10 Thoughts On a Lifestyle of Birth Control
These are not thoughts about preventing pregnancy in any and all circumstances. There are certainly circumstances when and where preventing pregnancy would be good and appropriate, even as there are certainly circumstances where abstaining from marital sex would be good and appropriate in order to pray and fast (1 Corinthians 7:5). But ours is a day of birth control as a lifestyle, a day in which it is seen as normal to strictly control the number of children a family has and as abnormal to have any more than two or three children. It’s against that unhealthy assumption these brief thoughts are directed. I want people, most especially Christians, to reconsider birth control as they reconsider the glory of childbearing and raising children.
Wanting to take the pleasure of sex that comes with marriage but close off any and all childbearing because of its intrinsic difficulties is akin to saying “God, I’ll take the singing and Lord’s Supper that comes with church, but you can keep preaching and baptism.” When God made marriage, sex, and childbearing, He made them as an organically connected unit. We are not free to try to chop it up.
Having children helps you discover your spouse.
Making a lifestyle of refusing something God calls a blessing, without a morally weighty reason, is unwise.
Children expand and enrich a family. They do not merely debit it. In a family of five children and their married mother and father, there are seven minds, seven sets of arms and legs, seven personalities and intelligences and sets of gifts who are bonded together by covenant. To willfully refuse any children being added to your marital family is to willfully refuse the most valuable resource God makes: People. The reason for a refusal like that should be more substantial than pleasure travel or hobbies.
A Christian family is not like a wall anchor. It doesn’t have a pre-set maximum weight it can bear. It is an organic, growing, spirit-empowered thing. Its capacity can grow exponentially, like a muscle or a tree.
I do not know any mature older Christians who wished they’d had fewer children. I do know ones who wished they’d had more.
The world in which Hannah, Sarai, Elizabeth, and Elisha’s widow longed to be given children was much harsher and less safe than the one in which we take pills or have operations to not have children.
Each child in a truly Christian family is a new gift of sanctification for the other members of the family.
No one who despises childbearing actually loves people. Loving one’s neighbor as one’s self includes loving babies.
Thoroughly woven into the Christian story are joyous pregnancies and births. God loves childbearing.