Part IV: Trusting God

Please keep commenting -- your thoughts are very useful as I'm figuring out what I'll write about next. Only a few more posts and then I'll be (haha) done.

There's a fine line between "trusting God" and "trusting I know how my body works."

The Quiverfull philosophy says that God sends children as blessings, and that we shouldn't take any steps to prevent pregnancy. Wanting to control your fertility for any reason shows a lack of trust in God. As with many philosophies, this one looks good in theory, but when you run it in reality you discover some bugs.

As you find out after your first baby is born, there's no such thing as natural birth control. Breastfeeding suppresses your cycle for a while, but it's different with each woman. Some women don't get their cycles back for a year and a half after childbirth. Some women find themselves pregnant a month after giving birth. My cycle usually starts back somewhere around five to seven months after the baby is born. (I got pregnant with Stuart with Addie was eight months old.)

Furthermore, there's no obvious indication that you've ovulated until after the fact. I don't often take issue with the way God designed things, but seriously, that particular area needed a little more tweaking.

And our bodies aren't machines. They don't all work predictably. Some of them plain don't work right at all. If it's possible to be infertile, isn't it possible to be too fertile? A friend suggested that the use of plastics and artificial hormones in our food has affected fertility so that women ovulate more frequently than they should. There might be something in that, but there have always been women whose bodies don't seem to rest and recover between children like they should.

Given the wild variables from one mother to the next, it's unhelpful at best to say that we shouldn't take steps to avoid pregnancy. Sure, God opens and closes the womb -- but you don't get pregnant unless you're having sex while you're ovulating. Knowing how something works doesn't invalidate how God works.

Children are more than just the joining of a sperm and egg, more than just genetic variations of their parents. They're new souls. Obviously the decision to prevent or allow one of these new souls is weighty. But does God ever indicate that we don't have any say in that decision?

-- SJ