one-third the risk of developing breast cancer as a woman who has her first full-term pregnancy after age 30.

When a girl reaches puberty, her breasts start to develop, but they don’t actually finish developing until she begins making milk for her first baby. The immature breasts of a woman who has not yet gone through pregnancy and breastfeeding are composed of type 1 and 2 lobules. (A lobule is a milk duct and several milk producing glands around it.) In fact, 70% of this woman’s breast tissue is type 1. Type 1 lobules are the most susceptible to breast cancer. 80% of breast cancers are formed in Type 1 lobules. 10% form in type 2 lobules. When women reach the last eight weeks of their first full term pregnancy, at least 70% of their breast tissue matures to type 3 lobules, and then when they begin nursing, their breasts fill with milk and become type 4 lobules. Type 3 and 4 lobules are cancer resistant. The sooner a woman’s breast tissue matures to type 3 and 4 lobules, the safer she will be from breast cancer because she will have exposed her cancer-vulnerable, immature breasts to fewer menstrual cycles, and therefore fewer onslaughts of estrogen. And the more babies she has, the more lobules will mature. (For more information, click here and read the excellent FAQ.)

But not only do many women delay and/or decrease childbearing, they do so through hormonal contraception (like the Pill), which contains steroidal estrogen. And while it is claimed that estrogen given with progesterone (as it always is in hormonal birth control) is not dangerous, there have been numerous studies linking hormonal contraception with increased breast cancer risk. A Mayo clinic meta-analysis of 23 studies found that 21implied increased risk, and combining the studies gave an estimated 44% increase in pre-menopausal breast cancer risk in women who used the Pill before their first full term pregnancy. The World Health Organization, in its own studies, found the risk to be slightly lower (24%), but still high enough to be scary, to me anyway. (Read more here. Click on “Girls on Steroids”)

Is it possible that we’re killing ourselves, dying to avoid a large family?

Obviously there are many, many women who struggle with fertility issues, who actually cannot have more children. But this should not stop us from sharing the information on the risks of choosing not to let natural fertility take its course any more than the fact that there are people with medical conditions which prevent them from exercising should stop us from declaring the benefits of exercise for the rest of us. For most human beings, exercise is necessary for good health, and choosing not to exercise because it’s not the lifestyle you want is going to come with health risks. No one minds if we say this. We need to come to the point of being willing to tell the truth about birth control, too. It was a bad experiment. God designed women’s bodies, not for years and years of monthly cycles, but for pregnancy and breastfeeding. And choosing not to have children because it isn’t the lifestyle you want is going to come with health risks.