Deep Thoughts

I've been doing a lot of deep thinking lately, mostly to do with a readjustment of certain prejudices that I didn't realize I had. I'm sure some of you have already been aware of the to-do over NFP in the blogosphere lately. Well, maybe you haven't. But trust me, there is one -- it all boils down to the "NFP is the best thing since sliced bread" vs. the "NFP is a hard sacrifice - almost too hard" debate. The experience of the Pickles household is that NFP has indeed been a great thing -- certainly a challenge at times (Miriam surprised us with her existence ahead of schedule, for example), but also a great blessing for our marriage and personal growth. We've been blessed with temperaments that haven't found occasional abstinence to be a heavy burden. But we understand that it's not that way for everyone, indeed for many of our close friends and family members. I even have a formerly close friend who left the faith because she and her husband found NFP just too hard. My heart goes out to them.

So the other day I was cruising around my favorite "mom blogs" and came across one post that really got me thinking. I normally don't read Danielle Bean's Coffee Talk Tuesdays, just b/c the comments are always so dang long, but this time I actually had some time to kill. So I read through several comments and suddenly found my heart racing. Sadly the comments degenerated into name-calling and some judgmentalism, essentially over whether poor people should have children if they're not sure they can support them -- and that perhaps they ought to feel ashamed for accepting government aid. Enter my prejudice. I had never voiced this to anyone, but I had always subconsciously believed that if a family could not support themselves, they ought not to have any more children, at least temporarily, and that they would be irresponsible to welcome new life into the world when they couldn't support the family they already had. Never having been poor myself, I didn't realize how bigoted this belief really was. But seeing my subconscious thought actually voiced by a couple of the commentors, and then seeing one commentor ask who gets to decide who's rich enough to have children, brought me up sharply. Who the h-e-double-hockey-sticks am I to judge another family harshly for wanting to bring another baby into the world? Why should it be wrong for a couple to want to incarnate their love for each other in a new, unique human being with an immortal soul?

Finally Danielle had to close comments b/c they were getting too snarky. But her response was another eye-opener. This paragraph really caught my eye:

We need to be very careful when we talk about “responsible parenthood.” All too often, this phrase leads to the idea of preventing pregnancy as the default mode for Catholic marriages. In this way of thinking, couples must meet certain criteria, financial or otherwise, before they are “allowed” to have children. I can think of many words to describe this kind of thinking, but not one of them is “Catholic.”

She also wrote an article for Inside Catholic about how prevalent the culture of death is even in Catholic communities. Since when did having children become a sign of irresponsibility? Have we been so brainwashed by the false fear of overpopulation that the idea of more babies makes us uncomfortable, or even afraid? It's so twisted -- children are supposed to be the hope of the future, not its death.

Finally, I found this post on a quote from Casti Connubi, about the state's responsibility to provide for families who can't support themselves. I found the blog author's comment particularly eye-opening: "...when social structures and economic conditions are such that they cause excessive strain on the family, it is not the duty of married persons to deprive themselves of the natural goods of married life in order to accommodate the State, but the duty of the State to make provision for and accommodate marriage and the whole structure of family life that results from it." In sum, married couples should never feel outside pressure to limit their family size. Whether or not they abstain from "the natural goods of married life" in a given month to prevent the conception of another family member is an extremely personal matter between them and God, and really not anyone else's business. If they so choose, they MAY use NFP to postpone a pregnancy, but it should never be required, or even expected, of them. And the rest of us should be willing to bend over backwards to give them needed help, lest they feel punished for being generous with God.

"Babies are only and always blessings." Let's not make the challenge of welcoming them into some families feel like a burden. This appeal goes for me, too. I could always be urged a little farther out of my comfort zone to offer help to other moms who might need it, even if they're too embarrassed to ask.