Reproductive Rights and Wrongs

If I leave my husband for my lesbian lover and we blend our families and take in foster children, we will likely be celebrated on the cover of Time magazine for our commitment to family.

BUT

If I spend fifty years in a monogamous, faithful, heterosexual marriage and give birth to six children, I will likely be publicly vilified in the checkout line as others count my brood and notice I am pregnant with number seven.

If people comment to my lesbian partner that they don’t approve of our relationship, those people will be shushed and told they are guilty of discrimination, possibly even a hate crime. If people comment to me and my husband that we’re selfishly overpopulating the world, or insinuate that we don’t know how children are conceived, or act as though I am an addled, oppressed woman, lacking in intelligence or personal ambition who should be liberated, they are applauded by spectators.

We didn’t become this culture overnight but here we are.

There are commissions, nonprofit agencies, and entire legal institutions committed to protecting the reproductive rights of women, but these apparently don’t include a woman’s right to have as many children as God chooses for her to have and to receive each of them with joy. AND it isn’t usually men who are belittling or scorning or mocking women who choose to have large families through childbirth – it’s other women.

Seriously, how rude and unconscionable is that?

We’re all one big handholding circle of sisterhood unless one of us chooses to love our one husband and raise a dozen children. How did THAT come to be the woman excluded from the great community hug of inclusion? It’s shameful and if you’re a woman who has clucked her tongue at another woman pregnant with her fourth child, well, don’t ever do it again.

Children are a blessing from the Lord – period. God said it and everyone else should shut up about it.

In my line of work, people are careful not to make judgmental comments about the single mothers who have children by several different fathers (and I agree that not only should there be no judgmental comments but no judgment – none of us should be judging others based on the children we’ve chosen to bear) but I have heard extensive, scandalous commentary about television families with multiple children – how do people justify that?

We can certainly measure the deterioration of our culture by the increase in violence, addiction, or mental health issues but I think an equally frightening judgment of our own culture is this scorn for women who celebrate life by giving birth more than three times and commit themselves to raising the children they bear.

It’s weird just to write that sentence.

Isaiah spoke these words when he was prophesying against Israel in chapter 5:20-23

“Woe to those who call evil good and good evil, who put darkness for light and light for darkness, who put bitter for sweet and sweet for bitter! Woe to those who are wise in their own eyes, and shrewd in their own sight! Woe to those who are heroes at drinking wine, and valiant men in mixing strong drink, who acquit the guilty for a bribe, and deprive the innocent of his right!”

What greater right do the innocent have than to be conceived, born, received with joy, and raised in love?

And, I’m sorry, but I have to think “double woe” if you’re a woman and you do this to another woman. C’mon, what’s up with that? The Lord saw fit to bless me with two healthy children and I bless Him for that. But I also love women who long for that blessing, women with one child, women who choose to remain childless, and women with ten children and may God bless us all!

I know some of us have joined in the mocking of women with many children without thinking, without realizing, because the judgment has crept in on cats’ paws in the insidious fashion of all treacherous evil, but let’s unite in calling it out, now! Children are a blessing from the Lord and if God has called you to many children, you are blessed indeed, as are they.

Apparently, the church hasn’t cornered the market on hypocrisy since many women who say they stand for reproductive rights would also condemn the mother of many children. Clearly they believe there are reproductive rights and reproductive wrongs.

There are, but they have it figured the wrong way.

What did one domino say to the other? We don’t have to fall.

Today’s post was inspired by reading this post “To the Lady Ashamed of Being Pregnant with Her Fourth” and this post “The Contempt Show Big Families.” (And just in case I have confused you at all, I am a heterosexual woman married to one man for the duration with two children.)