Recently, shared what Father Stephen Freeman wrote in 2018 on The Inherent Violence of Modernity, and one passage in particular blazed with resonant truth:

“The philosophy that governs our culture is rooted in violence, the ability to make things happen and to control the outcome. It is a deeply factual belief. We can indeed make things happen, and, in a limited way, control their outcome. But we soon discover (and have proven it time and again) that our ability to control is quite limited. Many, many unforeseeable consequences flow from every action.”

It reminded me of Kingsnorth’s (sadly tiny) portion in Against the Machine dedicated to my wheelhouse, where he explains:

“The technologization of sex and sexuality—which involves everything from online hookups to birth control pills to IVF to mastectomies for teenagers born in the wrong body—is a huge shift in our relationship with human nature, and nature in general.”

The way we relate to human nature, and particularly to our sexual nature, is now violent. It is a soft and clinical kind of violence where our fertility is concerned. And it is another kind of violence, against multiple persons, where pornography is concerned.

I’ve been thinking a lot recently about how the effect of both - emotionally and spiritually - could feel similar. Not the same, but similar.

The reality of sexual disintegration is degrading. It feels that way because it is a rending apart of parts of ourselves that are meant to be whole. If something feels violent and unsettling, it’s likely because it is.

Both our procreative potential in fertility and our sexual desires and actions are part of a whole sexuality—one which the world, the flesh, and the devil are bent on disintegrating quite forcefully.

Degradation of the person comes in many forms.

Profanation comes through subtly violent means.

Desecration comes by way of clinical and digital settings alike.

Sexual and bodily integrity are not unrelated.

Wholeness requires integration of seemingly disparate parts.

In lieu of a polished essay—because this is substack and we can let our hair down a bit around here by sharing [checks notes] philosophy quotes—let me invite you into my thought process. More specifically, these are simply the books and quotes providing an anchor to this concept in my mind.

If you read them with the Life Considered Spirit™, you’ll likely see what I mean. Will be pondering them myself for a while.

R.J. Snell, Acedia and Its Discontents

Specialization especially seems to understand reality as disintegrated and manipulable, just as the specialists of fertility and pornography understand sexuality. Rejecting the delight of the whole of goodness, all reality is open to our exploitation…

[To be clear, the “specialists of fertility” he has in mind are those who specialize in its disintegration and manipulation as a matter of course. Clunky term for the job, I know.]

By health, says Wendell Berry [in The Art of the Commonplace], “we mean merely the absence of disease,” whereas health is best understood as “wholeness.”

Specializing in the body without consideration for the soul, or, for that matter, specializing in the soul without including the body in the health of the person, devalues the body, our own as well as the bodies of others.

For us, the world becomes mere resource, raw material, what Martin Heidegger called “standing reserve,” a stocking or storehouse of energy for us to use when and how we wish, waiting at attention for us. Its interiority is denied, its splendor formae dimmed, there is no kābôd or “freshness deep down”; the Holy Ghost does not brood, Christ’s play has stilled, and only we father forth. There are no gods anywhere, and the world has been stripped of its intrinsic value, serving at our beck and call. It is no longer gift, merely a stark given, mute.

Left unchecked by creation and governed by will, this terrible covenant of sloth, in all its bored nihilism, refuses to willingly approve or love reality—heedless of God’s instruction to Adam, the empire of desire looks at the assembly of being, the session of onion and persons and tackle and trim, and chooses not to say “At last,” seeing nothing of value… There has been a “bleaching out of the density of things, of their depth and internal constitution,” and a “lifting [of] the weight attributed to them.”

Byung-Chul Han, The Agony of Eros

The impulse to live, heightened to the utmost and affirmed, approaches the impulse to die. Eros is the medium for intensifying life to the point of death. Indeed, although erotic activity is, in the first place, an exuberance of life, the object of this psychological quest—independent of any concern to reproduce life—is not alien to death.

The crisis of love does not derive from too many others, so much as from the erosion of the other.

The pornification of the world is unfolding as the profanation of the world. Porn profanes the erotic.

Profanation... involves practicing a special form of negligence with respect to what has been set apart in this manner.

Roger Scruton, Beauty

In distinguishing the erotic and the pornographic we are really distinguishing two kinds of interest: interest in the embodied person and interest in the body—and, in the sense that I intend, these interests are incompatible… Normal desire is an inter-personal emotion. Its aim is a free and mutual surrender, which is also a uniting of two individuals, of you and me—through our bodies, certainly, but not merely as our bodies. Normal desire is a person to person response, one that seeks the selfhood that it gives. Objects can be substituted for each other, subjects not. Subjects, as Kant persuasively argued, are free individuals; their non-substitutability belongs to what they essentially are. Pornography, like slavery, is a denial of the human subject, a way of negating the moral demand that free beings must treat each other as ends in themselves.

The old morality, which told us that selling the body is incompatible with giving the self, touched on a truth. Sexual feeling is not a sensation that can be turned on and off at will: it is a tribute from one self to another and—at its height— an incandescent revelation of what you are. To treat it as a commodity, that can be bought and sold like any other, is to damage both present self and future other. The condemnation of prostitution was not just puritan bigotry; it was a recognition of a profound truth, which is that you and your body are not two things but one, and by selling the body you harden the soul. And that which is true of prostitution is true of pornography too. It is not a tribute to human beauty but a desecration of it.

Art, as we have known it, stands on the threshold of the transcendental. It points beyond this world of accidental and disconnected things to another realm, in which human life is endowed with an emotional logic that makes suffering noble and love worthwhile. Nobody who is alert to beauty, therefore, is without the concept of redemption – of a final transcendence of mortal disorder into a ‘kingdom of ends.’

One cure for the pain of desecration is the move towards total profanation: in other words, to wipe out all vestiges of sanctity from the once worshipped object, to make it merely a thing OF the world, and not just a thing IN the world, something that is nothing over and above the substitutes that can at any time replace it. That is what we see in the spreading addiction to pornography - a profanation that removes the sexual bond entirely from the realm of intrinsic values. It involves wiping out one area in which the idea of the beautiful had taken root, so as to protect ourselves from the possibility of loving it and therefore losing it.

Beauty is vanishing from our world because we live as though it did not matter; and we live that way because we have lost the habit of sacrifice and are striving always to avoid it. The false art of our time, mired in kitsch and desecration, is one sign of this.

Do not quench the Spirit. Do not despise prophecies, but test everything; hold fast what is good. Abstain from every form of evil.

Now may the God of peace himself sanctify you completely, and may your whole spirit and soul and body be kept blameless at the coming of our Lord Jesus Christ.

He who calls you is faithful; he will surely do it.

I Thessalonians 5:19-24

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I’ve been mulling over some terms we use when it comes to the realm of might be called moral theology and Christian ethics. These are disciplines that, paired with theology, train us to see rightly in the light of Christ.

Of course, they can feel abstract. But they do deal with concrete terms and concepts that visibly play out in the world. They wrestle out and weigh truth claims against each other alongside Scripture, tradition, philosophy, and the like. They aid us in living as Christians in the world. (Please go to the professionals for more on that.)

In any case, there’s been some basic concepts mulling around in my mind as relates to this newsletter, one of which has occupied much of my headspace. Though not exhaustive, it helps me to lay them out in a “What are we dealing with here, and how might they interact?” type of way.

Hopefully it makes some kind of sense.

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The Fruit of the Spirit & Virtue

To refresh the memory, here is Galatians 5:22-23: “But the fruit of the Spirit is love, joy, peace, patience, kindness, goodness, faithfulness, gentleness, self-control; against such things there is no law.”

And then we have some clusters and kinds of virtue as developed in Christian tradition. (Forgive me for not citing all sources, I captured these long ago and forget exactly where I got the definitions).

4 Cardinal (or Natural) Virtues

Prudence, Justice, Fortitude, Temperance

3 Theological Virtues

Faith, Hope, Love (or Charity)

They appear in I Thessalonians 1:3 and I Thessalonians 5:8, and of course in I Corinthians 13 when the Apostle Paul writes, “So now faith, hope, and love abide, these three; but the greatest of these is love.”

Thomas Aquinas describes these virtues as such “first, because their object is God, inasmuch as they direct us aright to God: secondly, because they are infused in us by God alone: thirdly, because these virtues are not made known to us, save by Divine revelation, contained in Holy Writ.”

7 Deadly Vices And Heavenly Virtues

Pride: A desire for excellence in excess of right reason // Humility: A rightly-ordered estimation of excellence

Gluttony: A disordered desire for good things // Temperance: A desire to keep good things in their rightful place

Lust: A disordered desire for pleasure // Chastity: A rightly-ordered desire for pleasure

Envy: Sorrow for another’s good // Love: To will the good of the other

Greed: A desire for more than is needed // Generosity, Charity: A desire for enough for all

Anger: A desire for vengeance contrary to reason // Meekness: Power under control

Sloth, Acedia: Sorrow for spiritual good; the absence of care // Diligence: Taking care to do what we value most

Conscience

Merriam Webster defines the conscience as:

1. the sense or consciousness of the moral goodness or blameworthiness of one’s own conduct, intentions, or character together with a feeling of obligation to do right or be good.

2. a faculty, power, or principle (as in an individual or group) that steers toward what is right and away from what is wrong.

3. conformity to what one considers to be correct, right, or morally good.

Who and what helps form it, and in what ways? Certainly, a Christian would say Scripture and the Holy Spirit contributes to this formation, but of course even that doesn’t happen in a vacuum.

In what ways can it be dulled or seared? How would a person know this is happening?

In any case, there are many references in Scripture to the conscience, and much ink has been spilled on those.

The Ick Factor

This seem to be indicative, to some degree at least, of how a conscience has been formed. It draws from larger ideas I am not well versed in: natural law, metaphysics, and somehow Thomas Aquinas again (it’s always Thomas Aquinas).

has written on the mind twists we get into in order to create “abominations, but ethical.” What we do with the created order is always speaking something. The way she ends a related essay stopped me in my tracks:

“We need to stop pretending we can’t see what’s right in front of us. The warning was always there. Jesus could have made stone into bread, but he chose not to violate reality just to fill his belly. ­Instead, he made bread into his own body, to fill our hearts.”

has also written a Defense of the Ick Factor, and its deep gut repulsion that may show up as something like awkwardness in polite conversation.

Oftentimes, a visceral feeling of disgust is the proper response to something intrinsically dark. Darkness hates light and life, order and beauty.

Sensitivity to the Realm of Spiritual Forces

Ephesians 6:12 says, “For we wrestle not against flesh and blood, but against principalities, against powers, against the rulers of the darkness of this world, against spiritual wickedness in high places.”

What is the sensation of spiritual darkness?

How does the atmosphere of evil move through space?

What does the weight of warfare feel like?

Spiritual perception is valuable. Creation itself speaks of eternal truths, if we let it. And a muted creation, among other things, renders us susceptible to diminished sight.

Christ’s own sacrifice of suffering, death, and resurrection of his body accomplished spiritual realities. It does not seem insane for the Christian to believe the things of earth, the bodies of his image-bearers, could be wrapped up with spiritual realities. That there could be particular parts of us that incite not just physical effects or emotions, but are wrapped up in a more cosmic struggle.

Where I’m going with this is that phrases such as “our bodies have meaning” or “the order of creation is good” and “we need to create a culture of life” can, as someone described them, come off as mundane and nonviolent. They don’t have teeth. They are “bombastic programming” talk, a roomba vacuum bumping up against you. “Yes, how nice. Moving on.”

When it comes to issues related to the whole body, sexuality, and procreation constellation, we are certainly dealing with matters of moral theology and Christian ethics. We are dealing with the fruit of the spirit and virtue, conscience and the ick factor.

I suppose I would simply like us to consider—without getting unnecessarily obsessed—that these are also matters the powers of darkness are interested in. I’m not sure exactly what this entails, and I’m not trying to find a demon around every corner. But I’ve felt it.

There are theological riches in our co-creative powers. There is spiritual heft in women’s generative potential, and all it asks of us—in both its suffering and blessing. Satan and his minions hate light and life, beauty and order. He despises Christians and what truths they speak in the world, with and through their bodies.

But more on that later.

Above, I asked what this sensitivity to particular realities feels like. I’ve heard an atmosphere of spiritual heaviness or warfare described as humidity: “It is thick, you can almost chew on it, makes it hard to breathe, hard to move.”

What to do when the response is, “What do you mean it’s humid here?”

We can share the articles, labor over the essays, have the conversations, complete our work in the world. What I’m seeing is that spiritual issues, as with any other, are not resolved solely in this manner. What those things become, even over much time, are the needed stacking of stone and wood and animal parts. Prayer calls down the fire.

That blazing illumination of the Holy Spirit is the locus of revelation, the impetus for change.

tips for my labors

Recently, I completed Timothy C. Tennent’s 2020 book For the Body. Having never heard of this book nor the author, I was pleasantly surprised. It was compared somewhere to Nancy Pearcey’s Love Thy Body (which I have not read) with the positive comment that Tennent’s had less of a culture-war tone. In any case, this book was made up of clear and sensible theological explanations, no anxious or abrasive tones. It is certainly not as sociologically and philosophically robust as Abigail Favale’s The Genesis of Gender or Carl Trueman’s The Rise and Triumph of the Modern Self. But that has advantages, too. I would hand this to someone completely unfamiliar with why the body matters to our faith, or how to look beyond abstracted talking points about sexuality.

This was a thoughtful book. There are many facets to tackle on all sorts of things related to the body, so we need books such as this which narrow the scope a bit.

As summarized in a concluding chapter, here were the seven key building blocks covered in his “Biblical Theology of the Body”:

1. Creation is good and our bodies are trustworthy. God created us with a joyful union of body and spirit. Because the goodness of creation flows out of the very nature and character of God, the created order has inherent moral boundaries. Therefore our bodies embody moral agency.

2. God created and fashioned our material bodies in the image of God, and they are icons once foreshadowing and now recalling the incarnation and bodily resurrection of Jesus Christ. The physical body is the avenue through which God conveys the means of grace and unfolds his plan of redemption, including our own bodily resurrection at the climax of the ages.

3. Christian marriage between a man and a woman is an icon pointing to the greater mystery of Christ and His church.

4. God’s design in creating us male and female, along with the reproducibility that is made possible through marriage, reflects the Trinity and allows us to partake in the mystery of God’s inner life as we become co-creators with Him and share in an intimate relational bond of family life.

5. Celibacy and the single-focused life point to the in-breaking of the future new creation and the marriage supper of the Lamb, which will be fully realized in the consummation of the ages.

6. The physical body is a beacon or sign to the world of God’s presence and redemptive purposes in the world. Our bodies are mobile temples with a missional presence in the world. The sacraments are not merely for us, they are given to us that we might sacramentally embody new creation in the present order, as missional witnesses of the church to the world.

7. The daily tasks and duties of life serve as sacramental markers of God’s presence embodied in the whole of life. Our contemporary discipleship programs are not effectively communicating these seven building blocks of a theology of the body.

Likewise, the video study-guide book includes chapters such as:

Our Bodies Are Speaking to Us

Marriage Points to Spiritual Mysteries

Children as a Reflection of the Trinity

Singleness, Celibacy, and Same-Sex Friendships

Our Sacramental Presence in the World

Our Bodies in Art and Media

The Bible and Homosexuality

A Way Forward

Good stuff, right? During the course of this book, I kept thinking that it was something conservative Christians could read and nod along to (“yes, yes”) and still find themselves at an impasse when it comes to certain, shall we say, Life Considered matters. So what is the unspoken element, where is the disconnect? Why does my look at similar books on the evangelical market make me think such an absence is not unique to this particular book?

We have not sufficiently accounted for the shifting role of modern medicine in altering our perception of what would otherwise be helpful and straightforward articulations in a book such as this.

The question of the proper ends of medicine is an essential one, where honoring the limits of our mortal flesh and their own telos is concerned. It’s a crucial question for Christians, reaching far beyond something like transgenderism. There is more than one way to participate in a “bleaching out of the density of things.”

So, a positive Christian vision ought to have a few more particular questions answered. These need to account for the ways in which our cultural beliefs about the purpose and goals of medicine have deformed, and what the implications are for the topics of this book (and others like it). For an otherwise conservative, orthodox Protestant readership, there are intuitions and assumptions that can slip through the cracks or remain on the periphery.

In other words, there are gaps… and therefore opportunities to correct and clarify over time.

To explain what I mean, here were some of the most gripping and fruitful quotes, plus commentary. This is less an essay, more an invitation into my stream of consciousness and excessive digital marginalia!

We must learn to speak about what the Christian faith is for, not merely what it is against.

If the Incarnation is the knot that ties together heaven and earth, then contemporary attitudes about the body are determined to untie that knot. A robust theology of the body must necessarily resist the modern encroachments of new Gnostic beliefs in the Church, namely, anything that pits the feelings of the inner life against the clear message of our embodied, material, creation, a creation God has called good and holy.

As they say, Carl Trueman is really good on this.

Our bodies, as good creations of God, also point to the bodily resurrection of Christ, the crucial foundation for our confidence in a similar bodily resurrection at the end of time.

Marriage between one man and one woman must be protected because the man and woman united together stand as icons representing Christ’s unity with His Church, the bride of Christ. Adultery, fornication and gay marriage all erode one of the key markers of marriage and the exclusive unitive sign of our union with Christ as the people of God. Alternative arrangements, though endorsed by the culture, cannot be embraced by the Church since they serve as an anti-sacrament, a visible sign of our rebellion against God’s design. They are the antithesis of what marriage is intended to be. Marriage is procreative. When God calls us to be fruitful and multiply and fill the earth, he calls us to become co creators with him by bearing children and thus creating a family unit that reflects the mystery of the triune God. The sexual act has the potential to produce new life even as the intimate communion within the Trinity is fruitful in producing life.

I’m struck by the term anti-sacrament, something which rebells against God’s design. Well, there are many ways we can rebel against God’s design. If sexuality includes our procreative potential, then our imaginations ought to expand about how we can “erode one of the key markers of marriage and the exclusive unitive sign of our union with Christ as the people of God.” Perhaps that’s not confined to pre-marital, extra-marital, or homosexual activity.

The sexual act is of course, exceedingly enjoyable, but its deeper purpose is to point to spiritual realities, and when sex is separated from these spiritual realities, fragmentation and brokenness occur.

Again, this is in the context of sexual activity. But let’s consider procreation outside the bounds of sex, utilizing IVF. Ought the intimacy between husband and wife retain any meaning when it comes to its relationship to children? Is the form and setting of a child’s conception just a nice to have, or the whole point?

Contemporary culture tells us that self fulfillment is the greatest good. This lie has led to the commoditization of marriage… The world operates under the gravity of sin and self-orientation, while Christians operate under the gravity of holy love. Marriage is a covenant where self giving love is is powerfully made manifest.

There are other ways we can and do commodify the goods of marriage: In elevating a recreational sexual experience (with no regard for honoring the life-giving nature of sex), or in elevating procreation on our forced terms (with no regard for its tie to marital union).

Since the culture no longer accepts the guidance of the Judeo Christian tradition, we should expect that cultural definitions of marriage will continue to evolve.

There has been a gradual acceptance of alternative understandings of marriage or gender, and this can also happen with alternative understandings of the nature between marital union and children. We can commodify the sexual goods of marriage just as much as marriage itself.

Between the culture’s commodified view of marriage, which envisions marriage only within the frame of personal happiness, and the divine design, which is exclusive, unitive, procreative, binary and self giving… Sexual relations were closely guarded because sexual intimacy was covenantal, not recreational. Sexual brokenness such as fornication and adultery represented a fracturing of the Biblical vision of marriage. Since Christians understand marriage as an icon of Christ and the church, and indeed the Trinity itself in both its unitive and procreative design, alternative sexual arrangements cannot be considered an appropriate expression of Christian marriage, even if two people sacrificially care for and nurture one another.

Introducing third parties into the conception process seems problematic in each of these areas. Do our instincts connect matters of fertility and reproduction with sexuality? I’ve noticed those who rightly see our sexual behavior as a deeply moral issue (something we submit to the Lord in obedience) more often than not handle procreative potential as if there is no moral correlation to sexuality. Fertility is spoken of as mere biology to do with as we wish. We wouldn’t say sexual activity is mere flesh and biology. We say it’s sacred and has a proper design and context. There is theological and moral significance in both ends of sex, and we ought to speak of both accordingly. As I see it, the way we treat the generative nature of sex belies a deeply secular attitude, where discussions of pregnancy and children are more akin to talking about the weather than connected to a deeply mysterious and sacred dynamic of marriage.

The church has never accepted such a pragmatic view of ethics.

This is simultaneously befuddling and heartening to hear.

Befuddling, because calculations of pragmatic utility are elevated all the time in Christian circles. A moral language and vision has been eclipsed in many respects by possibilities of what we can do. The full picture of the icon gets dimished.

Heartening, because Christianity has never simply been about what is expedient, and we need continual reminders of that. We are part of a faith that is supposed to look compellingly bizarre! It is supposed to seem a bit otherworldly when compared to the priorities and wisdom of the world! Are the wild claims of Christianity pragmatic and sensible?

God’s creation merges the physical and the spiritual into a unified harmony in opposition to any division or hierarchy of spirit that degrades the body, as is common in all expressions of Gnosticism.

Genesis chapter 4 offers some measure of hope in a fallen world as the marriage between a man and a woman united as one flesh is seen to be the designed means through which children come into the world. Indeed, it is through the one flesh act of sexual union that we are enabled as the gift of God to join him as co creators. A new life proceeds from the sacred union, one that further dispels our solitude and deepens our self -giving. Eve came from Adam and now a new Adam, a child comes forth from Eve. This creative and relational process reflects the Trinity, forming a tri-unity of persons and intimate unity of father, mother and child.

Does it matter where this creative act of co-creation takes place? What is the nature of the relationship between marital union and the begetting of children? Is sexual intimacy a nice to have when it comes to conceiving children, or the whole point of the dynamic at play in God’s design? The form does matter and points to realities beyond itself. We say something untrue when we render this dynamic superfluous in assisted reproductive practices which bypass the sacred union of man and wife (and often in the most degrading ways).

The relational texture of this creative process is stripped away in the process of In Vitro Fertilization.

The fruitfulness and legacy of childbearing seem so modest and unassuming, but it stands in contrast to the disastrous self promoting trajectory of the Tower of Babel.

I am intentionally skipping over the part which briefly mentions contraception and its history because it was more confusing than helpful. Though, what I found fascinating here and in my survey responses is that being a potential abortifacient was a top consideration in the very minimal discussions people seem to have. Another was ongoing side effects. It occurred to me that if this has been the only messaging received, then it makes sense (among other reasons) that sterilization is so common with Christians. It checks both those boxes: It is mostly side-effect free. And of course no risk of abortifacient mechanisms.

But this belies how deeply entrenched a mechanistic view of our sexuality has become, where we miss the forest for some (admittedly important) trees. Some foundational questions are left unasked: “Were our bodies designed with intention and declared good?” and “What is medicine for?”

The goal of elective medical interventions in this realm is making our co-creative functions not work. It requires humility to live more within the grain of our given bodies. Humility would not participate in practices that make, in the strong words of the Council of Nicaea, “an enemy to the creation of God” nor would it do so with assumptions about how life ought to pan out for them.

The way is, as he says, “modest and unassuming.” This still requires a cross, and yet the Man of Sorrows is with us. “Our experience of [fertility] in a fallen world is an opportunity to exercise faith in a loving God who saved us through His own suffering.”

Christ rightly orders our affections, and the sanctifying work of the Holy Spirit purges our greed and self orientation. In short, those of us who have been bruised by the Gospel are now being blessed by the Gospel. And the blessing is always greater than the bruising. Whenever God says no to us, it always feels like harm and hurt. But God’s no is always a deeper yes.

…if children are conceived through these illicit sexual acts, these children are brought into this world in a chaotic relationship with those who gave them birth, thereby distorting the good and beautiful vision of reproduction in marriage… that fruitfulness is intended to take place within the covenant of marriage between one man and one woman.

There is more than one way to violate the biological logic of marriage. There is more than one way to conceive through illicit means. We can dishonor and tear asunder both the unitive and generative aspects of our bodies, and of married sexuality. If we believe what we do with our sexual nature is a weighty matter, this ought to extend beyond who one has sex with. The whole texture of union speaks something about the weight of creating souls. There, and not a lab, is where God chose co-creation to happen.

The understanding of the family unit being designed to reflect the Trinity in both its community and its fruitfulness has been largely lost today, replaced by the modern utilitarian framework that dominates our cultural consciousness. Today’s culture embraces autonomous solitude and scorns the reproducibility of the body, which is a rejection of the Trinity.

Doesn’t this utilitarian framework dominate today’s Christian cultural consciousness, as well? If this wasn’t the case, my drafts would not overfloweth as they do.

The role of the church is not just to bring a particular message. It is to embody the message as we image the Incarnation and foreshadow the coming new creation.

Our personal formation and collective witness is part of the way we live the message. That’s why I get my undies in a bunch in this corner of the internet. We can embody untrue stories! It’s bad for us! And it’s bad for those watching us!

Augustine was the first to refer to a sacrament as a visible sign of invisible grace, an understanding which is later elaborated into an outward and visible sign of an inward and spiritual grace. Despite the fact that the word sacrament just means holy mystery and has the potential for broad application, the term began to be understood and expressed within the narrower boundaries of specific clerical functions… Augustine opened the door for a more generous understanding of the sacraments because he did not limit sacraments to oaths and rituals, or even to their use as a sign of the Church’s unity. Instead, he understood sacraments as an array of acts or deeds in which physical things pointed to Christian mysteries. In other words, according to Augustine, a sacrament can be understood as all the various ways God conveys His grace to us. In this understanding, sacraments are more than just one or two biblically mandated acts. They are bridges that permit for two way traffic, allowing us to express our loyalty and love to God, and allowing him to express his love and grace to us.

Well, I am torn on this and somewhat surprised this Wesleyan used that language in the book! Maybe I shouldn’t be? A while back I read Hans Boersma’s Heavenly Participation about the “sacramental tapestry” and inquired of a far smarter mind than myself:

“My real concern with the view is that it doesn’t quite do creation justice as creation. I worry that it effectively reduces creation to a transparent tapestry, something that isn’t really there in the end… and even where I think modernity has gone awry I’m not terribly confident that saying ‘creation is sacramental’ on repeat is going to help.”

There is something to both views I appreciate, and am not quite sure how to reconcile them.

One of the driving concerns of this book is the increased secularization within the church, but we must be equally concerned by the over-spiritualization of the church. The forces of secularization have tended to push the church toward a less public and more privatized expression of religious practice. The force of the gospel is turned inward to the private inner life of the soul. While we neglect the role of our bodily life as disciples in the world, the privatization of our faith has left us with a truncated gospel that seems increasingly unable to address the most pressing issues of our day.

Increased secularization and over-spiritualization: This is quite the pair, but it rings true.

For many of us, our death comes in embracing the menial, practical arenas of life each and every day. Daily we are asked to deny ourselves and take up our cross in service to others, becoming martyrs over and over again for the cause of Christ and our love for the world who hates us… The body is the very means of grace that invades our whole lives, even the common tasks this world has deemed menial and unimportant.

It is harder in many ways to live as a creature embracing limits in line with what we were made for. But in the way that good yokes can mysteriously be light.

The Incarnation is God’s great affirmation of the holiness of the human body. Since we are designed to be icons of the Incarnation, pornography is a dis-incarnation, turning the body into an icon of lust and sinful idolatry rather than of Christ. The body was designed to point to Christ, but in pornographic images the body points to our idolatrous desire for self satisfaction, our bodies image idolatry rather than serving as image bearers of the triune God.

If we expand our vision just a bit, we will see, as R.J. Snell puts it in his book Acedia and Its Discontents:

“Specialization especially seems to understand reality as disintegrated and manipulable, just as the specialists of fertility and pornography understand sexuality.”

There is more than one way to manipulate and disintegrate our sexual nature.

Sexual wholeness is a key aspect of our theology of the body because it touches on so many contemporary issues we face.

The church has a long history of responding to the challenges brought by both Gnosticism and naturalistic materialism. The former denies the importance of the body. The latter denies the transcendence of the soul or spirit. In contrast to both of these errors, the Biblical worldview sees the self as a unity of body and spirit set within a moral and spiritual framework with purpose rooted in God’s design and redemptive plans. Current trends in our culture attempt to separate biological realities from personhood. This shift has implications for both modern gender theory and the argument in favor of abortion.

As you might be guessing, this shift also has implications for what we think of the relationship between the two ends of sex: unity and procreation. Medical practices and procedures can blur our vision on this.

The narratives and values regarding sexuality embraced by culture today teach a utilitarian view of the human body. They see the body as our personal property, to do with it what we please. No one else should be able to place any kind of moral restraint on the choices people make with their own bodies unless their choice significantly harms another person’s freedom.

Again, Christians are not immune to these narratives and values, even while keeping sex in marriage.

Any act that devalues the human body is unwarranted. Murder and euthanasia are condemned because they are the taking of life which is sacred… Abortion not only takes a life but also assaults the womb, which is designed to be a protected fountain of life.

Wombs are assaulted all the time in order to make them hostile to life. That is a core feature of what women’s health is in the business of. There is cognitive dissonance here when it comes to creating a coherent Culture of Life. More on that later.

Building families through childbearing is a major theme throughout the Old Testament. The Israelites considered bareness to be a cause for grief, as testified by the accounts of temporary infertility of such important Old Testament women as Sarah, Rebecca, and Hannah.

I appreciate what Sharon had to say on experiencing infertility in the larger context of attitudes about control over our sexual nature:

“One of my more common complaints about the way Christianity at large treats infertility rests on this point. When we severed procreation from the marriage bed, we lost all ability to understand stories like Sarah, Elizabeth, Hannah, Leah and Rachel, Rebekah.

Most of the time infertility is treated as nothing more than the loss of choice. Planned Parenthood has catechized far more of us than we realize. I think this, impart, explains why so many couples live on in silent loneliness. How do I explain the depths of the loss when you thought the marriage bed was merely an experience?

It’s all tied together. Honoring Motherhood and Fatherhood, procreation, the personhood of babies leads to honoring the barren womb as well. Without a healthy view of these, we end up with suggestions like: Well, you can have some of mine.”

Although sexual activity happens in private, it has public and spiritual ramifications in the Biblical vision.

The loss of moral argument, the third major problem we face, is even more fundamental, with far-reaching implications for Christians and non Christians alike. Philosopher Alasdair MacIntyre, in his book After Virtue, insightfully points out that our cultural dilemma is not merely the decline of morals in contemporary culture, but the more fundamental inability to even frame a moral argument. We no longer have sufficient shared assumptions as a culture to reach a consensus on moral questions. Whether based on a broad Judeo Christian ethic or Aristotle’s account of virtues, contemporary culture must find new ways to accommodate endless human preference within a fractured society… Can you have right and wrong without the existence of a holy and righteous God? The deeper question is how without God, can we escape from the emotivism spoken of by McIntyre? …Unless God has revealed a basis for morality, for good and evil, right and wrong, there is no objective way for us to agree on the rightness of a moral act.

Well, Christians still get stuck on emotivism and sharing sufficient assumptions about the morality of medical practices. A bit more on that here.

A post-Christendom context tends to produce fewer but more faithful and robust expressions of the Christian faith. We must embody such a healthy view of the body that the very testimony of our lives becomes a beacon of light for a broken world.

Here, I appreciate very much his push for Christian catechesis and discipleship. Of course, this ought to happen in informal ways as well. But in walking through ancient models of it, he makes a compelling case for formal instruction.

The pre-baptism phase of instruction traditionally walks through each phase of the Apostle’s Creed to summarize the content of Christian faith. For example, the first phrase of the Apostles Creed is “I believe in God, the Father Almighty, Maker of heaven and earth”. This phrase is where the Church historically taught about God’s existence and creation. So it is a natural place to emphasize that God not only created the world, but also created our bodies, fashioned them as male and female, established marriage, and affirmed that our bodies are trustworthy and noble because they have been fashioned by God. We can also emphasize that creation sets us within a moral framework with God given boundaries and expectations.

The second phase of instruction, mystagogy, introduces new believers to ethical formation, which is necessary to be a public member of the church. This much neglected second phase of catechesis historically took place between baptism, traditionally at Easter, and Pentecost. Since the term mystagogy is not widely understood or appreciated in the Protestant world, churches could call this phase of instruction New Believers Class or Discipleship 101 Class. Such a classes, which could be designed for any age group, addresses the need for ongoing discipleship in the life of the church. Theologically, the second phase of instruction corresponds to the greater theme of sanctification and focuses on the Holy Spirit’s work, informing us and shaping us to effectively embody the gospel in our daily lives as full and responsible members of the church. This phase of discipleship, depending on your church tradition, includes a wide range of instruction. For example, churches today often include discussions about the seasons of the church year, the role of ritual and symbolism in the church, a theology of worship, expectations regarding tithing, the role of church discipline, how to grow in your faith, the means of grace, and how to discover your spiritual gifts. There is nothing wrong with these topics, but it is vital that the church recapture the original ethical aspect of this phase, which traditionally has been built around the Ten Commandments and the Lord’s Prayer.

This is why this second phase of catechesis is an excellent place to include specific instruction regarding the theology of the body as well as the ethical implications of living as a Christian in a culture that has no basis for a moral framework and often not only accepts but celebrates immorality. A theology of the body should be central to this phase of instruction because this is the area where Christians are under the greatest attack in our culture and are the most vulnerable to false teachings.

If sexuality includes procreative potential, then we can presume we need a moral framework for that just as we do with the rest of the spectrum. We are vulnerable to cultural messaging here just as much as anything else.

A theology of the body, if articulated joyfully and wisely, will help change the public perception that Christians are merely against things, rather than for a stunning alternative… The Christians of the early centuries defeated the gnostic worldview not so much through the many polemical tracts written against them, but by the testimony of a more compelling vision of the body.

It is in community that we learn the rhythms of sacrifice and bearing one another’s burdens, and that we present a stunning invitation to abundant communal life to the broken culture around us.

I wonder how much we have been overtly or tacitly taught that we are on our own with our burdens. We have opportunities all the time to carry them for each other in this realm, as with any other.

As a church, we face several foundational challenges. Today we desperately need a renewed emphasis on catechesis and discipleship in the church and in the home. The typical Christian needs a better understanding of the challenges we face and how to respond to those challenges. Many contemporary ethical and moral challenges are similar to the trap that Jesus faced when the Pharisees pressed him on the topic of divorce. As we saw in chapter three, Jesus modeled how to sidestep the presenting questions and first go back to the beginning. In a similar way, we need to move the discussion to the deeper questions of God’s existence, his role as creator, and his original design and purpose for us. We live in a culture where sexual fulfillment has been framed as the highest good. This is why many of the challenges we face revolve around issues of human sexuality.

Sexual and personal fulfillment can be framed as the highest good in Christian marriage, as well. Perhaps we have plenty of in-house challenges to work on to become that beacon of compelling light.

We can no longer expect that either new Christians or people who grew up in Christian homes will be able to articulate a biblically, theologically, ethically and historically well framed Christian worldview without an intentional long-term effort by the Church.

We need a better understanding of what it means to be a Christian in an increasingly non-Christian culture, not just what it means to become a Christian. As our culture has grown increasingly antagonistic to Christian teachings, we must be intentional about forming faithful Christian identity and maintaining our ethical presence in the world. Tragically, the trend has been the reverse. Much of the church has worked quite hard to accommodate its beliefs to the wider culture, rather than focusing on the more difficult work of training Christians to understand and know not what we believe, but also why we believe it. I encourage pastors and leaders in the church to embrace a robust model of training that will help us over this impasse. The early church dedicated up to three years in training new believers, and new believers were not baptized until they completed this training. Then, after baptism, they had another period of instruction before they were fully incorporated into the church. These two phases are not an innovation in discipleship, but rather a return to the early church model used by Christian leaders who were forming Christian identity in an environment of misunderstanding and hostility.

Lastly, regarding his call for discipleship and more intentional training, I can’t help but think about the survey feedback I was given: Seminary seems to be hit or miss in how robust and practical a preparation students receive when it comes to these particular matters of the body as it relates to faith. Even the best experiences seem to include one ethics class, and maybe that isn’t cutting it for the bioethical directives and positive vision many pastors need. I could be wrong but that’s my sense, given the amount of desperation and advice-asking out there. Denominations, come to their authoritative aid so they aren’t going it alone!! That approach nuts and unsustainable!!! Premarital counseling is another formative opportunity where it makes sense to address a full, positive vision but often isn’t. Anyways, people have thoughts.

So, until we can collectively figure out and communicate the proper ends and moral limits of medicine… here are some general gaps identified in this book’s positive vision, asked in the form of questions. These are also opportunities for catechesis and discipleship which acknowledges the ways medical practice now colors moral perception. Let’s place them in The Life Considered Triad.

• The Body: Do we see the created design of our reproductive systems as a good gift from God? Do we treat them that way? What is the healing profession for? Restoring function, supporting the person toward wholeness and dignity? Or serving the will, what we desire to be true about ourselves and reality?

• Married Sexuality: Do we recognize both pleasure and procreation, unity and children as ends of sex? Is it possible to turn sexual fulfillment and pleasure into an idol? How do we honor the life-giving, generative nature of sex—in our bodies, in our marriages?

• Procreation: What is the theological significance of our fertility? What might our struggles navigating and receiving it (and any children) be an invitation to in the life of a Christian—with our particular blessings and particular sufferings? What is the nature of procreation’s relationship to marital union? Does the form of that relationship mean anything at all? In other words, what does breaking the tie between sexual intimacy and the conception of children (in the practice of IVF) communicate?

  ---

To reiterate in statement form, here is a roughly condensed version of a positive Christian vision of the sexual body as it relates medicine:

• We honor the created design and body-soul unity of our whole person. We refrain from elective harm or alteration of our reproductive functions.

• We honor marital intimacy as uniquely life-giving. Our overarching posture toward this reality is one of openness and not hostility.

• We honor the intrinsic connection the begetting of children has with sexual union. We recognize the relational context in which they are to be conceived (which respects the dignity of children and upholds reverence for marriage).

• We seek out medical providers willing to investigate what could be amiss regarding any struggles with miscarriage and infertility—and aim to restore health and proper function where possible. In doing so, we are better able to hold everything above in proper regard.

• We entrust any outcomes of blessing and suffering in these areas to the Lord. The potter who fashioned this clay will continue forming us as we do.

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(Sometimes I enjoy a book like a normal person, other times I come up with stuff like this.)

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We begin another chapter, and it’s mostly just quotations. I’ll save more commentary for the conclusion of the series. For now, again: gird thy loins.

With Malachi 3:3 as the text for a 1929 sermon titled The Refiner’s Fire, Phillips Endecott Osgood “admonished the ‘temporary guardians of a miraculous gift’ to respect their ‘partnership with God to keep it pure!’ ‘The dross must be purged out’—and eugenics was the means for purging. The editors of the ecumenical journal the Homiletic Review, reprinting the sermon in 1929, registered their unequivocal assent: ‘A contest is worth while which evokes so excellent a sermon. Eugenics is an approved thing. It is no longer on trial.’”1

A couple decades later, Protestant eugenicist Paul Popenoe argued that the readers of this magazine “need to take on the civic responsibility of ‘surveying the chances’ …warning that ‘feebleminded’ families were reproducing at a higher rate than those able to provide ‘the best start.’”

He “emphasized their duty to consider patterns in ‘the nation’s birth rate’ when choosing their mates and planning their families. It was incumbent upon the young people of the right sort to marry their own kind and to reproduce in ways that would lead to further success.”2

It is easy, Hall argues, for popular historians to paint a safe veneer over eugenicist history as clearly faulty, or blatantly racist. Rarely do we get an honest look at its origins and proponents in the United States.

Buck vs. Bell was a 1927 Virginia case regarding the sterilization of inmates which ended up in the Supreme Court. Justice Holmes gave the verdict and “linked several key eugenic concepts. To prevent individual suffering, the state may compel the prevention of certain ‘kinds’ of individuals. As an effective inoculation against degeneration, crime, and imbecility, the social body may ‘vaccinate’ itself against the deleterious or parasitic ‘unfit.’”3

This chapter seeks to “complicated the standard narration of eugenics past and present. This core assessment of burden and birth led to an arsenal of biotechnical tools to plan, evaluate, and enhance children and to measure the worth of a given family—tools that today have become standard parental and political equipment.”4

Hall notes skepticism among many U.S. citizens toward public spending on “the supposedly indiscriminately bred children of poor African American mothers as well as on the ‘huge’ families of recent Latino Catholic immigrants. The cultural context in which individuals make what are increasingly seen as purely ‘personal’ decisions and in which a society makes what are often deemed purely pragmatic decisions is shaped by the powerful rhetoric of eugenics… The quest to craft a more perfect union through ‘fewer and better babies’ is alive and well.”5

“…many eugenic ideas have jumped the gap from yesterday to today, bridging the chasm between overtly coercive eugenics and purportedly voluntary parental and social responsibility in the land of the free and among people supposedly freed for discipleship.”6

During what is called the Progressive Era, there were certainly gains in public health and civic life. “But along with the efforts came a newly potent, death-dealing distinction between those whose lives were worth care and those whose lives were not.”7

“Leading eugenicists in the United States used their own white, middle class, literate, wholesome, productive, patriotic, native-born Protestant families as the standard against which to judge and measure other families. The eugenics movement was germinated in a relatively elite, academic version of scientific racism… as the result of two primary forces: clergy eager to remain relevant in an era when other professionals, and scientists in particular, were gaining ascendancy; and middle-class laity eager to establish themselves as a good, wholesome parents and productive, responsible, clean citizens.”8

“That this [Fitter Family fairs] display evoked among mainline Protestants hopeful aspirations rather than holy offense is an important part of the story…”9

George H. Napheys’ 1871 book The Transmission of Life remained in print for several years, becoming influential among the laity of several Protestant circles. “In it Napheys wove together the latest in eugenics (the term would soon be coined by Galton—Darwins’s cousin—in1883), sociology, animal breeding, Christian faith, and good old ‘common sense.’”10

Emphasis was placed on the stakes involved in carefully choosing a healthy mate, so as not to doom your offspring by simply following ‘stupid Cupid.’

“Romantic whimsy is a costly indulgence for families dependent on reliably hearty children; it is perhaps similarly a luxury for a country striving to keep the wheels of industry turning.”11

Napheys reiterates that “couples may now plan families according to both responsibility and desire, since the discovery of ‘the law which governs the production of the sexes.’ Albeit with ‘certain elements of uncertainty,’ ‘persons can have either a daughter or a son as they prefer,’ and it is apparently common sense that ‘the ideal family is composed of some of each sex.’”12

Napheys Transmission of Life closes one section with a quote from theologian Canon Charles Kingsley. (He is the author of the children’s story The Water Babies and the one John Henry Newman gave his answer to in Apologia pro vita sua.)

“Rather than arguing for the supremacy of science over revelation, Kingsley argues that, when read through proper spectacles, the ‘painful facts’ of science are evident at the heart of Scripture itself.”13

Kingsley interpreted Darwin and fused evolutionary thought into theological writing aimed toward both children and adults. With Napheys’ help, his “practical eugenic theology” was distributed and popularized to a couple generations of laity.

“The search for a comely, hygienic, moral mate with whom to have auspicious children became, in the natural theology of Kingsley, nothing less than a step toward a more faithful, dutiful, socially responsible existence. Many Protestant clergy considerably less prominent than Kingsley, Napheys, and the university presidents who endorsed The Transmission of Life took up this adjusted gospel with verve.”14

This era of progressivism created a form of Protestantism which came to be called the Social Gospel movement, which sought to “monitor, measure, order, and aid the country… newly intertwined with organized, civic aspirations.” However, these efforts “would also be privy to a set of demons let loose in the modern, rational world itself.”15

The American Social Hygiene Association (ASHA) was formed after an outflow of concern over prostitution and venereal disease, initially showing up as “purity alliances” between clergy social workers, and educators.

“Through pamphlets and public displays, ASHA sought to bring the science of social and individual hygiene to young adults... Cooperating with the U.S. Public Health Service, the YMCA, and the YWCA, ASHA presented young Americans across the country with a program and a vision for healthy and conscientious reproduction.”16

Again there was emphasis in this material on keeping “oneself productive, pure, and pleasing for a mate with whom to plan the clearly good life. Warnings about casual alliances and dissolute living contrasted with images of hearty young men and rosy-cheeked women tapping Vermont syrup or picking apples. The underlying message to avoid disease, irregularity, and dirt is less obvious than the message to seek out the proper kind of wholesome young man or woman. The best alliance would produce health from health, perpetuating promise.”17

“Read together, the posters present the challenge of a prudent, well-informed choice.”18

“…what of those children judged to have been bred in error? They function at the boundary of danger. At best they are objects of piety. At worst, like Carrie Buck’s daughter, they signal the need for social vaccination through sterilization. How was one to judge those worth marriage, those worth care, and those worth extinction? The leaders of the eugenics movement were intent on putting the tools for such measurements in the hands of the populace.”19

Many Protestant women moved into leadership positions in the ASHA and YWCA, seeing it as “a chance to make conditions better for women from the canning factory to the tenement bedroom to the farm. Margaret Sanger, who eventually founded Planned Parenthood, certainly saw her participation in the American Eugenics Society (AES) in this light.” The women staffing and leading all these organizations hoped for more livable conditions and more “wholesome” lives for women.20

Increasing the country’s economic prosperity and social stability through a new social order required, however, winners and losers: Who were considered responsible parents? Who were deemed worthy and wanted children? Who defined the cleanliness and godliness of proper housekeeping and living conditions?

The Eugenics Record Office (ERO) created a movement called the Fitter Families for Future Firesides, providing lectures and hosting contests to judge families. Individual Analysis Cards accompanied the Pedigree Chart “to determine whether his or her attributes were normal.”21

Women also “volunteered to observe, measure, and judge prospective couples, infants, children, and families in order to further the movement to for a more perfect union… The three young professional women smiling at the camera likely helped [Ivan] McDougle compile the data that went into Mongrel Virginians, his text on cacogenic Virginians, published in 1924 to encourage the institutionalization, incarceration, and sterilization of an entire region in rural Virginia.”22

Margaret Sanger, in pioneering the birth control movement, feared “indiscriminate fecundity” in both rural and city settings. Devastating poverty and growing populations faced real, often disturbing challenges, especially immigrants in large industrialized places.

(On this point, I appreciated ’s empathetic take, briefly touching on her dissertation which was a dialogue between Margaret Sanger and John Paul II. Watch the whole panel discussion here.)

There was a reflexive impulse to address what many saw as “the apparent meaninglessness of a life born in poverty.”23

Hall goes on to explain the ERO wasn’t solely focused on the state of urban immigrants, but even conducted and compiled rural family studies titled White Trash. Women professionals, “newly trained in psychology, social work, and sociology,” documented “the degeneracy of country life.”

To the dismay of these modern investigators bringing “the gospel of proper living,” it was documented that “These poor were self-reliant, often indifferent to the charity and outright hostile to the values which some of the new professionals made a career of dispensing.” 24

Documenting “the Jukes” of Ulster County, New York, ERO official A.H. Estabrook decides to not only “judge their homes, their children, and their ways of life ‘faulty', but he also suggests that they are, on a fundamental level, subnormal… they are beneath human and thus prime candidates for the expert city-husbandman to categorize, select, and eliminate.”25

“The technique of renaming their specimens allowed investigators to retain superior distance—a kind of modern, demonic recapitulation of Adam’s stewardship of the nonhuman animals in the Genesis story.”26

“In a climate where normality increasingly meant industrial and aesthetic worth, those who were neither obviously productive nor comely were merely burdensome. Yet the poor, the shiftless, the apparently useless, and the deformed arguably played a central rhetorical role in the ‘mythology’ of eugenics. Photographs of the other kind of family and the dreaded type of child run throughout the eugenic publications… Those with a ‘goodly heritage’ were so judged by a grading curve that could not have existed without families who received a B or lower.”27

“Note that ‘religion’ was relegated to a root well off to the far right… seemingly squeezed in as an afterthought.”28

The AES didn’t have to look far to find clergy willing to prove themselves modernists in this regard. “The sociologist, the psychologist, the anthropologist, and the social worker were on the ascendancy, and mainlines pastors throughout America were determined not to seem obsolete or, even worse, backward… they did nothing less than capitulate.”29

“The Protestants most accustomed to their role as well-educated citizens had the fewest theological resources to resist the messages of eugenics. The oldest and most unquestionably American of the Protestant churches were the first to jump on the eugenics bandwagon.”30

William Robinson’s 1915 Fewer and Better Babies documented the push for marriages only of health, free of any tainting qualities. Clergy were the perfect gatekeepers for this, some becoming compliant by only performing marriages for couples who had received a “clean bill of health” signed off by a physician.31

Harry Ward, a professor of Christian ethics, was blunt in his view of Christianity. Its aim ought to be “‘a healthy society where all are strong.’ The faithful are thus not only allowed but also ‘compelled’ to be ‘eugenic.’ A ‘social ethic based on the principles of Jesus’ no less than requires ‘the elimination of the weak, not their perpetuation, and this it accomplishes by making them strong and by preventing their production, through both breeding and environment.’ By Ward’s estimation, Christians had a crucial role to play in a ‘coordinated world-wide effort to control population’ and ‘to [attain] the highest standards of health and development by all the population.’”32

Revisiting Osgood's sermon The Refiner’s Fire, Hall identifies he was suggesting “that the culmination of God’s creation was dependent on the elimination of suffering. This involved not acts of mercy toward the sick and the poor but acts to secure a future free of those who would ‘handicap [the Spirit’s] incarnation.’”33

George Huntington Donaldson proclaimed to fellow Methodists that “Heredity is a rock on which we can build with unfailing certainty.” In his view of the evolutionary new creation, “Those who were baptized into Christ became partners in the work of selecting, yanking out, and cultivating. With ‘proper selections and combinations all good can be produced and all evil eliminated’; the one following Jesus needed to cut down the ‘crop of defectives’ who ‘weaken and burden the race.’”34

As we grapple with our own stunted moral imaginations stemming from a strict Biblicism, so too was it said in the Methodist Quarterly Review that because “the Bible nowhere undertakes to give a detailed account of the process of creation… it leaves ample room for any theory to which careful scientific investigation may lead.”35

Unfortunately, “these preachers and the theologians on whom they drew arguably left few theological barriers to the all-encompassing narrative… Determined to think in modern, patriotic, and well-educated ways about the role of the faithful in America, these preachers attained their sophistication at the expense of the vulnerable.”36

The repeated mantra to “demand that each child born is worthy a place in our midst” echoes throughout history and indeed, into the present moment.

In 1940, the new Heredity Clinic at the University of Michigan opened. This marked “the institutional birth of what was for some time called ‘genetic hygiene.’” This was followed by the Dight Institute at the University of Minnesota., whose second director “was concerned that the term ‘hygiene’ connoted personal care products; he changed the term to ‘counseling’—and the new field of ‘genetic counseling’ was born.”37

If any old version seemed imposed with brute force, “The ostensible message of the new, voluntary form of popular eugenics was more ‘democratic’” and was endorsed by outlets such as the Methodist journal Religion in Life.38

Paul Popenoe, whose 1948 article Surveying the Chances warned the numerous young marriages forming could be problematic if “too large a proportion of the [resulting] babies are born in homes which can give them the worse start in every way.” National survival, in his mind, rested on “carefully planned population policy.”39

Another article by Helen Southard explicitly stated that carefully planned procreation was a “parental—and Christian—duty in our day.” Christians of a certain class came to agree on asking the question of “How many; how healthy?”40

The marketing of domesticity, of taming the wild parts of life and home into submission, was going strong at this time.

The degree to which these procreative measures were voluntary is dubious, “particularly given the power of cultural norms and the real, economic consequences of supposed reproductive irresponsibility and presumed lack of procreative foresight. Many supposedly ‘private’ decisions to have fewer and better babies were arguably rooted in the messages that drove the old eugenics… The ‘unfit’ were still a problem—albeit a more scientifically manageable one.”41

Normative parenthood in the twentieth century depended upon both a literal and genetic cleanliness as “professional women were charged with bringing order to the otherwise chaotic domesticity of the rural poor and the urban immigrant… It was not only the kitchens of rural or tenement homes that seemed backward, inefficient, and ugly. The parents, grandparents, and children who gathered to eat in those kitchens became the other kind of family—the kind from which aspiring citizens hoped to distinguish themselves.”42

“The turn from overt, coercive eugenics to implicit, voluntary eugenics may be less a sign of the failure of eugenic ideology than a sign of its success.”43

“There were some children meant to flourish and others whose lives were insufficiently ordered and wholesome. Distinguishing one group from the other was a whole set of signals… Promoting the medical tools of ‘responsible parenthood,’ mainline Protestants endorsed family planning and orderly hygiene as practices integral to civic duty.”44

“The distinction between perspicacious and ‘indiscriminate’ fecundity was solidified by the late 1940’s when most mainline Protestant denominations had accepted (and some were actively promoting) contraception.”45 Indeed, even the (in)famous 1930 Lambeth Conference’s resolution on the limited use of contraception had a eugenic backdrop—and some infer, motivation.

In many cases, “the question was quantity; in others it is quality… The matter addressed in posters from the National Campaign to Prevent Teen Pregnancy is some implied combination of bad quantity, quality, and timing… The stark photos are reminiscent of the ASHA posters of the syphilitic boy and the girl blinded by gonorrhea… but the propagandists responsible for this series leave nothing to interpretation, labelling the girls clearly for the viewer, in order to cultivate a potent combination of disdain and fear.”46

Sarah Lawrence College started the first genetic counseling masters program in 1968. Pulling from the website in 2005, it states, “in 1953, scientists made great breakthroughs in identifying diseases with genetic origins. The expansion in knowledge presented a new challenge to the medical profession: how should physicians impart this information to patients? And how would patients use these new data?”47

Hall goes on to explain that what is implicit in all these genetic counseling developments was the changing tide in the abortion debate—especially when it came to the legalization of abortion in cases of disability. This was pushed into the public eye with the Sherri Finkbine case of 1962 (documented also in Daniel K. Williams’ book Abortion and America’s Churches.)

The question of whether one’s baby will be normal is compounded and made more seemingly urgent due in part to “the technology newly available to detect genetic difference… What one could not prevent, one could terminate.”48

“But there was again a cost for the new knowledge—a cost related to a long-standing fear of irresponsible women, burdensome families, and inauspicious children. For the vast majority of conditions now screened through prenatal testing, there is no treatment. The choice parents face is simply for or against the termination of a pregnancy measured as genetically defective. To choose for such a pregnancy still involves a sense of social shame and isolation.”49

There is a resounding question, whether perceived—or, in the case Hall documents with one mother—an audible How could you let this happen? “The women who did not take this option report with searing uniformity the profoundly negative responses of the medical personnel around them.”50

Robert Edwards, one of the men who aided in perfecting the process of in vitro fertilization, said to a gathering in 1999, “Soon it will be a sin of parents to have a child that carries the heavy burden of genetic disease. We are entering a world where we have to consider the quality of our children.”

On this, Hall rightly perceives that with reproductive technology expanding, “this usually implicit sense that the parents of a child with detectable disability have made a moral mistake will likely only grow more definite in the future.”51

If this was the case almost twenty years ago, how much more now in the year 2026. And, as she notes, this will increase the perception that having certain children is now an avoidable choice that our civic life will increasingly stop spending resources on. The parent is responsible for preventing them, not society for helping them flourish.

Identifying this as a cultural problem, she quotes Hans Reinders in The Future of the Disabled in Liberal Society: “The benefits bestowed by love and friendship are consequential rather than conditional, which explains why human life that is constituted by these relationships is appropriately experienced as gift. A society that accepts responsibility for dependent others such as the mentally disabled will do so because there are sufficient people who accept [this] account as true.”52

(I’m fresh off of completing both Abortion and America's Churches and Dependent Rational Animals—clearly a big influence on the magnanimous —as well as working through Confidence in Life. So you could say I am mentally becoming the *conspiracy board guy.*)

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What was happening and why?

Caner describes how the castration of men had become a widespread problem in the young Christian church. The practice had “long been the physical mark of slavery (of slaves brought in from outside the empire) and of religious devotion in the so-called oriental cults.”

Primarily, it was taken up as a way to express dedication to sexual continence. Christians at the time were being accused of being a secret rite, wherein women and men lived as “brothers and sisters” and exhibited sexual promiscuity. To persuade non-Christians of the falsity of this (and others simply to demonstrate “that some Christians forgo marriage altogether and live completely in continence”) extreme measures of self-mortification were taken.

There was also confusion over whether Jesus’ words describing eunuchs in Matthew 19:12 were meant to be “physical, moral, or intellectual” characteristics. Additionally, outside influences gaining traction had led many to embrace “radical corporeal asceticism as a fundamental part of Christian devotion.” They ultimately wanted to highlight the “sharp contrast in sexual conduct between Christians and pagans.” To many with “zeal and sincerity of faith”, the extreme measures taken in mutilation provided clear proof of their love for God and dedication to virtuous living.

(For more on this, has written about Origen and Castration as a Means of Piety.)

Motivations and concerns were often, it appears, genuine. Being a newly influential practice, the church had to muddle through a bewildering time as they sought to understand, speak to, and (in time) clarify matters affecting these members of Christ’s own body.

There were also disturbing cases of men using their state as a way to gain access to women under the guise of being self-controlled, when really what was controlled was the natural evidence of their passions. Many eunuchs became associated with a dangerously deceptive “false chastity and untrustworthiness.” It was easy to hide under a “pretext of piety.”

What were individual responses?

Basil of Ancyra hardly considered this “evidence of a man’s continence; on the contrary, those who ‘perversely’ castrate themselves ‘by this very deed make a declaration of their own licentiousness.’”

The apocryphal Acts of John depicts a zealous convert who acted rashly. The book tells us “When he ran to John to show what he had done, the apostle displayed little charity… it was rather ‘the devices of Satan’ that had made him ‘cut off [his] unruly members as if this were a virtuous act.’”

To Tertullian, “self-made eunuchs represented something more sinister” than the conventional wisdom, instead being “emblematic of a specific theological orientation and attitude towards material creation which not only affected the way a person viewed marriage, but also how he perceived his corporeal status.” For Tertullian, then, eunuchs were associated with the heretical beliefs of Marcionism.

Athenagoras of Athens accused such men of “dishonoring God’s fair craftsmanship.” John Chrysostom declared them “mean who scorn God’s creation” and associated them with Manichaeans.

What did the Church ultimately decide?

Caner explains that “until the limits of ‘orthodox’ theory and practice had become established, widely disseminated and enforced, such zealots received very different signals as to what they should do with this particularly problematic area of the body.” (This dilemma sounds familiar.)

Castration was ultimately condemned, perceived as a way to “cheat” one’s way out of virtue, an unhelpful signifier of true chastity, an improper interpretation of scripture, a practice associated with heretical sympathies, and an egregious action voluntarily taken against the body, the handiwork of God. (Isaiah 45:9 and Ephesians 2:10.)

This was the first order of business(!) at the Council of Nicaea in 325 AD. Canon one declared those who willingly castrated themselves as unfit to be clergy:

The Apostolic Constitutions, said to perhaps have been written from Antioch in 380, declare: “21: Let an eunuch, if he be such by the injury of men, or his virilia were taken away in the persecution, or he was born such, and yet is worthy of episcopacy, be made a bishop. 22: Let not him who has disabled himself be made a clergyman; for he is a self-murderer, and an enemy to the creation of God. 23: If any one who is of the clergy disables himself, let him be deprived, for he is a murderer of himself. 24: Let a layman who disables himself be separated for three years, for he lays a snare for his own life.”

The maiming of persons and mutilation of members was likewise taken up in serious terms by Thomas Aquinas in his Summa Theologiae.

This is not a case about contraception per se, but rather one fascinating instance of how Christians came to, among other things, think about the respect due the body as such. Defacing the image of God for the sake of ostensible sexual piety was not ultimately seen as commendable. In any case, it is additional cause for a posture of fear and trembling in how we handle our own physical bodies, our sexual selves.

We hear echoes of the serious nature of being interrelated beings in I Corinthians 6:18-20: “Flee from sexual immorality. All other sins a person commits are outside the body, but whoever sins sexually, sins against their own body. Do you not know that your bodies are temples of the Holy Spirit, who is in you, whom you have received from God? You are not your own; you were bought at a price. Therefore honor God with your bodies.”

Wounds against these parts of us are profoundly affecting. Actions taken against one part of a person affect the whole. Our sexuality is inextricably tied up with not only with our internal passions and desires, but our physiological bodies and the ontological wonder of procreation. Scripture and Christian history have not treated any of these with cavalier lightness.

The density of creation, The saltiness of salt

R.J. Snell’s Acedia and Its Discontents has a chapter titled “Bleaching Things” which unexpectedly gives language to tack onto this reality. In it, he discusses the things of the world bearing an interiority which “possess a thickness, a weighty dignity which we ought to recognize and respect.”

If this is true of creation generally, how much more persons made in the image of God?

Confronting our current tapestry of issues will have us first needing to step back and see creation—despite the fall, despite limitations—as having integrity in itself. That integrity is weighty, if our souls will feel it.

It might even feel like a cross. However, as Leah Libresco Sargeant wrote, “...the body is both gift and cross. Cross is the idea everyone can agree on, religious or not. Gift depends on believing in a giver that has ordered Creation (even the hard parts) out of love.”

If numbed, we become those who look at our bodies, sexuality, or procreative potential wrapped up in both and, in the words of Snell, “choose not to say At last, seeing nothing of value.”

Abhorrence at creation’s goodness will leave a bland, unbearable lightness. It breeds spiritual apathy, sadness, ontological unease, and a perplexing witness.

Yet Christianity doesn’t leave us to the lightness of our whims. In love, we are tethered to the weight of a created order. There we find a boundaried delight. There we suffer with our Lord. There we become the flavorful salt of the earth.

What will they say of us?

I recently completed Daniel K. Williams’ phenomenal book Abortion and America’s Churches. I’m newly struck by the ways in which such issues come about in Christian communities. They arise in particular ways at particular times, and there is some sort of impetus for confronting them.

Unsettling ideas or practices to develop, whether from novelty, ignorance, deafness, blindness, or hardness of heart. It takes time for theological and moral deliberations to be established, and more time still for teaching to be dispersed and orthopraxy fostered with care. We see from history this is often a rocky process.

Hopefully, as with the literature we have on the case of castration in the early church and Williams’ on abortion in America’s churches (to speak nothing of all the other topics that could be listed) we will have more books written. They might show with similarly honest documentation the ways in which Christians deliberated, clarified convictions, and changed course on other matters.

We are in our own particular moment, filled with numerous shades of “ontological violence.” When historians look back, how will Christians have been shown to handle current assisted reproductive practices and other ways in which we have become complicit in modern medicine’s penchant for a “bleaching out of the density of things”?

I suppose time will tell.

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Of course, this means its scope and usefulness is limited.

Nevertheless, I wanted some way to ask my burning questions of you all, and listen to the answers. Here I am simply sharing those responses (until I figure out what else to do with them.)

*I would construct such a survey differently next time, as many times respondents would naturally explain something about themselves (say, denomination or tradition) that might not be captured in later responses if looked at individually. So, apologies for any lacking context.

Lastly, I am debating whether or not to share the “further thoughts” and gendered answers to the question about official Catholic teaching. I do not desire to spread false information or animosity among those in different traditions - even in here, I did lightly edit out some comments on Catholic teaching that, from my years of listening in and learning, were not accurate at all. So I did not want to aggravate the faithful or spread false impressions, myself (even if they weren’t coming from me). Does that make sense? I will read and hold onto them all, though - and perhaps incorporate the ones on Catholicism if I ever get around to writing about the gendered pull towards the tradition for ethical and anthropological reasons.

Thank you so much for all your input. This survey was really insightful.

What would you hope would change (if anything) in how your denomination or church approached matters of sex/the body/fertility/childbearing/assisted reproductive technology?

I don’t think I would change anything about the way my church teaches, because as far as their jurisdiction goes they’re doing a great job. But I will definitely do a much better job personally teaching my children about their bodies, sex, fertility, the menstrual cycle, pregnancy and birth, etc. because the church really needs to teach what the Bible says about these things but I think it’s the parent’s job to give a more holistic education on them. Like the church doesn’t need to be teaching my daughter about the different phases of her cycle or what happens during pregnancy, but I do. The church does not need to have The Talk with my children, but I and my husband do. As parents we work together with the church to create a full-orbed understanding of the glory and beauty and proper use of the body and its functions. I guess, then, I would say the church needs to be more instructive of parents and firmly require parents to talk with their kids about this. I was once in a church that wouldn’t admit anyone who membership who would not agree to give their children a Christian education. Parents could homeschool or private Christian school, but not send their kids to government schools. My current church doesn’t have a firm rule against public schools, but it’s telling that most families homeschool or Christian school. I don’t know how exactly the church would go about having parents talk about bodies with their kids, but it might be useful if the church created kind of a standard manual for these things or had a curriculum about the reproductive system and fertility and all of that. It’s kind of dubious for parents to be seeking out their own curriculum even if they homeschool because, as seen above, that can go dramatically wrong if the so-called Christian textbook doesn’t include the reproductive system 🙃 Maybe there should be a yearly Christian conference or talk for parents, where the pastors and elders go over the church’s teachings on these issues and give parents some pointers and helpful literature on having these conversations.

I wish we could teach that the created world is God’s arena for enacting spiritual realities, and not a hindrance to it. That the female body would be considered so sacred that no one would ever dream of asking her to medically manipulate it unless it were for the goal of restoring health. I wish we could speak authoritatively on these issues from natural law -- without needing some kind of proof text (although there are many). I wish our churches would teach that suffering is not bad, but in fact necessary for the Christian, and letting divinely-created bodies do what they do in marriage isn’t the same as actively seeking it out. A church that hails martyrs ought not be ashamed of families encountering suffering/inconvenience as they pursue faithfulness to God; we should be supporting them? I wish there were a spirit of repentance among the older generations of pastors and church members, that contraception and sterilization were so widespread. I wish it would be admitted that this has a huge something to do with why our churches are shrinking. I wish we could acknowledge the heart of greed and self-serving convenience that often accompanies such practices, which sadly still affects many people in the Boomer generation today even though they are long past their childbearing years. I see no admission of this. It makes it hard for younger families to feel supported because the older women in church either don’t understand what it’s like to have “many” children, or to suffer in their childbearing through miscarriage etc, or they just forgot how hard it can be because it was a short span of time in their own lives (think: the childbearing years of a woman of 2, children 2 years apart -- compared to an “open to life” woman). The needs are just so wildly different. I wish we had more access to fertility awareness teaching for our seminarians and pastors.

I think it is fascinating that the general Protestant Christian culture does not question medicalized birth control. I count myself in this group until the last year when I started scratching my head and wondering why I had never questioned it and if it was consistent with the rest of my Christian worldview. We spend so much time talking about sex being restricted to marriage. So much time talking about abortion. So much time talking about children as a great blessing from the Lord. Why is it a total non-conversation as to whether interventionist, medicalized birth control is appropriate for Christians? (Especially with some of what I’ve learned about the pill potentially being considered an abortifacient since it prevents implantation vs fertilization. I think this would violate a lot of Christian women’s convictions but they have no idea.) I guess my biggest hope is that this could become an actual conversation and not something that is stigmatized as being too personal OR taken for granted as a non-issue. I suspect this will have to be a grassroots effort and I’m encouraged to see so much more self-education and discussion happening, particularly amongst women.

I both wish the Episcopal Church (and the Anglican Communion writ large) did a better job of discussing sex/the body etc., but I also feel afraid that it will not be handled well if we did. I fear that having more discussions about sex and bodies would devolve into a debate about women’s reproductive responsibilities (I use this word intentionally rather than ‘rights’). I do think I am especially sensitive to how we discuss sex and the body because of an experience of sexual assault/intimate partner violence that I experienced in college. I don’t feel that *my* experience of the church has done a particularly good job of discussing the body, and in particular women’s bodies. The men in leadership either parroted unhelpful and damaging/patriarchal assumptions about women’s bodies and sex, or we have refrained from discussing it at all. I find this sad and frustrating. It contributes to this overall sense that women’s bodies are less valuable or inherently shameful because of our capacity for childbearing, or simply not worthy of discussion at all.

Hmmm, this is tough. I think I wish our society as a whole would invest more in women’s health in general, HA! I think there is so much more to be discovered (within the realm of NaPro for example) about a woman’s cycle and body. I think there could be even better technologies to assist with fertility tracking, but we just don’t have them. I don’t wish our church allowed for contraception because I deeply understand why it does not, but I wish there was more intentional accompaniment of the faithful in navigating the challenges of that teaching AND helping people understand that this teaching also doesn’t mean that to be faithful, you also MUST have a large family. And also recognizing that there might be seasons where NFP also is not that difficult or burdensome and that is a gift! I think we have so many awesome people thinking and writing about these things to make it actually make sense - ex: Abigail Favale, Emily Chapman, New Polity, Leah Libresco Sargeant etc. And I am so grateful for them!

In my experience, Anglican clergy are very solid on sexual ethics in the broad sense and the idea of being concerned over the ethics of types of contraception that may be used. Even ones that might not oppose IVF would approach it with concerns for the humanity of the created embryos. Same goes for methods of contraception, everyone is concerned to use a method of contraception that is not abortifacient. I would say that only about half are actively teaching on any of these issues in public setting, although I can’t speak to what they might do in counseling. Perhaps a larger problem, is that the majority of present day Anglicans come from outside traditions and broader evangelicalism and need more instruction on these issues then it has perhaps occurred to their clergy to give them. Our priest has held Sunday school lessons on all of the subjects at some point, but of course there are many many other things to be talking about and it can’t be done all the time in a scenario such as that one.

I wish that there was more unity across the Church in women taking on leadership positions. We have clear Church teaching on women not becoming priests, but it was always understood that women were valued regardless. Now, I see several traditional Catholics devaluing the role of women to protect the priesthood, but women aren’t excluded because they are less than. I think it’s an example of Platonism that needs to be more clearly resolved. Though I fear that any new teaching on the role of women would just be dismissed as coming from a modernist pope.... On the other hand, liberal Catholics push women into areas of ministry they should not be in, which is where the pushback originated. Basically, it is a human issue! Catholics come in so many different flavors that it is difficult to say that every Catholic believes x about these issues. Indeed, many Catholics would disagree with the Church in these areas, and many other Catholics will go further than the Church in these areas.

Although it’s not explicit, I wish this implicit idea that somehow you are “supposed” to be married for a long time before you have kids, and if you don’t, it’s an “accident,” would die out. To me, it implicitly encourages the use of contraception, which usually means hormonal birth control, which I think is a poison. I’m not against all forms of contraception, but strongly against hormonal “solutions” to not getting pregnant. I think people should get married only when they are already open to having kids, so although my wife and I are not actively trying, we are entirely open to it and have been pretty much since the day we were married. I think the message around sex is clear, but when it comes to cultural feelings towards children, I think we let ageism slip into the church. We should be doing everything to support couples in feeling confident enough to have kids and giving them a community to raise their children in when they do.

I wish we saw having children in marriage as something you could, after serious deliberation and for prudential reasons, opt out of for *a limited season* rather than something you opt in to whenever you feel you are ready. While I respect a Protestant approach of not going beyond the bounds of scripture in binding consciences, we should nevertheless teach that this facet of life requires active discernment and solid formation, with careful attention to how our society arrived at the status quo we imbibe as “normal” and the broader affects of contraceptive and ART technologies. More generally, we need more than a “chapter and verse” approach to Christian ethics. I think a lot of evangelical Christians feel the most important issues are those we can easily wrangle with clear scriptural commands - instead of seeing the unifying themes that animate all of Scripture and the lives of its earliest authors and interpreters.

In some ways I wish it would simply be mentioned or acknowledged. The general assumption I think tends to be that if it’s not explicitly condemned in scripture, it’s licit for Christians to engage in (so no abortion, IVF controversial, but contraception generally fine). At least that’s my impression as a single man, maybe among couples or females this is discussed more openly. So just to ask some serious questions about this stuff would be a good start. I do worry that if they were to hop on the anti-contraception bandwagon (for example), they lack the theological and pastoral depth to navigate these thorny issues. I’d worry you could end up with a purity culture-like culture around the topic. So honestly step one is a deeper biblical anthropology and view of the the world, and then the above topics can hopefully be broached in a manner that helps more than it hurts.

So much of my early journey with birth control and family planning felt deeply hand wave-y. As a Protestant, it seemed like every decision in the realm of fertility, etc. came down to personal conviction and whatever is best for the two of us. That position seems bonkers now. At some point, I am on board with the position that the decision is between a couple and God, but to have no guidance alongside that, or even the resources to prudently work out the options and weigh convictions left me feeling like we were just making things up as we went. And I’m so grateful for the grace of God in opening my eyes and my heart, but I would do it all differently if I could. I did not see my fertility as a gift for most of my life, and that makes me sad. I am determined my daughters will have a different understanding.

I feel the majority of Protestant churches get all of these topics wrong. I believe this is a result of turning away from tradition and virtue teaching. There is a very distinct separation of the sacred of secular amongst many Protestants, even if they claim there isn’t. I am mulling over many avenues of theology, but what I have come to realize is that much of what God has given to us to be sacred acts and gifts are very much neglected, abandoned, or trivialized in common American Protestant churches. The sanctity of marriage and sex have lost their importance. Having more than 2 children is seen as extreme. Contemplating the ethics of birth control is often deemed legalistic, unnecessary, and even careless (this is usually the case when someone excuses using birth control to prevent financial hardships).

If anything, I wish there was more awareness among laypeople that the pill is really not the choice we should be making as Christians, that our assumption in marriage should be that we will have kids and not push them off till a perfect time, but not a blanket statement that somehow prescribes to me how to actually live out the command “be fruitful and multiply” in my own particular marriage. I think pastors can be a good example of this to parishioners by being open to large families, but I also think that we shouldn’t be trying to condemn people from the outside for their choices here, which are often extremely difficult to make and nuanced, and in general I think these choices are best left to a faithful Christian couple to make between themselves in love for God and one another.

I wish that leadership would feel the need to teach on ethical matters. That they would outline a beautiful vision of fertility, the body, and the family so that people would be compelled to listen. I wish that, to a certain extent (I am a Protestant after all!), certain sexual matters would not be considered matters of private conscience. Pastors should not be afraid to say certain things like IVF, sterilization (most of the time), and the pill etc are not biblical and not moral. Mostly, talked about above, I wish there was a more prevailing narrative about the goodness of the body and that we understood better how these physical and spiritual matters are deeply intertwined. People seem to view them as separate and pastors need to lovingly correct this.

IDK, I think there’s a lot of general agreement in Presbyterian churches on sexual ethics/childbearing, yet not as particular as the catholic church. I and my husband also questioned whether it was biblical to try to have as many kids as possible (as God allowed) or if it was wiser to space them out/plan them… But it might would be nice to have some more clear? stated? authoritative? views expressed by the Presbyterian church. I don’t think I’ve ever heard a Presbyterian say anything bad about vasectomies (except on substack).

I am not attached to a denomination. I will say that part of the reason LCMS doesn’t work for me is that I don’t think there is a high view of women in this church, even though I know great women in the church, it doesn’t seem as though women are viewed as equally imaging God. This is more of a “feeling” and maybe has something to do with evangelical/fundamentalist culture seeping in? But also, Luther held that women were ontologically inferior to and therefore naturally subordinate to men? I have two daughters and I don’t want them to be hurt by the church anymore than I want them to be hurt by secular culture. The extremes on both sides are dehumanizing and horrific! Actually, I feel the same way about my son, too!

Not sure. There’s a lot of practical stuff we never get around to in the PCA because we do so much heady stuff. Yet we are doing a theology of the body Sunday School, so there’s that. I wonder if part of the way in, for us Protestant skeptics to give these matters more consideration, would be to channel a little Wendell Berry about living in tune with the rhythms of creation + the patterns of life or a month that the OT purifying rituals are arranged around + the need to have a better argument against men pressuring their wives about sex. For that last one, I have to believe that a lot of men would have a more measured and restrained approach to sex if/when you think it might lead to a child.

I just want basic teaching and MORE TRANSPARENCY. The world taught me almost everything I know about my body, not the church. This really truly grieves me. I also want churches to be more open about things like IVF and the pill and the cost these things can have on the female body. I think more personal stories on how using NFP in real life works for people are imperative. I think it’s unfair to say to women “NFP or else!” and then provide zero testimony on the fruit of that decision (this was my personal experience of Catholicism). It would require women to be more transparent and vulnerable, yes, but I think there would be so much fruit from conversations like that.

Deep, Bible-based discussion is necessary for change. A lot of people have not thought about the issues deeply. Their past actions are likely to butt up against whatever is taught to some degree, which could lead to anger and discomfort. That’s okay. But it needs to be handled carefully and wisely. Churches where the Bible is the preeminent authority very much need biblically rooted teaching, along with perhaps some practical points; that’s what they are used to. Catholic tradition is not a convincing argument for most. And many will say “this feels like an issue where there is freedom and where I should follow the convictions of the Holy Spirit if there are any.”

I would just like more conversations around all of this. Good teaching, but also space for people to talk about their experiences and why they’ve reached different conclusions. I think a lot of people just don’t think about these things as related to our faith. If you’re not having sex outside of marriage and you’re not having an abortion, then anything else is fine and dandy. I think, though, that our bodies are important and deserve more time and attention as a church. I wish these things had been taught to me as a child. I wish that having questions about reproduction wasn’t shamed or pushed off to “when you’re older.”

I wish that more pastors would speak more explicitly about sex and fertility from the pulpit. Many Catholics in the pews unfortunately do not understand the Church’s official positions on things like artificial birth control, IVF, theology of the body, even the definition of sex. I know that a lot of priests try to avoid preaching on these topics because it can alienate those people, and obviously this is easier to say as someone who doesn’t have to preach, but I wish more of our priests believed that the gravity of these issues outweighs the risk of alienation. Mincing words on such serious topics seems uncharitable.

The Catholic Church should talk NFP waaaaay more, but not as a “rainbows and unicorns” solution. There are so many women today either interested in their body’s data or interested in infertility treatment or interested in pursuing more natural harmony with their body and nature. We have tools and instructors and courses and no one knows about them! Last surveys I saw said 1% of Catholic use NFP, so I don’t think we’re getting the word out there even among our own people. Pretty shameful to have the truth that people are starving for and to sit on it, rather than have uncomfortable conversations!

My church has a very tender and thoughtful stance on infertility and infant loss. It is recognized with a special Sunday once a year and usually several ladies or couples share some of their stories. The sheer number of couples who have experienced one or both is always astounding. On the other side, ethical issues surrounding IVF, vasectomies, etc. are generally not discussed. I know many vasectomy bros (what MLA says is true, people are extremely open about this) and many couples that have gone down the IVF route (most without success, I’m sure there are others that have conceived).

I think focusing less on the basic of “no sex until marriage” and more on the positive practice of sexuality. The church has so much richness-we need to be better about sharing it and not reduce ourselves to a basic purity culture mentality. One area I definitely struggled with was seeing my sexuality as a positive in practice because even though, intellectually, I had been exposed to ideas of my sexuality as a good to be stewarded, the basic message I feel I got from formal sources was much more focused on the “don’t do these things, here’s all the ways your sexuality can be misused.’”

I think Catholics needs to get better at being willing to mentor couples through the weeds of sexual relations and the consequences - whether that be live children or pregnancy loss or infertility, or any number of other things. Encounter and accompanying couples. Sometimes, some Catholics have a tendency to tap the “rules board” with the pointer and assume that everything is obvious. In reality, the Church is far more generous than some interpretations let on. This, however, is not a problem with the Church and her teaching, but rather her church (small c - the Body).

I would hope they would address current issues such as egg freezing and IVF, which many women are doing now, including Christians (though not in our branch of the PCA, to my knowledge). I would hope they would also provide some kind of guidance to young couples about a Biblical way to handle fertility, well beyond just making sure both people have the same desire for children. There are so many lies our culture feeds us about controlling fertility, and I swallowed so many of these lies without even realizing it, because the church provided no guidance whatsoever.

Teaching would go far, far beyond “don’t get an elective abortion, probably.” Mentorship from older women in cycle education and fertility awareness (but they’d have to have done it themselves!); teaching from pulpit and premaritally about the historical church norms of childbearing in marriage and also that infertility does not make you lesser. A wider concern with the dehumanizing and abortifaciant aspects of fertility treatments. Denormalization of IVF. A more child-and birth-mother-centric view of adoption (and less of a “I’m a savior” view).

Everything. Just… everything. I suspect clergy refuse to wade into these waters for fear of getting too personal with people in the pews and risking offending anyone who may have chosen IVF or is struggling with fertility issues. A parish might make brochures available in their foyer book racks from NaPro tech places but the pastor will not address such issues, whether to teach, encourage, or admonish (where needed). They are willing for their parish to host speakers for events outside of Mass but these topics are generally avoided in homilies.

I wish that it was at least a standing item on premarital counseling, if not something that came up, if only occasionally, in regular church teaching for all the congregation. I want it to be less of a topic that raises my heart rate because I don’t know how people will respond. I feel fortunate that the brothers and sisters in Christ I’ve mentioned NFP or Fertility Awareness Methods to have had charitable responses. Some even shared that they practiced that or see the value of it, and it’s led to a really lovely and encouraging conversation.

I wish the meaning of sex had been discussed more in premarital counseling and the marriage class we attended. All of the books and other media we came across usually talked about the intimacy/pleasure aspect of sex with no mention at all of procreation or how those things fit together. There was a lot of “how to have a great sex life,” but little to no depth regarding the act and its purpose or meaning. We have a different pastor now than we did then, though, so I don’t know how things would be different if we were getting married today.

I feel like for the most part, we are just not participating in the narrative. We are just going along with what the culture dictates, and though we say children are a blessing, we are really kind of aggravated with people who choose to have more than 3. We are also treating pregnancy like we treat everything else--something to be medically controlled, to be sterilized and dehumanized. I feel we are so far away from the church having a real, counter-cultural stance on this subject that I honestly don’t even know where we could start.

I think a lot of it starts with just people having conversations within their own churches. And pastors hopefully being trained in seminary to have stronger convictions about these topics. On a wider scale, even in recent years, Protestants of different denominations have come together to speak in a unified voice against things they see as immoral/unbiblical (ex: https://cbmw.org/the-nashville-statement/#signers). So I don’t think it’s crazy to want some sort of statement about these topics. Should we call a conference?

I would appreciate an acknowledgement that the current cultural default (even within the church) of getting married, using contraception for 5-7 years, then having 2 maybe 3 kids, and then getting a vasectomy or tubes tied, is the church departing from historic Christian teaching and following the way of the culture. If people end up following the cultural default then so be it, but I think if this was properly and sincerely addressed it would result in a pretty significant cultural shift in the evangelical church.

If anything, just talk about it more! There are lot of uninformed Catholics in the pew and it is a GIFT - so many women just come alive when they learn these realities. Finally they are being valued, finally it all makes sense. But there should be acknowledgement that it can be a cross - whether facing infertility or too many babies coming at once if NFP just isn’t cutting it... It’s complicated, but I’m proud of my tradition for being what I view as one of the last bulwarks against so much inhumanity.

My biggest issue with the church and fertility these days is the pedestal we have put motherhood on. I always just wanted to be a stay at home mom (as encouraged by the church culture I grew up in) and now it seems like that may not be an option for me. I am having to work through what I find my worth in because I have it so engrained in me that motherhood is the highest calling for a woman. Maybe let’s not put so much emphasis on motherhood being the best way to further the kingdom of God?

I wish more resources and help were available in a non-awkward way about how to “plan” your family without hormonal or medical interventions. Aside from clear teachings on the roles of wives and husbands and biblical passages concerning sexual purity, it is very much hush hush in my church. I even struggle to talk about it with my husband, though we have a very good and loving marriage. Though he does take a stance against things like IVF, it’s not something he openly loves to talk about.

I really wish the Anglican church we got married in had been more open in offering couples the option of NFP training and support (especially after finding out that many of the staff/clergy were using NFP)--I think many couples would have benefited from it. I think overall the Catholic approach of working with the woman’s body rather than against it is so much more positive and actually supportive of women and children than the Protestant approach that I encountered growing up.

I hope to see it taught on directly, at least in marriage situations. I love that my church teaches about the purpose and beauty of sex on a Sunday (and my husband recently taught on it to the youth). I would love to see that level of care and boldness to go into teaching and guiding people through fertility. They say enough to make a careful listen realize that these decisions aren’t fully up to them and their spouse, but I wish they tell us what to do a little more clearly.

Better catechesis and awareness about our teachings, our bodies especially in light of those teachings, and fertility. Particularly at a young age, though that’s not an easy task and perhaps one better left to parents (so maybe better catechesis for parents specifically as parents!🤔). Women’s fertility and cycle is a gift, not a defect, and having that knowledge earlier would have made a huge difference. And men need to know this too!! Include them in the conversation.

I’d personally love more conversation on being embodied as a single person. I feel like it has different nuances from being embodied as a married person. I love the shift to talking about it in the context of marriage and family, but it can be isolating and dispiriting as a single woman to hear that my body matters (Yes!) but then for the conversation to end with “and that’s why motherhood is fulfilling.” (Doesn’t seem to be an option at the moment for me.)

My husband and I talk a lot about the need for the Church to “dignify the hard choice” by requiring it of people - ask people to practice occasional abstinence in marriage/forgo IVF/live a celibate life if unmarried (whether same-sex attracted or not) and come alongside them as they do this, rather than making individuals/couples bear the weight of these practices AND making them feel as if this need not be so and they could simply choose otherwise

I know that “purity culture” was traumatic and damaging for many folks brought up the way I was. I received good messages about sex and body from my parents, and I think this was protective. I decided as soon as I figured out what sex was that I would be a virgin walking down the aisle on my wedding day. I did this, and am both proud of this decision and grateful for all the blessings and benefits it has yielded in my marriage and life.

Just to start a discussion on the topic. Granted, I’ve only been visiting my current church for 2 months now. Maybe it is discussed and I just haven’t seen it yet. But ultimately I want all denominations to move away from a mechanistic and hedonistic mindset (as my wife and I were taught we should be having sex every day if possible) and towards a view that integrates body and soul with a proper understanding of male and female biology.

Either we teach children, or the world teaches children—about every matter. I pray that we as a church provide resources for girls and boys to learn their bodies and how hormones have an influence on mood, periods, even how we are able to complete tasks. I think holistic approaches need to be more widespread and we should LISTEN to girls having pain and difficulty, instead of putting a bandaid on their very real wounds and experiences.

My sense is that, being in a denomination with only male ministers, the male ministers didn’t feel comfortable talking about these topics. My dad was a minister, and that was certainly the case for him. The lack of leadership by women is one of my main disagreements with our current church, and I think a more structural change of increased leadership by women would be a first step towards discussing these topics more openly.

I’d love to see a more comprehensive approach. We ought to be teaching our kids about fertility. We ought to be talking about that in the homilys, if only in broad strokes (I don’t think a detailed discussion is appropriate for an Orthodox homily, but that marriage is for babies, marriage and kids are a crucial good, that our church should be supporting and encouraging those kinds of things, etc, needs to be reinforced).

If people (congregants, priests, etc.) knew how to praise/encourage large families or families “open to life” (even if they weren’t naturally conceiving as many) without guilting or shaming those with small families. No one is *trying* to guilt or shame small families… but you feel like if you uplift the “open to life” approach you are automatically minimizing or downgrading others.

I want to hear clear teaching on this that doesn’t capitulate to culture but rather truly seeks to give the godly view of these issues without apology. I want Protestants to condemn IVF and vasectomies especially. I want the history of birth control to be better understood in the church. I want God’s high and beautiful view of family to be taught and for us all to stop asking one another “so are you done yet?”

I think the Catholic Church should more frequently address the topics of sex, the body, fertility, etc. in Masses and provide more opportunities for Catholics to learn about the Catholic perspective on these topics outside of conferences and seminars. I think in addition to the moral perspective on these things, the Catholic Church could do a better job on explaining how NFP and TOB can deepen a marriage.

I would hope that the LCMS would become much more public and honest about these things, especially with young people. Our denomination hasn’t officially taken a position on these things in a long time, and that’s really compounded problems—multiple generations now of people using contraceptives, getting divorced and even remarrying, creep in of ARTs even when they’re obviously morally wrong.

That the Catholic Church would provide more direct access to NFP education for parishioners. And that Protestant churches would stop avoiding the difficult topics and instead, prepare the youth and young families with what to expect, what is ordered, what is disordered, and what Christ calls us to, as well as to take a stance against altering the body’s natural fertilely through the pill.

Not sure about the other but I think talking about contraception and ART would be helpful as there are moral issues with these interventions. As a Christian and a doctor I’ve been wary of going into family practice or gynecology because I am unsure about the moral issues surrounding certain forms of contraception and ART. I would appreciate more authoritative advice from people I trust

No stupid jokes about vasectomies from the pulpit! No stupid jokes about not wanting to get pregnant and the burden of children. No insults and judgment on the stories of the ones in the Bible who faced infertility! Stop using the books that have terrible ideas and advice surrounding sexuality. Churches where old people are intolerant and hateful of children to be put in their place!

I’m encouraged by the fact that, whatever their other faults, the SBC has issued a statement against IVF. I would hope to see discussion not only of IVF but also of contraception at the General Assembly level of the PCA. More likely, however, would be a kind of ground-up approach from particular churches that begin to take this seriously and address it without shame...

Firstly, that children are a blessing. I think we say that, but there seems to be a lack of anything of past general affirmations of that. I wish they’d be a lot more vocal about IVF, birth control, sex as a gift, etc. Namely clearly calling out IVF as sin, (while I don’t hold a Catholic view) how BC/the pill can be sin, the church should support one another in child rearing, etc.

We’ve recently joined the LCMS church, which is unafraid to take a stand on bioethics, and I am at peace for now. I suppose I don’t look for a great deal of interference from the church, but it seems that parents in particular should be able to access a solid sense of teaching that they can pass on to their children within the context of their own communities and family histories.

More discussion about children being a fundament purpose of marriage. That NFP does require discernment and that openness to life in most cases ought to be the default rather than avoiding possible conception. That NFP is not to be used as contraception. My dream would be free NFP classes/guidance through the church for anyone along with free or discounted materials as needed.

I hope there would be more conversations about natural family planning, understanding your cycle, and how to decide how many kids you’ll have. It all feels very vague and I would hope there becomes more clarity about what the biblical principles actually are, where there is Christian freedom, and how to make wise, responsible, yet trusting decisions regarding family planning.

I am fairly satisfied with the ways these topics are approached at my church, but I would appreciate it if people here were more willing to discuss the place of sex within marriage, since I think we could use a bit more clarity about how to approach it the right way, not just explanations of how NFP works and the Catholic reasons why not to use artificial contraception.

Our theology is very rich and there are so many good resources. On the local level, it’s not always talked about at the pulpit and there are many cultural Catholics who don’t understand why IVF is not permissible. There is a lot of work to be done to educate Catholics on these difficult teachings. I wish there was better support for couples struggling with infertility.

I would hope more Catholics would resist practices that assume a baby will be aborted if a problem is found, such as the routine tests for abnormalities when a woman is geriatric (over 35?). And I pray more Catholics don’t conform to the cultural ideal of IVF and that they realize that the indefinite freezing and destruction of conceived children is an abomination.

I wish they would entrust themselves to really understanding Church Teaching with humility and an openness to what’s true. I’ve seen a lot of Catholics just going with the flow of culture and its ideas. And I don’t think it’s common that Catholics actually want to look deeply into Church teaching. They often just absorb worldly philosophies and move on with it.

I would love to see Protestants embrace a more holistic understanding of the body. There are a lot of things I think holding the PCA and other reformed spaces back from this (mostly just hundreds of years of bad or non-teaching on these ideas) but thinking about embodiment and the telos of men and women in a non-hierarchical way may be the first right step.

There are already some good answers out there in my denomination (books, essays, podcasts, pastors with the right perspective), but you either have to know where to look or be lucky enough to live in the right district (or care enough to move to one). So it would be good if the teaching was more widespread and consistent and well-taught (well-explained).

I hope that my fellow Catholics actually start to believe and practice what the Church teaches on these issues. I love the teachings and appreciate the consistency (over time and between different areas), and I find it really sad and disheartening how many Catholics don’t understand the teachings, don’t practice them, and outright reject them.

I would hope that it wouldn’t continue to be our best kept secret. I know that many in the pews would be upset, especially if they bought into the lies regarding contraception, IVF, etc. These people would need sensitivity and reeducation in the hopes of bringing them to love and understand the beauty of the teachings of God and His Church.

I think that this would be a topic available for consideration, for study, and for discussion. The Bible does teach principles that are important to consider when laying out an ethic of reproductive responsibility and care. We should be introduced to these topics so that we at least know that there are things we should be considering.

I wish they could at least realize how much it damages marriages and the church’s sanctity and message by acting so secular in this area. I think the Catholic views are a bit strong in this area but something has to change, it waters down the relationship of husband and wife which waters down the relationship of the church and Christ.

Explicate that the goodness of having and raising children is spiritual, societal, social, as well as individual; that the sacrificial love demonstrated by fathering and mothering contributes to the sanctification of the Christian, while leaning on brothers and sisters (it takes a village) increases love and grace in the community.

I would want it to be made explicit that these are matters of discipleship, not individual/isolated discernment/decision-making. We are worse on our own and need to actually see the Bible as authoritative and instructive for ALL of life. The Bible has plenty to say on the matter -- you just need to look with eyes to see.

I wish we could shake the legacy of Manichean and Jansenist influence, so difficult! I wish we could get more people to understand that the tradition’s No to certain things, so apparently restrictive, is the precondition for the freedom and completeness of the Yes that includes and liberates when taken on its own terms.

So much, we don’t talk about it enough! I want to get this added to premarital counseling, maybe have some more position papers that pastors can reference and share with church members. (Uh oh, did I just say that out loud. I’m applying for PhDs in OT/Theological Ethics so maybe this is a side project I need to get on).

I think it would be wonderful to have a more open discussion on ethics within the church regarding these matters. I struggle to see how the specifics of any of these matters could be well-navigated from the pulpit, but I do think fruitful teaching in a small group or classroom setting would be beneficial.

I do think that more effort needs to be put into assuming teens/young people can understand and engage with the topic on a philosophical level. Dumbing it down made it more offensive to my sensibilities at the time than I think it needed to be. But, that could have just been the way my parish handled it.

I think we need to talk about it more, and encourage people to be ethically consistent. If they believe life begins at conception , there are implications for this. I think we need need to treat it all much more seriously. I would like more complete teaching for my own children, starting at adolescence.

In my current church (Anglican, Reformed Episcopal), it would be good if there was a book club with a book about that or some type of class. I do know that before we started attending this church, they did have a study on the Theology of the Body so I am sure sex/fertility was discussed during that.

Views on God’s sovereignty and role in reproduction. Openness to marriage and family not being solely for the convenience and picture perfect vision of the couple. Perhaps that isn’t fair... but once you hear newlyweds talking about their child placement goals and strategies, you cannot unhear it.

I would like to see discussions of it in as much as the Bible has something to say. I don’t prefer a ton of reactionary stuff, and I think pastors can all too often think they have to have all the answers in an area that the Bible doesn’t explicitly cover (perhaps there’s a purpose in that).

I just strongly feel that Protestants need to start thinking about this!!!! I have really only learned what I’ve been taught on my own, but I feel this is a huge huge need in our churches. Not sure exactly how to start as the general congregation still seems to have not thought about this.

To steer the focus away from only how far we can go to what the full biblical picture of it all is. To focus on trust in God, putting aside our own selfish desires and to consider actual ethical implications of choices rather than just going along with the wider cultural norms.

I’d like to see if become a more commonly brought up topic. I think people are afraid of offending others that have used IVF or birth control. I’d be happy to see the church have a more conservative and Biblical stance on it. We need to be bold about what sex is intended for.

I hope the Catholic Church learns to address women as competent people who want information and evidence and who can speak freely about reproduction. I also strongly hope that the church starts to promulgate a real pro-life rather than simply an anti-abortion ethic and worldview.

I would want the Catholic church to take more pride in her teaching here, and to be able to adequately explain that it is not an anti-feminist stance, but rather that the teachings are the only attitude that protect women in their wholeness as people and images of God.

I think we need an overhaul!! To really reconsider what we are practicing and why! To develop a theology of the body and fertility that truly honors men, women, and children. So many of my friends have just never thought about their faith in relation to these things.

I find our church has become more vocal about this in the last two years, and I believe hiring a woman on staff in a leadership (non Pastor/elder) capacity has helped. The fact that she is single has also given her a more holistic approach which I think is helpful.

I think there is an opportunity for Christian formation that should encourage theological thinking around sex, the body, childbearing, assisted reproductive technology. I also think there are rich resources from scripture, tradition, and reason to support this.

We can’t really change the stereotype from inside the church, but I do wish the view of Catholics as just following *all the rules* and being brainwashed by that could be displaced for a little more of an open minded knee jerk reaction by non-Catholics

As Protestants, we simply do not have the same level of dialogue or robust systematic study around these subjects as we do others. There is much to be praised in our study in other areas, but this is one area our Catholic siblings have us beat on.

I would like the leaders of the church to be more willing to be awkward. Most Catholics are not practicing what the church teaches in this regard and lots of education needs to happen that will make people uncomfortable and perhaps upset.

Firstly, our culture needs more voices celebrating the miraculous human female body and her work. I would ask more church leadership to get proactive in emphasizing the blessing of procreation within a loving healthy Christian marriage.

In my childhood church, I wish they would see that it’s all part of a whole. They are so pro-life, but when it comes to big families or older couples and “surprises,” there’s definitely a lot of side-eye going on (gossip and criticism).

Pre-marital counseling seems like the primary channel for communicating these things, but a general awareness of the ethical/spiritual issues at play should be spread throughout the culture, likely even being addressed from the pulpit.

Talk about the body and fertility seems pretty balanced where I am in an Anglican church right now. It comes up freely with women, but it’s not discussed large scale and I don’t think it needs to be discussed among men and women mixed.

I wish it was more integrated with how we talked about being human generally. It needs to be one of the fundamental parts of our anthropology and should come up in everything regarding family re: marriage, children, sexuality, etc.

I don’t necessarily want my church to be discussing hot-button cultural issues from the pulpit. Sunday school, or other forms of disciplined learning, where some of these topics were discussed, would have been very enlightening.

I wish the church was speaking more boldly on IVF in particular and have told my pastor as much. People aren’t thinking deeply about these issues, so the church needs to be speaking to them and countering the cultural norms.

I would like my church to offer more concrete teaching and advice to young couples. I worry that our hands off approach leads couples to thoughtlessly following the wider culture, which I do not believe is healthy.

I think just being more educated on how the body works and how God made our bodies to work a certain way for a reason. And that having many children super close together isn’t necessarily the only way.

I would want some sort of class or seminar to take place so that my wife and I could actually think about the Christian ethics involved in the subject. As it is, there’s just not enough out there.

Right now it’s pretty non-discussed, so having discussion would be a good change. But also hard as I know many DEVOUT Christians who started their families through IVF and wrestled with it.

I would like to see the Church have better education in place for priests regarding these teachings. I would like for every parish to have an NFP or Christian sexuality counselor available.

More support for holistic/hormonal/body literacy teaching. That information/treatment can be so expensive and overwhelming to pursue and I think it would help a lot of women and marriages.

Nothing as far as official teaching goes. I think the church can be more supportive and encouraging of young couples being open to life as well as giving better instruction on NFP.

I’d like the Protestant church at large to develop a more consistent sexual ethic and be less okay with hormonal birth control and its effects on the individual and the marriage.

Both denominations, that I have experience with, Episcopal and Methodist, need to recognize pro life stances first, I believe, before tackling fertility. They are too far gone.

Many more sermons and pastoral chats/coffee hour conversations about it! I do want to read up on Catholic social teaching in that vein since I think it’s the most thorough.

I am very happy with my individual church, but I wish my denomination would have position papers on these matters and teach pastors how to counsel people on these issues.

Men (beginning in their teen years) should learn how the woman’s body works at an earlier age and be taught in the context of NFP and the theology of sex and marriage.

I would hope it could be an open conversation in which people can study scripture and seek counsel regarding it, as with any other prominent aspect of our lives.

Honestly and transparency. It needs to be comprehensive and nuanced, not factual and abrasive. But people need to understand God’s design and plan.

I wish our church discussed NaPro Technology during Pre Cana because some Catholics in desperation turn to IUI or IVF which is contrary to our faith.

I wish that NFP was more taught and supported in the church regularly. We were not given much guidance when entering the church in official channels!

The focus is primarily on getting people to use NFP vs contraception, but no one is ministering to those who are on board with NFP and struggling.

I wish we talked about it more. Especially the philosophy, the life-affirming and dignifying ideas behind it, not just the “list of restrictions.”

Lots lots lots more discussion and advice given to married and engaged couples as they consider their fertility. More teaching from the pulpit.

That this is a holistic theology and ethic, not discrete issues to be addressed individually, therefore it needs to be taught and discussed.

Encouragement that children are a blessing from the Lord, and an eternal gift, and more discussion on healthy sexual ethic within marriage.

Any robust teaching on the theology of the body! The Catholic tradition has a massive leg up on Evangelical Christianity on this topic.

I would hope women are better encouraged to understand the way God made their bodies and how to work with that as a positive thing.

I think firstly, just have them, then have them with everyone, men and women, as it affect both parties not just the woman.

Bridging the gap between some of the thoughtful work theological ethicists do, and what ordinary believers engage with.

That we would stop being swayed by the progress narrative, repent of errors and submit our desires to a biblical ethic.

A more serious conversation about reproductive technology. More of a celebration of children and a support for parents.

I would appreciate more discussion and more weight given to these matters both formally and informally in my church.

I wish there was better guidance and more firm boundaries on what the church views as good according to scripture.

I think it should be discussed more and at younger ages. It should definitely be a part of every marriage prep.

More explanation about why creating babies outside of the marital act is a disservice to both parents and kids.

More emphasis on the rational reasons behind why sex before marriage / abortion / IVF are sins.

More advice and compassion for women whose cycles are irregular or who have other reproductive irregularities.

Nothing. Grateful for the Orthodox church’s wholehearted embrace of the body (from conception to grave).

I think we should be proud that we’re pretty much the ones who understand a woman’s body and fertility.

Holistic sex education that includes body, mind and soul - not just courses of theology of the body etc.

Clearer and slightly louder expression of views. Better support on understanding and practicing NFP.

I want clarity, or at least more open discussion—especially for my own kids to have it different.

Hard to say - maybe more options for women’s discipleship/mentoring groups at all stages of life

More vocal and proactive in equipping believers to apply a Biblical framework to these topics.

Just talk about it. Even opening up these discussions I think would be helpful and worthwhile.

I WISH WE’D TALK ABOUT IT! AND HAVE SUPPORT GROUPS OR SOMETHING for people actually doing it!

I think more teaching about the subject in general, more grounded theological discussions.

I would prefer that they talked about them and made it clear that it matters spiritually.

Further integrating this into daily life for all, not just starting it at marriage prep.

That it wouldn’t be hidden, that it would be talked about and space made for it.

I have no complaints. I agree with what the Catholic Church teaches.

I wish priests and bishops were preaching on this more openly.

Just talking about any of these things would be a good start.

Not knock on the non-medical contraceptions such as condoms.

The teaching can’t change. The messaging clearly needs to.

Trust God with your fertility - that can include NFP.

It would be nice if they did approach these topics!

That it’s discussed more openly and throughly.

I wish all churches had a great NFP instructor

Just more open discussion and more resources!

Teach them that IVF is not an option.

I wish they would TALK about it. :)

Teach NFP and the good of abstinence.

More holistic, more relational.

A more holistic conversation

Anything would be better.

More openness

More info.

If you're a pastor, what do you see as your biggest needs when it comes to discipling your flock in matters of sex/the body/fertility/childbearing/assisted reproductive technology?

Although I’m ordained I don’t have a parish, so my preaching is more filling in. I’m a professional counselor and I’ve needed to meet people where they are. Although I’m not persuaded yet of the Catholic view, I’ve always had a high view of conscience, so even with working with those more concerned about IVF or other technologies I felt able to walk with them supportively. I admired that they thought about it at all, because I don’t think any of this is on people’s radar, and I’ve done a lot of premarital and marital and infertility counseling for a good range of evangelical people over the years.

I’m an assistant pastor, if that helps contextualize my answer; I think the greatest barrier is that nobody talks very publicly about these things, whether from the pulpit or even in conversation with fellow Christians, except maybe quite close friends. And in those contexts there is a vacuum of teaching, so people tend to assume that, if it doesn’t cross a line like ‘abortion’, everything is permitted because medicine says so. To get people to think intelligently and theologically is difficult because there isn’t even a conversation going on.

This is currently a huge problem in our church…. I think it’s boiling down to Holiness, the value of physical bodies and that God made them with intentional design. I think these are the high level items to start with. I don’t think rigid black and white teaching has necessarily been helpful. Yes, God has standards but he also meets us in relationship. What he wants me to focus on now may be different that what he wants you to focus on. What is the highest level we can agree on? Sex is all about holiness.

I am not a pastor but I am the Next Generation minister at our church (over kids and youth) and I would love to do some sort of class for the teen/preteen girls that celebrates their body and teaches them about their cycle (I know you have shared some of these resources on the comp!). Will keep you posted if this happens and if anyone comes or if there is a revolt haha.

My husband is the full-time minister presently, though I am ordained as well. We discuss regularly the need to take on these topics with thorough wisdom with our church families alongside similarly orienting conversations about family, bodily dignity, and fidelity with those who identify LGBTQ.

I’m not a pastor, but I am a life group leader and YIKES someone in my small group did IVF and discarded all her embryo’s after genetic testing. So I see this as a huge hole in discipleship. I had no idea how to respond, but she clearly shared this info with zero sense of shame.

My congregation is mostly Hispanic. Most are unaware of the Church’s teaching on contraception, many are in invalid marriages. Many have multiple children by multiple partners. Honestly the biggest thing they need is just the basics.

My husband feels like many congregations lack interest in even discussing it. We feel like our views are pretty different from most in the churches we’ve been a part of. Not using birth control isn’t very common in our circles.

Not a pastor, but I think it generally just needs more discussion. Your articles on these subjects are quite literally the first times I’ve ever thought critically about these topics.

My husband is a pastor although I am not — he has not thought much about this but has been listening for the last few years to my increasing concerns.

Not a pastor - Been on the receiving end though, doing it gently and with substantive enough knowledge to begin with!

previously

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Mere Orthodoxy | On Substack

Why It Is Difficult to Talk About Ethics of the Body

“When I came in and sat down and looked around, I realized it was a Roman Church full of plaster statues and bad art, realistic art. I hated the statues; all the emphasis on the human body. I was trying to escape from the human body and all it needed... I saw the bodies standing around me on all the altars... and I remembered that they believed in the resurrection of the body, the body that I wanted destroyed forever…

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5 months ago · 74 likes · 19 comments · Mere Orthodoxy and Haley Baumeister

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Of course, this means its scope and usefulness is limited.

Nevertheless, I wanted some way to ask my burning questions of you all, and listen to the answers. Here I am simply sharing those responses (until I figure out what else to do with them.)

*I would construct such a survey differently next time, as many times respondents would naturally explain something about themselves (say, denomination or tradition) that might not be captured in later responses if looked at individually. So, apologies for any lacking context.

If you're a woman, did you learn how your full cycle (not just your period) all functioned together, as a girl? Did you feel equipped with sufficient knowledge of it going into adulthood?

No

No.

No and no.

While I grew up in a family and with parents who were very open to conversations about sex, menstruation, etc., I didn’t really learn about my full cycle, including phases, changes around those phases, cervical mucus, temperature, and the like until I was married and off birth control. I dove in deep and have determined to fully educate the daughters I may have early on, in large part so they can understand their fertility as a gift, which isn’t something I grew up understanding. As a young woman, I occasionally had rough periods, so I didn’t really see the process as anything besides a painful inconvenience, which extended into early marriage. I don’t lay this at my mom’s feet at all. I went into marriage with my eyes wide open about sex, and have never felt an ounce of shame or weirdness about conversations about sex, either with my family before I was married or after with my husband. My mom simply didn’t pass on a lot of knowledge about a full cycle, because she mainly tracked it during her childbearing years, and even then relying mostly on the calendar.

NO and, boy, do I wish I had. I spent 6 years with debilitating anxiety that strangely, mysteriously caused horrible episodes of panic in 1-2 week increments that would come on slowly then suddenly break, and I’d feel fine. Because I had irregular cycles and PCOS, these episodes weren’t regular, but in hindsight, they were obviously tied to my hormones. Not a single medical or psychological professional suggested this might be a factor! Only after years of becoming fertility awareness obsessed was I able to see that it’s probably something approaching PMDD. Also, never being taught about ovulation meant I had no sense of periods being *for* something, or my body’s natural fertility. This would have helped me be aware of my moods and emotions, and to be able to distinguish between unhealthy anxiety and the normal waking up of romantic desire (which can feel like anxiety - especially if the only thing you have learned about it is that you must be very careful to control it) as it ebbs and flows throughout the cycle.

Not as a girl, beyond the basics. I mean, we talked about cycles in more detail in high school biology, but kind of skipped over it quickly and didn’t really discuss it in a practical way from which girls could really learn. My mom knew how to track her cycle, but didn’t really pass that on. Maybe she thought I learned through school? I doubt she learned growing up - I think she was taught how to do it when struggling with fertility as a married woman. I educated myself before marriage as I intended to use a thermo-symptom method of natural family planning. I wish I’d understood my cycle better earlier because it helped me make so much more sense of my body and overall health. I found it empowering and I wish all women were better educated! I’m appalled at how little some of my friends — who have multiple children — understand how their own bodies work.

Definitely not! For example, I had no idea that my discharge would start before my period - I thought something was seriously wrong with me, and I didn’t feel like I could talk to my mom. It was through overhearing other girls in the sports changing room that I realized what was happening to me was normal, and that some girls were even excited about it! When my period actually came, my mom expected my older sister to coach me through it...but my older sister hadn’t even started *her* period! So I had no education on my cycle at all. It was at university and post university, again through pro-life information rather than Church-led information, that I learned detailed information about my cycle and began to see it as something that was a natural, normal, even fairly cool part of who I was as a person.

Not that I can remember. It may have been covered in biology class at school, maybe health class, but I don’t really remember. Pre marriage, I bought ‘taking charge of your fertility’ and read that (or at least a lot of it. It is a HUGE book). So I felt pretty equipped at that point. What’s interesting is that I stumbled into some wise choices given that I have a family history of breast cancer and ovarian cancer. Not being on hormonal birth control and spending a good chunk of time breastfeeding are protective factors against these cancers. I didn’t really know this until I went to get a referral for early mammogram screening. But it did make me think that I wish someone had been shouting this from the rooftops when I was in my early twenties.

Not really as a girl, only as I prepared for marriage and immediately after, when I really had to face the decision of what we were going to do regarding contraception. I don’t think my mom really felt comfortable with this topic, or really with a lot of the puberty/sex conversations and I felt very uncomfortable an awkward about it too, so none of that helps. I really had to consider it once I was engaged and had to decide what I was going to do since the pill was not an option in my mind either ethically or physically. I have only daughters myself, and am hoping and planning to teach them more about this already as girls, before marriage is on the horizon. Currently interested in the Body Talk Basics program, but haven’t gotten it yet.

In sixth grade my mom gave me the period talk and I do remember her explaining that it had something to do with not having conceived that month. I definitely understood that one did not have a cycle during pregnancy. I knew very little beyond this though. I had no idea what cervical mucus was, or how to detect ovulation. No idea my cycle had four phases. I came across an advocate of FAM on instagram when I was engaged and got completely sucked into a rabbit hole and never came out. Once I learned I felt very equipped. My mom definitely provided the basics and tried to demonstrate why these things were good and normal. Anything she omitted in terms of body literacy was because she had not been taught those things herself.

No. No one taught me about my cycles until my Pre Cana NFP class six months before I got married. I declined birth control as a teen (being Catholic and waiting until marriage and just being ornery and confident) until in college I was on Accutane for acne and had to be on birth control while taking it, and taking birth control was a terrible experience for me personally (as was the Accutane prescription process: if you chose “abstinence” as your first method of birth control in the phone menu, they wouldn’t dispense your medicine, “abstinence” could only be a secondary method, even though they listed it as an option in the primary list, which no one told me and caused much frustration and many tears).

I did not get formal education or really any conversations about my cycle growing up (homeschooled). It didn’t help that my cycles varied from 16-90 days after a very late menarche until my mid-20s, at which point I picked up enough along the way of reading to know roughly when ovulation occurred. I had no connection between cycle phase and mood symptoms until my husband and I were dating and he was curious about the menstrual cycle in general. Our first child was conceived because we didn’t know about the double LH surge, so after that we both deepened our knowledge and tracking pretty quickly!

No, I did not learn as a girl and did not feel equipped going into adulthood. Around age 27 when I wanted to try to have a baby, after a few months of trying and having issues coming off the pill, I bought and read Toni Weschler’s book Taking Charge of Your Fertility. I was amazed about what I learned about my body and all the signs it gave when you are ovulating! I started charting my cycles after that by taking my temperatures each morning and checking other signs and making note of them. I made a vow that my daughters would know what was happening to their bodies each month.

Not until receiving NFP (Creighton) training ahead of my wedding. I did understand the general timing (a longstanding premenstrual mood disorder forced me to have some grasp of this) but not in particular the short window of potential fertility. In my experience some environments deliberately seek to hold this knowledge back from teen girls out of fear that they’ll leverage it in ways that are not ultimately ordered to their own emotional and relational health, but I feel we are intelligent enough and the cultural hour late enough that this ought to be addressed head-on.

No, not until the last few years. (Thanks to you Haley!) I had a small conversation before my 10th birthday with a cousin who wanted to prepare me. The women in our family start our cycles between ages 9 and 11. She was 9 and had a very traumatic experience. She did her best to prepare me, but even once my period came a few months after I turned 10, not a single adult woman gave me any sort of knowledge, wisdom, or comfort. Birth control was pushed and highly encouraged from the age of 13. After that it was basically left up to me in how I would maintain my cycle.

Not at all. I do come from a family of lighter periods, so my hormonal cycle is not as extreme as many’s + no complicating medical issues. That said, I didn’t even understand that period blood was more than what would come out of a scratched arm until my first period. I did have a period tracking app (Flo) that indicated my likely ovulating window. Ignore that they’re now in a class action lawsuit for selling that data. I didn’t learn about the broader hormonal implications until years later, and I’m honestly not sure I understand them now.

Not as a girl - I learned that my period happened once a month, that it was part of “becoming a woman” and related to my ovaries, and that was it. (Homeschooled ;)) I had a very mild and consistent/regular cycle, and never honestly paid much attention to it aside from the inconvenience growing up. I also was never sexually curious and consequently didn’t learn about my body and cycle until well into my thirties, yikes!! So no, I did not feel knowledgable at all (naive, really) and have felt like I’ve been catching up, even as a mature adult.

I did not learn that information as a girl. Looking back, I was not equipped with sufficient knowledge, but I didn’t know I wasn’t equipped. I went on hormonal birth control briefly when I got married, because I didn’t think anything negative of it, and I thought that was what married couples did if they wanted to avoid immediate pregnancy. I didn’t stay on birth control for long, but it wasn’t until I faced (mild) infertility and endometriosis and started researching on my own that I learned more about how the cycle actually functions.

I only learned about my period, and it was a source of shame. I wasn’t allowed to talk about being on my period around my dad or brothers, and I was told to hide (wrapped and new) pads from sight of them. I was only told “birth control bad” and wasn’t told about the phases of my whole cycle. I ended up going on the very liberal site “scarleteen” for sex education when I graduated high school (homeschool), and at least I was able to get a fuller picture of how my body worked there, even if it wasn’t an ideal source.

No, didn’t learn much about the full cycle until right before marriage. When I initially learned about my period and sex, I thought that anytime you had sex you automatically got pregnant. (Funnily enough, I remember thinking... “so my parents only had sex four times?” as I am one of four kids). Of course I learned that this was not the case soon enough, but it took a while and it took the approach of marriage for me to hear and learn more about the four parts of a woman’s cycle.

I definitely learned the basics of how my cycle functioned. I remember learning about ovulation, and my uterus preparing for pregnancy, and my period being the shedding of that uterine lining when I wasn’t pregnant. Going into adulthood, I didn’t have a lot of practical knowledge about my cycle. It was when I started learning about NFP that I realized there were ways to predict the parts of the cycle and that there were greater effects than just having cramps at my period.

As a girl, no. I learned very generally that it would happen every 28 days and I did not know what caused it, but that the absence of it signified pregnancy. I struggled with anorexia as a teenager, so imagine my horror when my period was typically late or absent due to being underweight! I thankfully was able to rectify most of my knowledge gaps once I entered college, especially through the Newman center at my college and their helpful resources for Creighton method.

I taught myself about my cycle and felt I had to hide the knowledge from my parents. I only understood a little bit of what my fertility looked like and what that meant. School taught about periods, sex, pregnancy, stds, etc. but nothing specific enough about cycles to help me understand my hormones, feelings, health, or state of mind throughout the month. I did not feel well equipped going into adulthood. I feel like I was given the minimum information.

Not really. Unfortunately I got my period quite early (10 to) which I don’t think my mom was mentally prepared for. She bought me “the care and keeping of you” after that happened , but I don’t remember that book going into the whole cycle. When I was in AP biology class, we struggled to cover all of the material in time. I know we did go over the phases of the cycle but it probably got one half a day in class and I didn’t commit it to memory.

I did not learn this. I did not want to get pregnant right away when I got married so I used hormonal contraceptives. I only knew vaguely the full cycle. In my mid-20’s I began to question the evangelical obsession with being anti abortion and started to research abortion, when life begins, etc. This is when I learned in detail more about it all and the ethics of it. I got off hormonal birth control and was pregnant the next month.

I can’t remember when I first learned how my full cycle worked. I filled in bits and pieces from books and conversations as I grew older, and from making inferences based on other mammals (I grew up on a hobby/family farm, so tracking cows’ cycles and managing bovine fertility and lactation was a big deal). I felt/feel equipped with sufficient knowledge of it going into adulthood, but perhaps that’s my presumption talking!

Not really—I knew a bit but really learned much more about my fertility when I decided to start classes for the Creighton method while in graduate school (not linked to marriage prep, though I did meet my husband about a year later). I was aware for a long time that there was more to know about my cycle, but wasn’t much interested in it until then (I had regular enough cycles and no felt reason to be more informed)

Of course I learned about fertility in the biology textbook. I also vaguely remember discussing natural family planning with my mom, and therefore learning that as a woman, I was only fertile around ovulation. I took an NFP course during marriage prep with my husband, which filled in any gaps of my knowledge. But ultimately… I had to LIVE it for years to truly understand my fertility with my husband.

I only really got the period basics. High school health class did not stick out into my mind as going beyond egg, period, etc. Focus definitely was on very basic mechanics of how babies are made and avoiding that. It wasn’t until NFP classes that I got any sort of detailed information on hormones/hormone levels, how those affect my mood and well-being, and how the whole system works together.

No, Mom imparted a general attitude that I appreciate, but I do not remember ovulation being discussed. That is perhaps my own oversight, she might have mentioned it. But I did have a chance to be present at child births and help out with babies, so learning about ovulation and how that worked was kinda the final piece of the puzzle that I was missing.

My mother gave me the American Girl book “The Care and Keeping of You” when I was in 5th grade, which was a good primer but definitely did not explain the entire cycle. My health classes in middle and high school focused mainly on the period. It was quite a revelation to me when I learned about the cycle as a whole as an adult woman in marriage prep.

Sort of... I think I had a decent grasp of the biology (for a kid) but I also then studied molecular at university where I did a while module on the molecular biology of fertility, so I ended up with a pretty good idea of how everything worked by the time I was a young adult. And yet I still chose to go on the pill at the start of my marriage 🤦‍♀️

I did overall but I taught myself growing up with the Care and Keeping of You and google. I was a big researcher and didn’t necessarily feel comfortable asking my parents about it so I wanted to know without asking. So I think I ended up knowing a lot more than a lot of people in my situation (Christian homeschooler) but I wasn’t *taught* any of it

Hmmm, I remember learning about the entire cycle when I was girl but mostly an emphasis on my period and the ability to get pregnant. Though I remember learning about ovulation/the whole cycle, I know I did not really understand it to the extent I was able to when I was in high school/college biology classes or later learning NFP.

No, I got a very poor version of “the talk” and had very irregular cycles as a teen. When I read the book Taking Charge of Your Fertility as a young adult and began seeing a NaPro doctor prior to my marriage, everything started to make sense. I don’t even remember how I learned about those options! It’s all a blur at this point.

No. I got a brief textbook explanation about my period from my mother when I was 9 or 10. I learned a little bit more in health class in middle school. I did not really know anything about my cycle, ovulation, fertility, etc., until I was a young adult and learning on my own online. I did not feel equipped.

As a girl I knew the bare minimum. I was curious so I taught myself. But I didn’t feel super comfortable and I wouldn’t have been comfortable if I had gotten married and became sexually active on my timeline. Since that timeline is God’s not mine I have had the time to fully understand it now

I learned some basic facts from a male theology teacher in high school who was trying to explain the Pill. The whole picture not until I was engaged and learning Creighton at 20. Definitely didn’t feel unequipped or ignorant at the time; I felt more informed if anything. Others knew even less.

I learned this when I was preparing for marriage. Thankfully, I was 19 years old at the time, so it was relatively early. I was less aware of the potential for mood changes, and had to delve into that more deeply as a mother when I became aware of what I’d eventually identify as PMDD.

I had zero idea of how my body worked. I learned it all by myself, through Google after I got pregnant the first time I ever had sex at 17 years old. So I only felt “equipped” because I had no choice but to figure it out going into adulthood as a teenage mother to a little girl.

I did learn about it before getting my period, but did not remember all of the information when I became older. When I was engaged my husband and I took a Marquette NFP course together and I also read through sections of “Taking Charge of your Fertility” which was very helpful.

I did not really. Or maybe PE class the full thing was discussed. My mom handed me a little booklet to read. My period arrived at summer camp and I was completely unprepared, terrified, and told NO ONE for six months….hiding bloody evidence all six months of that time. :(

I had a general sense of this from middle school health classes through college biology courses. I didn’t come to more fully understand the nuances of the ovulatory cycle until college and especially as I prepared for marriage and sought to learn how to practice NFP

nope! and nope! I don’t know if I really felt unequipped either, I just thought I knew all there was to know, and should never ever have sex until I was married because babies happen at any time. I have since gained a good understanding, thanks to the internet.

Not at all. I don’t think my mum was really knowledgeable either… she grew up in a poor family in another country. I don’t think she was given any sort of education either. I was extremely self conscious and suffered in silence for years about painful periods.

I did not. Even after going through nursing school I still knew very little. It wasn’t until I knew engagement/marriage were on the near horizon that I started researching and ended up reading Taking Charge of Your Fertility, which was quite eye opening

Nope! I think at the highest level I understood the notion of the uterine lining building up and then being shed during a period bleed but I really understood nothing else. It’s been all self-education, particularly over the last 10ish years (I’m 37).

I learned how it functioned fully when I was a teen. I still suffered from common misunderstandings about what’s “normal,” so my endometriosis went undiagnosed for ten years despite significant pain, until a Catholic NaPro doctor helped me out.

I did not learn about these things until my sister converted to Catholicism when I was in my early 20s. At that point she began to be interested in natural family planning and I learned a great deal from following her on that journey.

Not really – I knew what periods were for but not much attention was given to the rest of the cycle until I was a young adult and learning about how to manage period pain and PMS. Then learned more after getting married at 27.

My mom did a decent job with providing books and resources to explain this despite the church’s full on lack of resources. I definitely didn’t know anything about fertility until I was much older and trying to conceive myself.

Only learned about my period as a girl. Was honestly like “what the hell is THAT” every time I saw cervical mucus for many years lol. Did not feel equipped until I wanted to get pregnant and started learning more on my own.

A little in high school sex education classes, and I only found out more as a biology major. I did not feel equipped! Aside from those facts I memorized for courses, I didn’t know how I could understand my own cycle.

I learned about my complete cycle from my mom, via conversation and books she gave me. I learned more details when I was in college and sought them, when I learned how to track my cycle with the assistance of an app.

I did learn about female anatomy and how to count days of a cycle as a young teen. Nevertheless, I didn’t learn about how fertility truly worked. I had the understanding that you “might get pregnant anytime.”

I learned about my period at the highest level and not much more. I think that there was a mindset that education would lead to sin/promiscuity. I don’t believe the intention was ill, but it was misinformed.

Nope! I had no idea about a lot of it until I was engaged and thinking about the fertility aspect of sex. Somehow my husband knew more about this than me--he knew what a luteal phase was, but I had no clue.

I learned very little in depth until I was in a marriage prep NFP class. Understanding the complexity of hormones better would have really helped and is something I’m still trying to learn now in my 30s.

I learned more about how my full cycle functions later as an adult in my medical profession and personal searching. I did not feel completely equipped going into adulthood and wish I had know more.

Not as a young woman, I only learned about my period and it was only when we started “trying” to become pregnant that I learned the ins and outs of ovulation and the timing of things in my cycle.

Never learned it as a girl. Learned it all myself when I developed hypothalamic ammenorrhoea and did not have a period for nearly 4 years. I feel very confident in understanding my cycles now.

When I turned 19, I became full on crunchy and found the book taking charge of your fertility, which I read and implemented when I got engaged at 20, fully implemented when married at 21.

None whatsoever. I remember thinking that something was wrong with me when I experienced cervical mucous for the first time. I had to ask my mom and she informed it was normal. Phew!!

I did not! I just knew about my period going into puberty but then went to nursing school and learned about the full cycle in my anatomy & physiology class and women’s health class!

I was given a very light education about my full cycle. No, I did not feel equipped. I have done some research as an adult, but truthfully, feel pretty disconnected from my cycle.

Not as a girl, as a young, married, 22 year old who felt duped in to birth control and hated the side effects. I began reading Taking Charge of Your Fertility and bought a Daysy.

I learned it as part of my high school anatomy class, but didn’t personalize it until I was preparing for marriage and getting ready to track my cycle to prevent pregnancy.

Not at all. I read “Taking Charge of Your Fertility” in college, basically as a means to start tracking well (I had loosely tracked for a while) before getting married.

Not much outside of biology class. I don’t feel like I had a good baseline knowledge of it outside going into adulthood. Learned most of it through my medical training.

No. In my public school in the 90s, there was some basic education on hygiene, anatomy, abstinence, but certainly no discussion on things like fertile windows.

I didn’t learn how my full cycle actually worked until well into my 30s- after I had birthed six kids! Needless to say, really changing that with my girls.

Basic knowledge imparted by my mom but after that, into my childbearing years, I did my own research on an as-needed basis. ( And this was pre-internet. )

Not as a girl, however I learned about it quickly as a young woman. The knowledge came to me before anyone thrust the pill into my hand, thanks be to God.

Not really, but I was familiar with NFP. I only have sons, but I’m glad there are better resources these days for helping girls learn about their cycle.

I did not really know how it worked - just that there were fertile and infertile periods. I learned more about how it specifically worked as an adult.

Yes and no. My mom did a great job laying the foundation of teaching us our full cycle, but I definitely independently studied and learned much more!

Yes, my Mum was pretty good at ensuring I understood how my body worked. At around 20 I read Taking Charge of Your Fertility which helped a lot too.

Did not even learn about my period. Had no idea about the full process til I bought a book in my 30’s after I was married and already had one child.

No, I didn’t. I feel like I had “sufficient” knowledge, but it would’ve been wonderful to have a fuller knowledge! I want my children to know more!

Absolutely not. I converted to Catholicism. It was when I learned NFP upon entering the Church that I began learning how my body worked together.

No, I didn’t learn any of that until after I was married and my husband bought me Taking Charge of Your Fertility. That was a game changer for me.

No. But as for the second question, I didn’t know what I didn’t know either. I didn’t even know to wonder about what more there might be to it.

Not as a girl. I learned about the full cycle at the end of high school and even more in college. So I feel equipped now, but only recently.

Nope. I wasn’t told a lot and have, over the years, found out a lot myself. Am definitely going to do it differently with my two daughters!

Not as a girl. Probably became aware of it when I started trying to have a child in 2015. (Taking Charge of Your Fertility book.)

NO. LOL. I didn’t even know what “ovulation” was until my college roommate told me about it when I was TWENTY YEARS OLD.

NO! I didn’t figure it out until a friend (bless her) pointed me to Taking Charge of Your Fertility a year into marriage

Absolutely not. I hardly knew about my cycle until reading a book on fertility/family planning prior to getting married.

I did not. I did not feel like I had that information until I started researching while struggling with infertility.

Not as a child, no. Not until my own fertility struggles and loss, when I chose to find out all I could on my own.

I went to a mother daughter retreat I went to specifically for this purpose that was run by the diocese NFP lady.

A tiny bit from a book my mom gave me, and in biology/health class in middle and high school. But not really.

No, I learned in undergrad and grad school while studying public health. Even then, I learned more on my own.

Yes - my parents were the heads of Natural Family Planning Australia and Billings/Sympto-Thermal Instructors.

No, I did not learn this completely, but I think my mom did better than most communicating what she knew.

I actually did because my parents taught NFP and my mom was a big advocate for it in our diocese.

No. I have taught myself these things over the past two years to begin natural family planning.

Nope! I think I had it mostly pieced together by the time I was an adult though. (But not 100%)

No. I didn’t see it as that important beyond knowing when to expect cramps and bleeding.

No. I learned it myself as an adult and now teach others (I’m a FAM/NFP educator)

Mostly yes- learned basic charting after uni but had a sense of it before that.

Definitely not. Focus was always on avoiding the horrors of teenage pregnancy.

No, not until I started trying to have children and then I learned on my own.

Nope, I learned as an adult after I had a horrible reaction to birth control.

No, and no. I taught myself after googling a lot of questions in college.

No. I figured it out as I had kids and learned how my body was working.

I learned about it as a teenager and fully understood it by adulthood.

LMAO NO. Everything I know I learned from the Internet in my twenties.

I feel like I’m just learning about it now at 38, post 3 kids (!)

No- just periods, with a short note about the fact of ovulation.

Absolutely not. Had to learn it all on my own as I went along.

Not at all. I knew I’d get a period once a month. That’s it.

My mom taught me the basics and prepared me well, I think.

Didn’t really learn it until just prior to marriage.

no, not till learning NFP as an adult while engaged.

I didn’t learn about this until last year… I’m 42

Yes, but not as soon as I should have learned.

Yes I did, but that was due to self education.

Nope. I learnt this well into my mid twenties.

No, not until I was engaged and learning NFP.

Yes, my mother taught me the whole picture.

Yes, I believe I had sufficient knowledge.

No. Learned more on my own as an adult.

Not full cycle until after marriage

Nothing was said until it happened.

I did learn it in Catholic schools.

Nope, I had to learn on my own.

Moderate level education.

No, I’m still learning.

No “sex ed” was a joke.

Never, no not at all.

nope, not at all!!!

No, definitely not.

No absolutely not.

Not at all. No.

I knew nothing.

No, I did not.

No Not at all.

Yes and yes.

Not really.

No and no!!

No, and no

Nope! Haha

No and no!

Not at all

No and no

yes yes

Nope.

Nope

yes

Yes

If you’re a man, were you taught how a woman’s full reproductive cycle worked (If married, did this happen prior to marriage)?

In secondary school I was taught biology and had a basic understanding of woman’s reproductive cycle. Post-university, being “very online, and having taken a keen interest in United States politics, the “Cultural Wars” (because being very online; because I strongly identify with the United States constitution; because US culture is de-facto the imperial culture of the Anglophone world/internet world; because not a few prominent Evangelicals were cultural warriors) I learned a lot about the this topic. This all happened before I married (at 35; The average (median) age of first marriage in Hong Kong is approximately 31.0 for females and 32.6 for males in 2024).

Thankfully, this was a strength of the British school system when I was younger, and so I learned about this in detail. My wife and I have open conversations about her needs in this regard, especially as they change over time. We read Rachel Jones’ book ‘A Brief Theology of Periods’ together a few years ago, which helped to deepen those conversations. I’m also an expectant father… so I anticipate being involved in supporting her through her journey with her own reproductive cycle.

I was never taught this. I first learned about this in a pre-birth class we took prior to our first child, but that was kinda on the other extreme of being too focused on subjective experience (the facility had a tarot card reader on staff). This happened after marriage. I ended up reading a few books on the reproductive cycle, pregnancy, and childbirth, including a pretty good one put out by Mayo Clinic.

Ok it’s not a question for me to answer BUT my husband studied medicine and so learned this. He also, at university, attended NaPro talks (where he was often the only man) as a means to further educate himself. Hilariously, he often got flack for this, where some women participants said him being there learning about Napro technology etc was inappropriate and could make other women feel uncomfortable.

I suppose the basics were covered in biology classes. I teach human anatomy so I’ve familiarized myself with it more recently. My unrepresentative, unscientific vibe is that most kids (male or female) don’t have a very good grasp of that stuff going into college. I’m not married, so on a personal level the practical aspects haven’t been relevant for myself in a marital context.

My husband knew a LOT about the female body, which I’ve appreciated. I guess there was a little blue book called The Woman’s Body Book that he found in his mom’s nightstand and read cover to cover, and he was intrigued by the female body, never grossed out or offended by it. I’m pretty sure he’s the one who told me about ovulation.

I was not really taught about how a woman’s reproductive cycle work except the traditional health class in public school. Marriage prep through the Catholic Church did include an NFP course, but I learned the most going through a subsequent NFP course and through experiencing infertility early in our marriage (we have 5 kids now).

Happened prior to marriage, as my first serious girlfriend explained loosely. I think I learned a lot more about how it worked (other than just you bleed for one week out of the month) once my wife (girlfriend at the time) began to take birth control and would tell me about what it changed about her natural cycle.

As a nurse I learned the stages of the cycle but generally there wasn’t a lot of context so there wasn’t anything to do with the information. I didn’t learn anything fertility related until getting married and 100% of it has been from asking questions of my wife

Around puberty I was given dobson preparing for adolescence and then around the time we got married I think Lahaye and ed wheat, the usual. Some awareness but not a lot, and learned about many things pretty late in the game.

Yes, I was taught at my public school. I didn’t grow up with sisters though, so I learned a lot more about it in practicality after getting married.

Yes, I knew before I took the pastoral care of marriage class in seminary, but it was in that class that I got certified as an NFP instructor.

I had only brothers. In 5th/6th grade, I asked a friend of mine what were the woman diapers on the baby diaper isle and he explained.

n/a (tho I believe NFP training, required for both spouses in our denomination, also contained some surprises for the husband to be.)

My husband barely knew anything except about mood/emotional swings and the period length prior to marriage.

My husband was not taught about the full cycle and we were not prepped on this prior to marriage as Protestants.

I was not taught by anyone. My wife and I kinda figured it out together; she knew more than I did, obviously.

I guess through ms/hs. I have 5 sisters, so I got a more in depth education than most men, I’m sure.

not a man sorry... but my three brothers got THE FULL TALK from my mother, with hand drawn diagrams!

Yes. Very early on. I have a sister and I attended public schools with detailed sex-ed classes.

Yes, my girlfriend (now wife) taught me about this from her own experience and learning.

Not a man but I have had to teach things to guy friends even if they have sisters.

Absolutely not. Sheila Gregoire and some Catholics helped me on this one.

Speaking for my husband, no he didn’t learn this.

I was taught in UK state school the basics of this.

Not a man but my husband did not have a clue.

I will answer for my husband… No.

Yes, NFP training before marriage.

Yes, in high school health class.

My husband says absolutely not.

My husband certainly wasn’t.

Bare basics in grade school.

Yes. Homeschooling ftw.

Never taught.

Not really.

Not at all.

No.

If married in a Christian church, how did premarital counseling discuss contraception or managing fertility together?

Was fertility awareness (whether abstinence-only NFP or not) ever brought up, suggested, or taught?

How were/are medicalized approaches talked about (in premarital or with others at your church)?

I am not married yet and haven’t done premarital counseling yet, but will shortly and will report back. Based on the fact that Calvinism permeates our worldview and since pronatalism also runs pretty deep here, I’m pretty sure birth control is out. My boyfriend and I do not plan to use birth control of any kind, but I will probably consider fertility awareness + abstinence NFP to space out pregnancies if I encounter any medical issues. We both want to have as many as the Lord gives us and we are prepared to both make financial sacrifices, and I’m not particularly concerned with how my pregnancies are spaced, even though it’s the hot topic right now, because I’m pretty confident that God decides when I will conceive and when I won’t. If it comes up in premarital counseling, and I suspect it will based on my experiences in this church, I will discuss all that with my pastor as I have with my boyfriend. However, our church has a member family who adopted embryos from the NEDC (National Embryo Donation Center) and our pastor has openly encouraged anyone struggling with fertility to seek this as an option, ironically not because we really support the practice of IVF but because we mostly don’t—I’m not sure if that’s an official stance, but it’s possibly the majority position. I think our denomination believes it is wrong to freeze embryos that you may or may not be able to give birth to, because a fertilized egg is a human and that’s not how we should treat human beings. It’s on par with abortion. But since there ARE centers where people have donated embryos that they’re not able to use, someone must give birth to them—we can’t just discard them because that would be murder. So, our church encourages people who are experiencing infertility and looking to adopt to go to the NEDC and consider adopting an embryo. I’m not sure of our official stance as a church, but according to some members, the end goal is to adopt the last embryo and close NEDC’s doors for good because the idea is that IVF should not continue (aka should be made illegal) so eventually there’d be no more embryos getting donated. If I end up having fertility issues, I would consider going to NEDC.

All couples in our Diocese are required to attend an NFP class together prior to marriage. I tracked my cycle for two months prior to the class (which was ~3 meetings, 2 with a group, and 1 with an instructor to go over the chart). We were taught that NFP is meant to be used for grave reason, but that it is beneficial for all married couples to know how the female body works and to have a respect for it. The class was very scientific, the methods were very well backed, and more help and information was easily available for irregular cycles. We had one pre-marriage class on avoiding contraception, and taught that it subverts the goods of the marital act, which are 1) procreation and education of children and 2) spousal unity. With contraception, obviously procreation is intentionally avoided in an unnatural way, and it is disruptive to spousal unity as well, because it prevents the full gift of self within the marital act. I think this framing is helpful for showing that the Church has considered contraception in detail. How is NFP different for avoiding procreation? Well, again, it should only be used in times of grave necessity. But also, NFP is fallible, and is used with the understanding that pregnancy is unlikely but possible. Also, I think being generally aware of a cycle and choosing as a couple to abstain is different than intentionally depriving a spouse for a non-serious reason. There is on-going debate within the Church about what is licit when using NFP.

Abstinence-only NFP was recommended during marriage prep, but most people had to take the initiative to find a practitioner themselves. Not everyone in our marriage prep group was living in accord with Catholic teaching (for example, many people were already living together), so I think it was difficult for marriage prep to bring this up to be able to reach the whole spectrum of couples. I am surrounded by devout Catholics and listened to manyyy fertility podcasts, so it was relatively easy for me to figure it out, but that was also because I have so much interest in the topic as a baseline as well. It would have been awesome for married couples who shared to talk about what navigating NFP and managing fertility together looks like. Even for myself, I am realizing discerning baby #1 together was way easier than it seems to be to discern the next pregnancy together. That is not something I ever would have thought about. I don’t really know what the balance is between prudence/imprudence for couples disclosing particularly “private” struggles in the hope to help prepare engaged couples - for example: a couple struggling with the wife achieving orgasm; a couple struggling with the desire to use contraception; a couple with a spouse actively struggling through pornography addiction recovery; the shame associated with any/all of these things

As part of my marriage prep we were recommended to go to some NFP classes. The one available was a Creighton model, and the practitioner was very keen to tell us all about how to avoid pregnancy, how effective it was etc etc, and we came away feeling like something wasn’t quite right about the presentation of the information, as we were a young healthy couple with no reason to delay having children. We ended up learning the Marquette Method after our second child was born, while resenting that it cost so much. The people who provided our marriage preparation gave us some great resources to read about the Catholic Church’s stance on marriage and family and family planning - in particular the fact that children are viewed as a gift in the Church, and also that family planning tends to be more about spacing children, rather than avoiding them completely or using NFP to only have a preordained ideal number of children. Thankfully, contraception was explained as wrong in our marriage prep, but I do know people who have attended supposedly Catholic marriage prep courses where the facilitators of the course straight up asked couples to consider what contraception they will use in marriage!

Nope. Not at all. Never brought up. I’ve only ever talked about these things with my best friend, who ended up having a terrible time with hormonal birth control, and is currently weighing up with her husband whether he should have a vasectomy. This stands in contrast to the decisions I’ve made with my husband. He would never have an optional operation. Admittedly, this is more to do with his aversion to being poked and prodded (he doesn’t even like taking pain killers) than with a moral stance, but it is clear cut. And I was always decidedly against birth control - after my mother telling me that it had a horrible effect on her and she quit taking it early on. I didn’t want to be a constant grouch as a newly wed. I’d also read that it can take a while for your system to regulate after going off BC, and we wanted kids relatively soon and it didn’t seem worth it. So FAM (not abstinence only, though) really is it for us. We discussed it before marriage and even now, though we are probably done trying to have more children, we both see that having another baby is hardly the worst thing in the world and we’re comfortable with the possibility.

Nothing discussed in premarital counseling with our Presbyterian pastor other than an affirmation of the goodness of children and marriage as the formation of a new family. I do not personally know any other Protestants who practice nfp or fertility awareness (maybe because we don’t talk about it!) My current evangelical, sorta Anglican pastor has cautioned against the pill for abortifacient reasons, in favor of barrier methods (and explicitly advising people to wait a few years after getting married for kids). I recently went to the wedding of a childhood friend who is a serious Texas evangelical dedicated to mission work. The whole weekend was extremely spiritually focused. When she casually mentioned she’d just started on the pill before the wedding, I did a double take. I spend so much time thinking about these things (online!) that it was strange to me to hear someone just assume the pill was totally normal and no big deal among devout Christians. While that is probably an accurate statement of how many people think, it felt so strange to me!

An nfp course (in person or zoom, a bunch of sessions) was required by the Catholic Diocese in which I was living, but the Diocese in which I got married (we were long distance dating while I was at college), where I did my required one day retreat with my husband... We were clearly the only couple at the retreat not living together before marriage, some of the other couples (maybe 6 total couples, maybe more?) had children. (And good on them for getting married in the Church and regularizing their union, I didn’t know their situations, but still, the teaching of the faith shouldn’t change based on perceived discomfort of presenters or attendees.) The presenters had brochures on nfp by the bagels, but clearly and noticably skipped over talking about avoiding contraception and not living together before marriage. My fiance (now husband of many years) and I discussed this at the time, that Catholics seem to have the truth and avoid teaching it when it might make someone uncomfortable, even if it could save their soul. Very discouraging.

ertility awareness was brought up (by me lol) in premarital counseling and the emphasis was really on how NOT to have a baby and enjoying sex separately from fertility. Fertility awareness was perceived by one party in our counseling as the “calendar method” and therefore bad. The other party knew of people who FAM had worked for and it seemed to be perceived as a better option than hormonal birth control. There was lots of postivity toward children and having children just not much advice on how this practically should or should not play out. Other medicalized approaches are not widely talked about. Our pastor is against IVF on the basis that it not only is harmful to embryos but a break in the marital union. Members are a mixed bag on vasectomies. Some think its sinful. Others are offended by this. Some people are “two and through.” But we have several families with 5, 6, 8, and 10 kids. Most seem to be against the pill.

Contraception was not discussed at all nor any form of family planning. During pre-marital we did a SYMBIS assessment with our pastor and his wife (who is also considered a pastor in our church) and that assessment asked each of us separately a question about being on the same page about having children, but even when we reviewed the assessment that particular topic/question wasn’t discussed. Sex was discussed in a way that I appreciated and found encouraging- but not fertility. (Of note, our pastors have 6 kids!) I have never heard birth control talked about in a church setting. I have had plenty of conversations on forms of birth control with Christian girlfriends (only 1 I’m aware of using NFP besides myself), but the whole notion of medicalized birth control has never been questioned. This has been a new area of thought for me personally within the last year. (You’re doing the Lord’s work, Haley! ;)

Our premarital counseling (with the above-mentioned theology prof) included the topic and they just wanted us to be open to having children eventually. When I said our plan to avoid pregnancy until I graduated was NFP+condoms, he laughed and said “You know what they call people who use NFP? Pregnant.” At that church, adoption was also highly esteemed. It seemed an overemphasis on the spiritual nature of it -- a picture of salvation -- and I know of a few couples who were actively preventing biological children in order to pursue adoption. I can’t remember any discussion of medicalized approaches, and this might have to do with the fact that I always thought “doesn’t apply to me.” I just wanted nothing to do with it, it seemed an injury to my body. I’m pretty sure I would have remembered fertility awareness being discussed. It wasn’t.

Yes! Married in the Catholic Church. Our marriage prep discussed this extensively. We took an hour-long course on NFP and I stayed for the extra hour of cycle-tracking training. One of the couples leading our NFP course spoke about cycle tracking and bringing that data to a doctor when they were having trouble conceiving, but it was made clear that medical interventions like IVF are not allowed. My mother took an oral contraceptive for most of her adult life, but for non-contraceptive reasons-- this sort of medical intervention is seen by a lot of people in the pews as a grayish but acceptable area. At the Latin Mass parish, compared to Novus Ordo parishes, the laity tend to be much stricter in their definitions of medical intervention and entirely avoid anything like that.

You could choose a class over any NFP method to fulfill the marriage prep requirement. We had three or four classes over the sympto-thermal method. I don’t remember much being discussed by way of IVF or other bioethical issues. If I recall, it was assumed that we knew contraception, IVF, etc. was off the table. There wasn’t a philosophical discussion about it. It really was just method instructions. I do think there was a mention that NFP can help a couple achieve pregnancy if they are struggling with infertility. Since I’ve gotten married, though, programs such as the John Paul II Foundation’s Together in Holiness conference have started which are meant to help married couples in this area among others.

FAM/NFP was never brought up, suggested or taught. In informal discussions with others, they stated it would be too much effort to practice FAM/NFP and they discussed other methods of birth control they loved or hated, not mentioning anything about ethical considerations. The consensus was very much that as long as you were married, you could do whatever to prevent or achieve pregnancy. We did the Alpha Premarriage course before getting engaged and our mentors didn’t want to discuss the sex chapter with us as they found this not appropriate for where we were at. The Alpha course content mentions needing to discuss ‘family planning’ and recommends some christian books about marriage/sex. No details.

No. So sad about this. The pastor said his wife was on the pill and so after talking to some doctors he felt like it wasn’t an abortifacient. We read one John Piper article about birth control and away we went... literally everyone I talked to was on the pill or thought that was the only way. I didn’t start learning about other options until I did my own research as an adult. Then it came more from the crunchy secular world instead of the church. (aka why hormonal birth control is bad for your body, nothing about morality.) Even then my mom said “wait you can’t do the calendar method! That doesn’t work!” Pretty sure she went to menopause still not understanding how her cycle works.

The session on sex and fertility was the very briefest of our premarital counseling conversations, which happened with various pastors. It was my fiance and I and a male pastor and truly lasted probably 12 minutes. I distinctly remember that he basically mentioned a few of the methods Christian couples use and presented them all as options to talk about and work out between ourselves. There was little guidance given or encouragement toward one or the other. I believe NFP was mentioned (or something like it), but probably in the same breath as conventional birth control methods. The conversation was so presentational and impersonal that it didn’t impact our decision at all.

At this point, my now-husband and I had discussed NFP as a way to keep the fertility purpose of sex front of mind, even if we used contraception for additional peace of mind during the rest of the month. It was critical to my husband that sex not be exclusively for pleasure, and that we focused on loving the other person first and always remembered our co-creative responsibility. Unhelpfully, I don’t actually remember what of this we discussed with our counselors. For this week, we met 1:1 with the same-gender counselor and discussed logistics / fears / wisdom BUT I don’t remember much about fertility past “we’re not ready yet” and “okay.”

My husband is a pastor, and a wonderful one, and we have done several premaritals. However, we don’t cover the topic in depth. We always encourage them to view children as a blessing, not a burden, to serve one another in love in sex and childbearing, and to consider their motivations for abstaining from having children and to make sure they are on the same page as far as family planning. But it’s definitely handled as a gray area, and unless I hadn’t stumbled upon your blog I wouldn’t have thought more about it! But the more I learn the more I’m intrigued and eager to ponder the implications of glorifying God with our body.

Official Catholic pre-Cana marriage counseling mentioned not using birth control. I remember a couple who taught “NFP“ emailed me to set up training but I couldn’t afford to pay for the training so I emailed them I couldn’t and they warned me that the training was very important. At the time I also attended an Episcopal church, and the priest there warned me that the body was made to have babies and having unprotected sex would definitely most likely do babies. I approached our evangelical college mentors and they said “everyone has different convictions in this area.”

We had exactly ONE premarital counseling session before our pastor forgot about us. My pastor’s wife did tell me in the hallway one Sunday early on that my job was to never say no, which was what led to her conceiving her first child in the first months of her marriage (despite her telling her husband “it wasn’t a good time”) Fertility awareness was a nonissue because a good Christian wife was fully surrendered to her husband and God’s purposes for her womb. I was on birth control at the time for medical reasons and knew that this would be frowned upon.

We took a class on the Sympto-Thermal method that our parish offered, but I had to research to find the Marquette method. We were married 12 years ago so I hope Marquette is better known and couples realize they have options when it comes to NFP. With NFP, I struggled understanding the theology behind why the unitive and procreative ends couldn’t be separated. I accepted the Church’s teaching, but I found it challenging. It wasn’t until I heard Elizabeth Kirk talk on Humane Vitae and infertility that I saw the beauty of the Church’s teaching.

Contraception was not discussed during pre-marital counseling at all, and “Family planning” using contraception is assumed to be the case in all marriages. Socio-economic factors ensures that Hong Kong has one of the world’s lowest fertility rates in the world (average TFR), since Hong Kong has some of the most expensive real-estate in the world. The churches here are greatly shaped by this. Since the pastors at my church believe that life begins at conception, assisted-reproductive technologies is approached very cautiously.

There wasn’t discussion, from our counselors. I’d talked about it with Mom a lot, and with my prospective husband. Mom had explained how the pill worked, she and Dad felt that it was a gray area which they preferred to avoid, but Mom was also troubled by her peers who were expected to never avoid pregnancy, and how hard it could be on their bodies. Mostly Mom told stories of what attitudes she’d seen and encountered, the fruit it had borne, and her thoughts on it. I really appreciated the story-telling approach.

It was generally discussed during my Catholic marriage prep class. There was one day that a mom came in and explained how to chart your cycle to avoid/ achieve pregnancy. She used medical terms without going into a lot of depth. My husband was Catholic at the time, while I was Protestant. The priest explicitly told us, individually and in a group setting, that we were not supposed to use birth control, but NFP was an option. We were giving the contact info for a Creighton coach.

We did marriage prep at our previous church, and it was fantastic in this regard. We went through some biblical principals, talked openly about our feelings or thoughts towards certain practices or products, and the counsellors raised things we had not previously considered. This was less theological, and more care based, largely around making sure that we were on the same page, but biblical principles were nonetheless taught, although none of these were a surprise to us.

We were going thru premarital counseling (PCA) and wrestling thru questions of contraception, whether it was licit to use any form (we were always against BC, but weren’t sure about condoms), from what I remember our pastor basically said it was OK to use condoms and/or abstinence. My pastors wife encouraged me to track my cycle+temperature and was aware that infertility might be a possible trial. I think IVF was never really brought up as a solution for that though.

We had a half day marriage “retreat” that very briefly and basically touched on NFP as the morally correct and healthy way to steward our sexuality within marriage. Again though, I had to find out how to practice it entirely on my own. Even within Catholic circles, we have found our commitment to practicing NFP to be the exception rather than the rule, there can definitely be the attitude of that side of Catholic teaching is voluntary/not realistic.

Yes: the message that contraception cuts against the dignity and humanity of women was strongly communicated ; the benefits of NFP were emphasized, perhaps in some intro sessions at the expense of full clarity about the difficulties or potential pitfalls, but we later had the benefit of an individual teacher with a great deal of clinical experience who could prepare us perhaps better than the general run of introductions can do.

We had researched NFP on our own and attended a one-day class at a Catholic parish. During our Episcopal marriage-prep meeting, the priest asked if we’d discussed birth control. We said we’d be using NFP, to which the priest laughed and said something like “good luck”. Honestly this was part of what pushed us to eventually seriously consider Catholicism - the total lack of support or even understanding in our Protestant church.

I don’t think we discussed contraception in our pre-marital counselling (although to be fair this was very much disrupted by the start of the pandemic). I was influenced to go on the pill by all of my Christian peers (similar age and stage) because they all seemed to say that otherwise you’d most likely have an accidental pregnancy... Which was obviously embarrassing and to be avoided at all costs (I hope you can read sarcasm).

Premarital counseling was very brief (our Anglican priest was a good friend and felt he didn’t need to do anything extensive with us). Nothing fertility-related was discussed, other than checking to see if we were okay with including the part of the traditional marriage service that mentions the bearing of children. No one in the churches I’ve attended is brave enough to broach the topic of birth control in any form!

Other than our priest asking, “Have you discussed family planning?” during pre-marital counseling, this was not talked about at all in our church. After we got married I made it a point to talk to other young women who were getting married and make sure they knew that they had a reasonable option for delaying pregnancy other than contraception or the pill, which many of my Protestant peers felt was their only option.

Absolutely not talked about. We only had one premarital counseling session (because our pastor forgot about it) and it was very general. When we first got married my wife happened to be on birth control for an off-label use (part of a ridiculous scheme doctors use to treat menstrual depression), but we were always uncomfortable with it and and used a barrier method in addition when we were not TTC.

My premarital counselling did not discuss contraception at all. People talk about contraception as a personal decision made between the couple. It is only condemned in more extreme circumstances. For example, if a young couple opted for surgical sterilization before ever having kids. That would not be approved of, as our church believes a Christian marriage ought to be open to conceiving children.

So, our premarital was very odd. Because we were actively in the process of converting to Catholicism. We did meet monthly during our engagement with an older couple who had been sympto-thermal instructors (Couple to Couple League) at one point, so they gave us their spiel. But I did a mostly DIY monitoring situation as far as fertility went during that first month…

Yes, premarital counseling did discuss these only superficially and I was really young (18) so the seriousness on my part was not there. Yes, NFP was brought up, but no where to go for more information. It was by chance that at college a young woman getting married told me about it and about a class that was offered at a hospital on the Billings Method. Nothing at all is mentioned at my church.

In premarital counseling, which otherwise was thorough and excellent, the pastor talked about abstaining during (my) the wife’s fertile period if both of us prayerfully agreed. I’m sure he said more than that, but that’s the only thing I remember. Nothing pro or con contraceptives, or theology of the body. I/we didn’t learn about NFP until years later. No discussion of medicalized approaches.

Premarital counseling lightly touched on sex, and not fertility awareness at all. My formerly Catholic friend is the only one I know of at my church who knows the Creighton model I am using to chart my cycle. IVF is from all appearances the standard route for infertility in the churches I’ve been in, but all in all, infertility isn’t often spoken of, nor is miscarriage or infant loss.

It was not addressed that I can remember, but to be fair my gynecologist at the time didn’t know about it either even though I specifically asked if there were options outside of the pill. This was early 2000s, no one knew anything. :) My gynecologist and doctors today totally know all about it. My husband who is a Baptist pastor does bring it up in premarital counseling.

When we were getting married, our pre marital counseling couple was very against the pill, but never talked to us about it or their opinions. They asked what we were doing, we said the pill, and that was that. Really wish they would’ve spoken up. Now lots of friends openly speak of their husbands vasectomies and how they don’t like contraceptives so they’re doing that.

We took a Christian sexuality class, which was required by the Catholic diocese. NFP classes were encouraged during this class. We had already planned to take a specific NFP method class before marriage, which we completed. As an adult convert, I was well informed and “on board” with the Church’s teaching on medicalized approaches to fertility and birth control.

Yes, our premarital counseling included questions about intended family size and family planning practices, more to ensure alignment than to present a preferred method. We were already confidently planning to practice NFP and hoping to welcome children in our marriage, so I’m not sure how that conversation would have progressed if we had responded differently.

It wasn’t discussed beyond asking if we’d talked about it together. Definitely no mention of NFP, though our counseling was with a former pastor I didn’t particularly get along with. I have talked a bit with my current pastor about IVF, theology of the body, etc. though I don’t think there has been much or any public teaching or discussion on those topics.

It wasn’t discussed. In discussions with my OBGYN before marriage (my husband and I waited until marriage for sex), birth control was pushed more than anything else. NFP was mentioned as an option, but an off-handed, “Oh, yeah, this is an option, too.” When I expressed intentions to choose that method she did provide me with more information on it.

I don’t remember it ever being talked about by leaders. In my young married church circles I heard friends talk about learning to chart their fertility, others were using birth control. Eventually many of the men got vasectomies.

Not at all in premarital counseling. With others at church, birth control was discussed, once that I remember, in a small group or youth group type setting, when I asked about it (basically, “is it good or bad?”). The response went about how you might predict - here’s why some think it’s bad, here’s why some think it’s good, decide for yourself.

No premarital counseling. My dad was a pastor and the only counsel I received from my parents regarding sex (other than that it is a gift not a drudgery) was that it would be to delay children to enjoy newlywed season. My mom (super devout pastor’s wife) took me to a clinic (not PP) to get on the pill three months before I got married.

I don’t remember it being mentioned at all, but then our “counseling” was just a few meetings with my Presbyterian pastor. FAM was never mentioned at church. The only conversation I ever had related to sexual health was with a friend who gave me some advice about contraception options and said she used an IUD. It was very utilitarian.

Our Christian counseling did not discuss family planning together, outside of our specific counselors conviction that married couples were to not hinder reproduction and should have many kids (they have six). Beyond this we talked about expectations and sex but medical approaches were understood by them to be unbiblical.

Not at all. It’s something I recommend to people getting married or soon to be engaged now, even though I’ve been married less than a year. It’s worth talking about! And frustrating to me that we couldn’t even discuss the pros and cons or different ways that people have approached contraception and fertility in the past.

We were required to take an NFP class prior to being married in the church. We took two to learn 2 different methods (creighton and Marquette) - one was very well taught and the other was clearly just to check the box which was disappointing. We took a vow to accept children and knew we would not practice contraception.

When my wife and I expressed our disinterest in hormonal birth control, our counselors figured we were on the right track. NFP was probably discussed as a part of natural desire, but was not belabored. Medicalized approaches were not discussed, but I don’t believe they would have applied to our current situation.

Zero zip zilch. I think our premarital pastor *maybe* encouraged us to discuss having children and whether we wanted to or not. (NOT Anglican... Sovereign Grace pastor. There is a chance my Anglican priest may have given us guidance on the normative historical views of the church re: marriage being for children.)

I don’t think contraception or fertility awareness came up at all. Sex came up briefly, but it was framed more in the “do not deprive each other” way and then we were handed some books to read about sex from a Christian perspective. My fiancé and I discussed things to make sure we were on the same page, though.

In premarital counseling, we used Prepare/Enrich as the curriculum. There was a section about sex and children with discussion questions for us to work through. Our pastor did not discuss fertility awareness with us, but commended us for already having discussed and deciding against hormonal birth control.

My husband and I were married by a United Methodist pastor (now Global Methodist - he left after the schism formalized) who was his formal youth pastor. He only actually talked with us about the wedding once since he had moved to another city, and it wasn’t very in depth. Mostly about the ceremony itself.

I don’t remember but I don’t believe so. My convictions have changed greatly since then, but I feel the vibe in Protestantism is to get on birth control until you want to get off. A friend later explained to me what happens with BC and my wife got off. He was a fellow church member but it wasn’t “taught”.

It was not discussed, but I intentionally chose a counselor whom I knew would not discuss it because at that time. I was uncomfortable talking with anyone about reproduction outside of my fiancé/husband. I have had some conversations since about birth control medication and why I choose not to use it.

We married an an evangelical Anglican church. It was not discussed in pre-marital counseling. In sermons these issues were explicitly left undecided as naturally it is impossible to set down a definitive position without a divinely ordained mechanism for doing so (did I mention we are now Catholic?)

Encouraged it, with slight nuance encouraging non-abortive hormonal options (the mini pill) or barrier methods. We were Protestant at the time going to a small Baptist church plant. Our Anglican church was a bit more nuanced (At least aware of Christopher West’s iteration of theology of the body).

My marriage was convalidated in the Catholic Church this year. We took classes that discussed managing fertility together, had to take a NFP certification class, learned different methods of NFP. Medicalized approaches (assuming birth control; IVF, etc ?) are not allowed and that was made clear.

None, as we were married at a SBC. I had to seek out answers as questions arose. My family did not offer much support or wisdom in this area. My heart’s desire was for a family and thankfully the Lord blessed us with ten children but we did feel a bit like fish out of water in the world.

I don’t remember any discussion on these topics during premarital counseling. The only conversations I recall about birth control around that time include casual discussions with two other friends/family members, discussing which medicalized approach was abortifacient and which wasn’t.

This was back when we were at a charismatic church, and they just wanted to make sure we had “discussed” family planning, but it was clear no method was off the table for them *except* abstinence-only NFP. They*really* wanted to make sure we were open to barrier methods, not just NFP.

Nothing about it in premarital counseling I chose to seek out a Creighton Model Catholic teacher and my fiance and I learned NaproTechnology together for 3 months leading up to marriage. We learned everything we had never really learned. It is all I have ever used for contraception.

Fertility was touched on, we took an NFP course from a local Catholic Church at the recommendation of our counselor, but again it wasn’t required. I don’t recall any discussion of medicalized approaches during the premarital counseling, although I have encountered it subsequently.

Not married but in premarital counseling, lots of contraception options were discussed and the only ones that were more “frowned upon” were emergency contraception and copper IUD as the prevention of implantation doesn’t align with the belief that life begins at fertilization.

Not married! But I’d say fertility awareness has never been discussed around me unless I’m talking to my friends who have begun having kids. My sister got married and got on birth control without second thought years ago before people started widely discussing it

I don’t remember this coming up, but it was long enough ago that I couldn’t say for sure. My husband and I talked about it a lot between ourselves, and FAM was suggested to me by my mother and later by others including SIL and MIL, but that’s all I remember.

The pre Cana presentation talked about NFP as a category of various options and how openness to life is healthy for a marriage. I don’t recall how medical approaches were discussed if at all. It felt very vague and rosy even then, and now it seems laughable.

They did not talk about this at all. They encouraged us to talk about children and be on the same page about it. Our pastor also encouraged us to wait a year to settle into marriage before getting pregnant or making another significant life change.

The pastor who did our marriage prep discussed it with us and we had to take an NFP class for marriage prep. I have never heard a homily about IVF, IUDs, etc, but the topic has come up often in conversation with other Catholics in mom’s group etc.

We were married in an LCMS church. Our pastor asked if we both wanted kids and what our thoughts on birth control were, but that was about it. (We were also late 20s during counseling so he already knew that we had thought things through.)

This topic was not discussed during our premarital counseling. I was put on the birth control pill in high school due to suspected endometriosis, and at no time did I ever hear a Christian teaching that ran counter to taking the pill.

Premarital counseling very briefly discussed contraception (no mention of natural methods or fertility awareness) by way of “if you have unprotected sex, you will get pregnant, so you need to think and decide about this together”

Not discussed. Did talk with friends about this and had heard concerns about birth control being abortifacient, but when I brought it up with my OB before getting married she laughed it off. Never heard formal teaching on this.

Catholic marriage prep discussed the Catholic perspective of being against contraception although I don’t recall a more thorough discussion on Theology of the Body. We did take an NFP course that went into fertility awareness.

Our Engaged Encounter weekend showed a Video Curriculum that my parents produced for Marriage Prep that has been used Australia-wide on Fertility Awareness. Our couples leader, gave us a pass to go for a walk together instead.

We did premarital counseling, and contraception and managing fertility was never discussed. I only had a conversation about contraception with my GP when I went in to discuss contraception before my husband and I were married.

Currently in preparation for marriage. NFP is taught in my program. It varies significantly by parish/program. Some even promote practices that are barely in line with Catholic Church teaching, if not completely violating it.

I honestly don’t remember if we talked about contraception much; if we did it was mostly “we’re on the same page about it already, so there’s not much to talk about.” But we definitely did not talk about fertility awareness.

I honestly don’t remember. My husband and I discussed it and agreed that marriage was for babies and that we should do NFP, basically, and we were both onboard, but I have no recollection as to where we came to those ideas.

Yes, married in a Christian church; I feel like these were not issues addressed directly or in depth in premarital counseling; they were somewhat addressed in some of the literature we read in the lead-up to marriage.

I don’t think we talked about fertility in our pre-marital counseling at all! It was more focused on learning to communicate better, work with our personalities, and love each other like Christ loved the church.

NFP was brought up, hardly emphasized as it should have been for Catholics; condoms we’re offhandedly referenced; and then cheating was implied as inevitable, so that explained their perspective a little more

Not discussed as far as I recall in premarital. I don’t think we ever saw NFP as a realistic option, and associated it with... not quite Amish ppl but something closer to that than the extreme homeschoolers.

We were married in a Methodist church and sought pre-marital counseling from my former Baptist youth group minister and his wife. Nothing about sex, fertility, medical approaches or the like were discussed.

Yes, we were required to take an NFP class of our choosing in marriage prep. Even though we were already aware, the classes also taught us the problems with contraception from a theological standpoint.

They did not mention fertility or ANYTHING related to sex at all in pre-marital counseling. I still can’t believe it. We (my now husband and I) kept thinking it would come up but then it never did.

Basically we were told we should have sex as much as possible and use any form of birth control that worked for us. Fertility issues were never discussed. Neither was fertility awareness.

Nothing in premarital (except maybe a question about whether we were on the same page about kids – when and how many). Medicalized approaches are not seen as sinful in my church context.

Our premarital counseling was limited for various reasons, but because of our background no one thought to check in on NFP stuff, which was just coming more widespread back then.

That was never discussed. But in the church I am in now, I don’t necessarily hear much about fertility but I know that most of the people there are open to having many babies.

I had read basically everything there is to read on it and taught it before marriage, so our immediate prep was technically minimal bc I knew more than the priest ;)

Mostly it’s not discussed. Occasional people may mention that it should be in God’s control and that it should be discussed between the couple before marriage

It never came up. We did premarital with a counselor not a pastor and it was more relationship focused. Discussed sex but in context of how to talk about it.

Our counseling was pretty brief, so I don’t remember touching on this. Even outside of this I don’t remember ever hearing about fertility in a church setting

Required to take an official NFP course before marriage. Other medicalized approaches discussed at our pre marriage retreat run by the diocese of providence

We talked about sex in premarital counseling but I don’t recall talking about contraception at length or fertility. Other than the idea that kids are good.

We were taught the Catholic Church’s teachings - that contraception is wrong and that NFP was for married couples with a grave reason not to have children.

Never actually discussed. Just one brief mention of “do you both agree on if you want kids and how many?” FA or medicalized approaches never mentioned

No, not in premarital. I knew I wanted to do NFP so sought that on my own. At my church, it was split between people doing birth control pills and NFP.

Did premartial is a generic megachurch setting and there was nothing on sex that I remember and definitely nothing about fertility and procreation.

Absolutely nothing was discussed about procreation in premarital counseling. We are asked how many kids do each of us want and we both said three.

Our marriage prep required proof of classes on NFP, which I’d already known pretty well by then but was able to link my husband into then.

My husband had one premarital session with the minister who married us, he was reformed Presbyterian. None of these topics were discussed.

No large education, but medicalized approaches were seen as acceptable. I educated myself because of wanting to avoid hormonal options.

I don’t recall any of this being discussed in premarital counseling, except for maybe an encouragement to discuss it amongst ourselves.

It was not discussed. My first husband refused to use condoms and made me start birth control. It was awful for me. We’re not married.

We did have excellent premarital conversation about this. However it was a missionary couple that did our counseling, not a pastor.

Birth control was heavily suggested… NFP was laughed at in our church. Everything was seen as permissible.

It was not discussed in our premarital counseling, all we were asked was if we were on the same page about the number of kids

We only received an hour long session because we were “good kids” and employed by the church. Sex was not mentioned at all.

I do not remember any discussion about this. It was limited to “are you on the same page about wanting children”.

I don’t think we really discussed this in premarital counseling. Medicalized approaches were not criticized.

Required to take NFP class any method as part of marriage prep. NaPro technology available and supported.

NFP was mentioned at Engaged Encounter, but not in the counseling beyond “here’s a chapter” in a book

One session on premarital prep was devoted to NFP and church teaching on reproduction and sexuality.

We did do premarital counseling but we didn’t talk at all about fertility or NFP or even sex at all.

Not one word. And I was too shy/embarrassed to ask my pastor during our 1 (one) Pre-Cana meeting.

Basically just think about when and how many children you want to have. NFP was never discussed.

I was married in an Episcopal Church. There was no discussion about fertility or contraception.

NFP was discussed during marriage prep and marriage retreat. A NFP Class was also required.

In our premarital counseling it was briefly mentioned but not explicitly talked about.

We had premarital counseling but fertility and contraception were not discussed at all.

NFP taught; in vitro was still new/rare but they noted it was not religiously approved.

Yes, contraception was brought up as something we needed to discuss and agree on.

Yes. Discussed in premarital counseling. Took a class prior to marriage on NFP.

Silence. My wife was bioligist and very educated. I was completely ignorant.

There was an overview of NFP in a day-long pre-marriage retreat (required)

Nothing was discussed at all (premarital counseling in a PCA church)

My one day of pre marital group counseling did not cover fertility.

The Catholic church introduced us to NFP during our precana classes

Not much, but hormonal birth control was spoken of and discouraged.

We were required to take an NFP class. Go Archdiocese of Denver!

Yes, NFP was encouraged. Medicalized ones were discouraged.

None of the above were discussed in premarital counseling.

Contraception was not discussed in premarital counseling.

We took pre Cana classes and were taught NFP during that.

I don’t recall it being brought up in Pre Cana at all.

Suggested in Pre-Cana, not taught/explained in detail.

Yes to contraception, but that was the extent of it.

FA was recommended and taught; medicalized was not

Yes, both contraceptives and NFP were discussed.

NFP was encouraged as the way to space babies.

Nothing was taught about fertility. No. No.

An NFP class was required by our diocese.

Fertility awareness - my own research

Literally was not discussed at all.

Not really discussed at all.

NFP classes after marriage

They were not discussed.

Not talked about at all

It was not discussed.

It was not discussed

Was not discussed

Not mentioned.

Not at all.

Not at all

None

No

previously

additional reading & resources

Mere Orthodoxy | On Substack

Why It Is Difficult to Talk About Ethics of the Body

“When I came in and sat down and looked around, I realized it was a Roman Church full of plaster statues and bad art, realistic art. I hated the statues; all the emphasis on the human body. I was trying to escape from the human body and all it needed... I saw the bodies standing around me on all the altars... and I remembered that they believed in the resurrection of the body, the body that I wanted destroyed forever…

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5 months ago · 74 likes · 19 comments · Mere Orthodoxy and Haley Baumeister

(or at the Mere Orthodoxy website)

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Of course, this means its scope and usefulness is limited.

Nevertheless, I wanted some way to ask my burning questions of you all, and listen to the answers. Here I am simply sharing those responses (until I figure out what else to do with them.)

*I would construct such a survey differently next time, as many times respondents would naturally explain something about themselves (say, denomination or tradition) that might not be captured in later responses if looked at individually. So, apologies for any lacking context.

If you have been to seminary, how and in what context were sex/the body/fertility/childbearing/assisted reproductive technology discussed?

I asked in curiosity since pastors often train in seminary, and church members are under their spiritual and pastoral care. Premarital counseling responses to come.

Went to college at a sbc seminary, worked for the seminary, was very involved in seminary life. I only remember sex/fertility etc being briefly (one 3 hr class) talked about in my intro to ethics class (the class was the same in seminary). The professor was slightly misogynistic, so I wasn't primed to agree with anything he said about it. It was generally anti birth control. Vasectomies were a gray area. Condoms were fine. The female body was discussed at length by my female peers, though it was rarely mentioned in academic contexts. There were very few female professors, so I'm sure that didn't help. We were all very interested in the ethics of being embodied and would have liked more teaching on it. There was one upper level elective on sexuality, but it was mostly notable for being anti-porn and anti-lgbt, not for being pro-anything.

I did attend seminary -- I attended Fuller Seminary between 2017 and graduated in 2020. The only context in which I remember the body and assisted reproductive technology was discussed together was in a class about transhumanism and human nature. We somewhat discussed sex in the body in a class I took on Ethics in the Gospel of Mark, and we discussed ethics and abortion in one of my philosophy classes.

I am about to graduate in May. The only class it came up in was Biblical Ethics. We didn't necessarily land on anything, but at least had some discussion about birth control, vasectomies, etc. It was taught by a man and he didn't seem to be too well versed. Otherwise we haven't covered it at all. But, I am doing an academic Old Testament degree so lots of Hebrew and not a lot of practical ministry.

I went to Southern Baptist Theological Seminary and we actually did talk about all of this a good amount in my Christian Ethics class. It was the first time I really heard someone (the prof was Andrew T Walker) talk negatively about the pill. Also drew very clear lines against IVF and surrogacy.

Nope, but I do know that main Seminary in Sydney does cover all of that in a serious way. Our Archbishop is an accomplished bioethicist in ART. My parents have also been piloting a program where they mentor the seminarians through their 9-week Marriage Prep course, all of it. including the sex and babies part.

I have a masters in ministry obtained from an interdenominational christian college (baptist background). There was barely any discussion on this. I chose to write on it in my ethics class but, apart from abortion, this wasn't a topic discussed at all.

Pastoral Care of Marriage, Sexual Morality, and Medical Ethics classes. All were talked about in terms of the Catholic Church's teaching, with especial reference to Theology of the Body and recent magisterial statements.

I have not been to seminary but my husband is a seminarian and he has had positive conversations with professors advocating for FAM in marriage and arguing against IVF. Childbearing was also held in high esteem.

I am currently in seminary. Most of my fellow seminarians are only speaking about sex and reproductive health with an assumed idea that all of us are coming from a similar, very liberal point of view.

In side conversations. My dean of academics (a woman and mother) once advised me that "motherhood is a radical bodily event and so is clinical pastoral education (CPE); time them accordingly.”

My husband had very in depth conversations about this in biblical counseling classes as well as in anthropology classes. We both benefitted tremendously from open, thoughtful conversations.

I tried to cover most of these in the marriage course when I taught in a Catholic seminary but they also had a bioethics class. I do think there should be more taught.

Currently in seminary, and the topic has not come up, although there has not been a proper context in which fertility specifically should have been discussed.

I heard that one of the groups in the ethics class did their project on this. But I don't recall us ever studying it in my seminary degrees.

Currently in seminary, sex and fertility comes up a lot especially when talking about fertility as a blessing throughout the Old Testament!

Mostly in the context of ethics courses. We definitely did discuss ethical issues around assisted reproductive technology.

I haven't, but I appreciate Louise Boychuk's efforts to teach clergy about NFP with her organization Vitae Fertility.

It was not :( this makes me sad… If we’re going to have any kind of sexuality stance it seems vital to discuss this.

I did go to seminary but don't remember much on these topics at all (partly because I didn't select classes on them).

Southwest Baptist University is not a seminary, maybe close? I remember no formal talks about these things.

My husband went to seminary and he said he had very minimal, brief discussions about this.

N/A for me, but when my husband went through 20 years ago, this was not discussed.

Seminary dropout (just a few classes left) but absolutely nothing on this at all.

This was discussed at my husband's seminary in an ethics class.

Never discussed in undergrad, masters, or doctoral seminars.

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We begin another chapter, and it’s mostly just quotations. I’ll save more commentary for the conclusion of the series. For now, gird thy loins.

“The growing circle of expert authority, from a physician in 1866 to someone such as Mr. Gerber in 1933, is worth noting… The good mother was to pay attention.”1

“Mr. Gerber began his letter with well-worded sympathy: 'Advice on baby’s diet is offered freely on every side to the point where it is confusing and conflicting…. ask someone who knows.”2

“The shared advice between physician and corporation flowed both ways and out into the reading, traveling public, through print advertisement as well as spectacles such as state and national fairs. Not incidentally, the ‘someone who knows’ was increasingly privy to the particular version of maternal knowledge advanced by Gerber, Mellin’s, and Nestle’s, by way of articles and advertisements aimed at medical professionals.”3

“One way to consider critically the norms of parenting during the century of progress is through particular, mainstream practices and products, and looking at the supposed ‘ordinary’ anew, as if we were strangers from a far-off land.”4

“How did the pharmaceutical summons Welcome to Ordinary make its way into American culture? …What sorts of cultural changes and pressures have coincided with the diagnosis of hyperactivity as a disorder and the assumed recourse to pharmaceuticals as a cure?”

“But even conceding the efficacy of pediatric pharmaceuticals, it seems appropriate to back up and ask about the context in which so many parents find recourse, often reluctant and and hard-pressed recourse, in a solution wrought from highly potent and little-understood drugs brought to them by a multibillion-dollar industry.”5 (The book touches on this further below.)

In any case, women needed only inquire of the experts.

“Similar to the condescending tone of the Gerber advertisement, a Heinz strained foods ad… assumed a mother’s befuddlement.” “The images do not show her calling on her mother, her aunt, her matronly neighbor, or even a local nurse.”6

“The advertisement brings together responsible maternity with medical authority and consumerism, featuring not only doctor and white-coated grocer but also the Seal of Acceptance of the American Medical Association.”7

“With the late-nineteenth-century elevation of maternity came the fear that most mothers were not up to the task. With the discovery of bacteria came the possibility that other forms of menace could be lurking, hidden, as well. Mothers represented the apex of social hope — and thus also the locus of social peril. They were simultaneously potent and incompetent, the font of wisdom and uninformed. They needed a team of experts to equip them for their assigned work of shaping the social body by way of shaping each tiny, individual body.”8

“Predictably, the same moral passion for quantification and regularity came to bear on the babies themselves. Eavesdrop someday on mothers of infants and toddlers at the children’s museum in an American city and you will likely hear percentages.”9

“A 1930 Mead Johnson advertisement ran with a large-print heading in all caps, Physicians’ Babies Are Better Babies. Two mothers, wearing fashionable hats and floral dresses, smile as chubby toddlers sit amiably on scales. The text put the matter succinctly: ‘Regular visits to the doctor’s office where the baby is carefully examined, measured, weighed and recorded, and the individual formula specially prescribed, are far more satisfactory than the mother’s attempting to feed her baby without professional advice.’” “The ‘better’ could be registered at scale — and baby became a quantifiable gauge of maternal and medical success.”10

“The production of ‘better babies’ was not merely a matter of personal pride; it was a matter of responsibility, for a good mother was the conduit for good citizenry.”11

“Canned Pet Milk would allow the modern mother to don the fashionable attire of her age and take baby (and attending nurse) on her adventures… She need not sacrifice mobility, convenience, or scientifically verified purity in the care of her baby. The class cues of the advertisement are overt…”12

A Parents’ magazine advertisement for baby soup and strained vegetables included “the promise that these foods were prepared under ‘surgical standards of cleanliness.’ Few mothers would confidently say that the average household kitchen could come close. The evidence of physician endorsement implied that physicians themselves did not expect most mothers to be capable of meeting the standards of superior hygiene.”13

This chapter also includes a fun narrative detour through infant bowel regularity, as homes were “to become as efficient and controlled as were the newly routinized places of American industry.”14

“This idea that children were, in the words of a Hygeia advertisement, “little human machines under your care” implied also that they required a certain kind of managerial proficiency… A woman could not be sure about the amount of milk going from breast to mouth, but she could measure the amount gone from a bottle and count the number of bites consumed… This focus on the minute, quantitative statistics of homemaking encompassed elimination as well.”15

Y’all, I teared up laughing at the text of an unpictured advertisement, warning parents:

“When food is too dainty then Nature rebels… Many childhood ailments can be traced to delayed elimination.’ But parents could rest assured, for “Nutrition experts at Battle Creek have worked for 50 years on this one problem.”16

A market for toilet seats implies a market for toilet paper.

There are warnings of harsh, subpar toilet paper causing “serious trouble.” In one Scott Paper advertisement, they warn of “15 painful troubles either directly caused or aggravated by inferior toilet paper.”17

Why take chances?

But what in particular, we ask, was at stake in this era?

“While scientists and social theorists disagreed on fundamental and finer points of evolutionary theories, middle-class parents received messages that were at times quite blunt. Many versions of the theory that hit the ground reflected an idea expressed openly [by Charles Darwin] …that life was inherently a struggle, with resources adequate for only a select few, and that those who survived were within the “favored races” of a species…”18

Concern was oriented toward progress and developing one’s place on a trajectory that was reaching upwards on the evolutionary track. “The cultural diffusion of Darwinian thought was sufficient to reach into the basic assumptions of parenting among the aspiring classes.”19

“The contrast between, on the one hand, ‘conventional,’ ‘sentimental,’ and ‘household’ and, on the other hand, ‘modern,’ ‘specialists,’ and ‘scientific’ was also a contrast between past and future, between those families whose routines and practices were merely ‘sentimental,’ full of ‘trivialities,’ and those parents who had opened themselves for apt scientific scrutiny, judgement, and counsel.”20

There was pressure to compare and place, with scientific accuracy, where one’s child was when it came to physical, mental, and social abilities. The Modern Baby Book, for example, compared children against the normality prescribed by experts. “Without comparison to other children, parents would not know how their own child measured up.”21

“To be modern and progressive was to refuse sentimentality, to name all traditions as mere reminiscence and instead move confidently into the future, shedding the ‘tradition of waste’ by being ‘fined down for efficiency.’”22

(By now, can you feel the spiritually alive and mysteriously wonderful parts of life withering away? Me too. Talk about a soul-numbing way to move through an otherwise rich experience of the world.)

She describes the World’s Fair in Chicago, whose focus was advancement. It featured various (often shocking) exhibits of contrast. These displayed the preferred chasm between the clearly inferior, wild, and quaint world of yesterday—and a tamed and controlled tomorrow.

“The superiority of Anglo-Protestantism, as the culmination of moral, ‘social-evolutionary development’ …was apparent as well in the spiritual universalism described in the 1933 Hall of Religion. While all ‘religions' were represented at the 1933 fair, the world’s best known religions were melted, mellowed, and molded into a calf that looked remarkably like the ‘spirit of modernism.’”23

Postcards from Ripley’s Odditorium showed children who did not, it was made clear, make the cut of the progress narrative. Such spectacles were “nature’s mistakes” which a modern mother ought to avoid.

“These children were reverse icons, the opposite of Gerber’s iconic baby. They provided both a visual paradigm of the accidental, mistaken Natural that scientific progress could leave behind…”24

The Progress of Furniture “offered at the exposition three small wooden cradles much like the one beneath the woman of 1833, but they were flanked in the display by two large cribs… For a mother of means, the choice must be clear. For those unable to afford either the space or the cost of the 1933 model, the sense of being on the wrong side of a divide was part of the message…”25

The gains of the Century of Progress and scientific motherhood were mixed up with, as Hall posits, at least two dubious messages—whether implicitly or explicitly.

The first was “an underlying assumption that women’s bodies were potentially unreliable and possibly even dangerously disordered, and that the process of childbirth and infant feeding needed the discipline, order, and expertise of (almost exclusively male) science.”

The second was, and perhaps still is, "an appeal not only to a bascially misogynist suspicion of embodied maternity but also to a newly scientific distrust of certain types of people within the social body.”26

In a word, gender fears and class aspirations were (and still are) found in tandem.

“On the cusp of the 1960’s, the Parents’ seal of approval stood not so much as a seal of professional expertise as a seal of parental approval — a sign that women like the reader herself, not incidentally married to men like the reader’s husband, approved of the product bearing the seal. This ‘feeling of freedom’ — feminine autonomy as aesthetically streamlined — would gain momentum as the next generation declared itself to be liberated from the tasks of traditional domesticity.”27

Hall returns to a brief history of ADHD and the skyrocketing child and adolescent rates of Ritalin by the 1990’s. The relatively new phenomena of biotechnology being marketed to parents was couched, she says, in “larger questions of marketing domestic normalcy in the United States… A plausible way to interpret the meteoric rise in pediatric psychopharmaceuticals is through the provocation voiced by cultural critic Wendell Berry, who suggested [in Life Is a Miracle] that technology will solve the problems that technology creates, and will create the problems that technology solves. One need not accept in every detail Berry’s distinction between ‘the natural’ and ‘the technological’ to worry about the way biotechnological answers are given as the new default ‘natural’ answers to perceived problems in childhood behavior.”28

Hall notes the bleak reality of the plummeting amount of time middle-class professional parents were spending with their children—the Welcome to Ordinary ads indicative of a “pressurized but newly neglected childhood.”29

“Scientific motherhood may have begun as an appeal to aspiration among rising middle-to-upper-class mainstream Protestant mothers, but it eventually made its way through the more broadly defined middle class. By the time Lilly marketed Strattera in middle-end women’s domestic magazines in 2003, the sense that ‘most people’ were able to ‘take for granted’ the unspoiled ‘ordinary’ displayed in the ads cut to the heart of a middle-class mother’s duty — to deliver an aesthetically normal version of domesticity… even while working outside the home to generate the income necessary to procure it.”30

“The combination of quantified, controlled parenthood, the march of progress in home entertainment, and the demands of a workday… is arguably a witch’s brew of family life — and the pharmaceutical companies know how to use all three ingredients to appeal to parents and a society eager to make things right.”31

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Hall describes this poster as “characteristic of a shift that unquestionably enabled notable gains in infant health through public-awareness campaigns for domestic hygiene. But the hygiene came at a cost, for the benefits were socially, economically, and racially encoded. “The baby” on which the domestic hygiene effort focused was too often a specific baby — a baby the logic of the day judged to be worth the effort… The same language system by which mothers, social workers, and physicians could measure gains lent scientific legitimacy to a calculous of human life. This calculus reflected a growing sense that the individual baby was a precious but fragile commodity to be quantifiably evaluated, carefully habituated, and hygienically safeguarded from those humans and households on the other side of a divide.”1

The pull toward being on the respectable side of technological progress as a woman, wife, and mother were strong. She continues:

“Mothers not privy to the set of practices for raising “The Baby” seemed somehow more primal and, in an often vague but still powerful sense, less evolved. Women who still held to their grandmothers’ wisdom on infant feeding, pregnancy prevention, family sleep patterns, and the like became projects for reform or, too often, fell outside the purview of American progress altogether… One needed the proper formula, the proper contraceptive, the proper kitchen appliances, the proper disinfectant, the proper infant clothing, infant shoes, baby powder, hair detangler, toothpaste…”2

The safe distance from which the magazine Together seemed to encourage the practice of charity is described in the book as a “hazy, spiritual love given mercifully by those whose lives were safely on the other side of a divide between the normatively pressed and the pitiably disordered… Put differently, “the germ-free home” warranted both a safe, albeit prayerful, distance from others and bold plans to tidy the globe.”3

Servants and family help, a common fixture of upper-middle class families, also feature in magazines such as Parents’. One page describes the mother’s duty to ensure all goes well in employing them:

“With planning, the “you” who is the director of the domestic scene, serving as both head of casting and stage manager, may ensure that her servant is truly of benefit to her children. With “constant supervision” and “constant awareness.” a mother may thus ensure that difference maintains its distance.”4

“The properly situated home thus becomes the benignly governed, colonial world in microcosm. With proper planning, careful exposure, and safely governed sympathy, the children of mothers in need of “help” will be well trained for their futures.”5

And then there was the marketing of other goods, such as supplements and vitamins, which came by way of interesting visuals:

“The child of the reader was the focal point of the various men in uniform who were researching, publishing, and producing the goods marketed in upscale women’s magazines… During the first half of the century, advertising to mothers in the magazines of domestic hygiene and health played upon the aspiration of their audience to ascend above the struggles and joys of other women and other women’s children.”6

There were also messages about the proper ends of good parenting: success in the world! The steps to good character (in the visual below) are not intrinsic goods, in contrast to the virtues of the Christian tradition. Here, they are the necessary means to a more pragmatic end.

“This message is characteristic — that maternal work in the home is fraught with occasions for error, occasions to lead one’s children in the wrong direction, toward the “commonplace.”7

Such advertisements are described as having two interrelated fears: “a fear of inadequacy and a fear of not being seen as adequately distinguished from the sorts of mothers who do not properly prepare their children to climb the stairway to Success. The sense that choosy mothers will choose according to the wisdom of the experts seems applicable to the marketing of almost any parenting item for sale.”8

Those less enlightened to the best ways to parent will leave their child’s potential untapped and latent. Such ads, Hall describes, “subtly suggest that a child may fail to flourish without the proper tools for uncovering that which is otherwise hidden.” 9

Additionally, non-white children in the pages of Parents magazine from 1929 to the late 1950’s “were almost without exception referenced only implicitly as the child whose existence was to be avoided by mothers in the know. The exceptions reinforce this point.”10

“Through careful attention to a child’s nature, with meticulous supervision of the domestic sphere, a mother could craft from the natural clay of childhood a model of success.”11

And then we arrive at the products aimed at cleanliness, complete with the othering already at play everywhere else. With ads for Gold Dust: “The caricatured imaging suggest that [the small twins] are essentially serviceable, essentially to be of use.”12

The dirty work of the home was frequently depicted as something beneath the classy woman of means:

“The other illustration shows another option, in which a mother collects the family’s dirty laundry and makes it someone else’s problem… The third illustration appears across the page break, on the other side of the divide. In this picture, a brown-faced child is shown next to the other mother, the servant who is expected to do the family’s washing.”13

Class and race dynamics are reinforced in a heartbreakingly captioned image:

“On one side of the divide is a child worthy of and even summoning the author’s attention. On the other side is the problem of his mother and the ill-drawn shadow child, a child who sleeps while his brother strains to depart the washroom altogether… The next line is ripe with scorn, pitched across the divide with such sarcasm that it took my breath away when I first read it: “Hadn’t she buried ten?” Given that the readership was largely made up of mothers intent on keeping their own babies safely guarded within a germ-free universe, the toss-away reference to the rate of childhood mortality among African Americans is powerfully dismissive.”14

In the segue into Hall’s exploration of what was dubbed the Lysol habit, she points out that “to understand the cleanliness that was considered akin to godliness, it is necessary to understand the vaguely civil form of Parents’ religiosity.”15

In it’s pages, Christianity was “so bland as to be useless… Christianity was construed in such a way as to make the life and death of a Jewish servant crucified in a neglected part of the Roman Empire into a formless generalization about “humanity.” What is more, the “humanity” characterized was… a culturally normative humanity represented by the readership.”16

We then see how Lysol came to dominate the household sphere in more ways than one:

“It was not enough to simply make things appear clean; one’s home needed to be clean in ways that only a microscope could confirm and only a scientifically proven formula could achieve. The sense of hidden germs, skulking, lurking beneath the surface of one’s domestic life, pervaded domestic magazines in the first half of the century, and arguably still echos today… The incalculability of the effort was perhaps key to the advertising. One could never be sure one had achieved a germ-free universe.”17

“…it was perhaps inevitable that the suspicion and other-ing of other women, so key to the proper mother’s identity, would become internalized… Given the various references to servants throughout the magazines in which Lysol was advertised, it is possible that one source of such diseases would be domestic workers.”18

In addition to the “threat” of outside help, there was the threat of a woman’s own body:

“One 1929 advertisement features a woman sitting at her drawing room desk, preparing to write an appreciative letter to Lysol for sending her the booklet The Scientific Side of Health and Youth. The text of the ad confidently states that Lysol has been the “standard disinfectant—the safe and certain disinfectant—for feminine hygiene” for forty years, which means from before the turn of the twentieth century. Into the late 1950’s… [the company] continued to suggest that its product be flushed into a woman’s body for vaginal “hygiene.” The advertisements suggest several crucial facets of the domestic hygiene movement during the development of “scientific motherhood.” In the midst of “constant reference” to the rules of domestic vigilance, a woman was also encouraged to suspect her own body of hidden dangers and impurities. After probing further into the implied meaning of “health and youth,” aided in particular by an article by Andrea Tone in the Journal of Social History, it became obvious… that one of the hidden dangers of the female body as construed by the advertisements was the perceived danger of unplanned pregnancy… Of course, “a fastidious woman” prefers not to discuss such “intimate questions” with others; thus the booklet would offer a guide…19

It is exasperating to read this with many standard practices of 2025 gynecological care in mind. The experts hint that we cannot be trusted to learn the workings of our own bodies—ones which our own Creator made good. We need their expert assistance to suppress, tamp out, and technologize our healthy functions—lest we be seen as backwards, primitive, naive! Many have had enough of certain manifestations of this “authoritatively intimidating countenance.”

Women were also given both subtle and not-so-subtle messaging about Lysol use, appealing to a certain sex appeal and lifestyle.

“Given that women were using Lysol to “disinfect” themselves of sperm as well as germs, the “vivacity and youthfulness” promoted in the advertisement also involved a woman’s ability to remain without child.”

I wonder what went through deeply catechized and discipled Christians’ minds when they viewed these ads? What goes through our minds when we’re at the OBGYN office, bombarded with similar messaging of medicalized control bestowed by the expert willing to make our desire come true—whether or not they’re curing real diseases or aiming toward true health.

“The large house, the maid in strict uniform, the convertible, and the parents’ attire all suggest strongly that this is not the use of Lysol for the sake of economic necessity. The sense is that a woman, after becoming a mother, must use Lysol to regain her status as a fully independent consort for her still dancing, motoring, golfing husband.”20

We go on to hear from Hall how “The “idea of progress,” so central to the development of modern America and to modern parenting in America, also helped to make this denomination the largest mainline Protestant body in the twentieth century… A denomination so construed as the savior of the world had few rhetorical/theological resources available to name the rift between and within women’s bodies or to heal the rift thus represented in the body of Christ… There were many reasons for postwar Protestants to adhere to the hopes and dreams of Parents’ and Ladies’ Home Journal and McCall’s rather than of incarnate, boundary-crossing discipleship. Redolent in most conduits of domesticity was an undercurrent of threatened shame and an overcurrent of class ambition.”21

And then there was the matter of all this backdropped by the Atomic Age:

“Mom, Dad, and their two (please note the appropriately spaced and gender-balanced) children descend the steps of the “big-steeple” church encircled by the symbol of scientific progress… the role of faith was to aid the nuclear household in producing children capable of responsibly handling the newest result of human aspiration.”22

Marketing of play items and carefully calibrated learning resources became commonplace:

“Even sources traditionally considered within the humanities were put to scientific use, to help cultivate with scientific precision the intelligence and creativity of a child to be molded... within a particular cultural matrix: the promised nation within which the child would become a responsible consumer/citizen”23

At the beginning of 1958 the magazine Together announced it would, in conjunction with the General Committee on Family Life, host a competition to discover the Family of the Year:

“By carefully considering the qualifications of each family, assessing one’s neighbors in comparison with one another, a reader of Together could choose the one family that would most make the congregation “proud." The contest easily represents the worst sort of horizontal rivalry and vertical elbowing that might emanate from the polished promotion of faith, aesthetically normalized beauty, and worldly success.”24

“The divide promoted by the germ-free home is the divide between families who can stand up to the evaluative scrutiny of the “official judges” and families who cannot, screened out by those who determine the qualifications for a truly good household.”25

The magazine Together also played into the desire for social and financial security:

“The ads for annuity and life insurance plans often play poignantly on the fact that many women in the generation aging in the 1950’s did not want to be a “burden” to others, nor a “risk” to the next generation, bound as they were for a more promising future. Giving to to others through a distanced form of charity would allow the nuclear family to avoid both risk abroad and the burden of its elders. The words of one satisfied annuitant are characteristic: “The future holds no financial worries for me. I have received peace of mind from a regular and assured income and I enjoy the inexpressible personal satisfaction of helping in the important work of building the kingdom of God…” The ad copy continues: “Loss is impossible and blessing assured because you are in partnership with the Lord whose marching orders were, ‘Go therefore and teach all nations and lo I am with you unto the end’—when you purchase a Life Income Gift Certificate [from the] Woman’s Division of Christian Services.”26

Speaking about the time surrounding Christmas, we are given a glimpse into some conflicting narratives and imagery at play during this time, and still today:

“When one was to give a party in [Christ’s'] name, one was to invite the very people formerly prohibited from the table as unclean. Thus, some of the ways that postwar mothers reading Together were encouraged to bring Jesus into their middle-class homes seem quite strained. Some of the suggestions in Together for anticipating Christmas in one’s family represent the strange maneuvering required if one was to bring Jesus into the home without challenging in some way the life of a “typical” Methodist family.”27

Others were working hard at family Christmas photos “to achieve the right expression, the right lighting, and the sense of hushed expectation of the proper Christmas.”28

Hall decribes further:

“Interspersed throughout the pages of Together are images of families seeking hospitality from those already settled in America. The salience of these images is heightened in the Advent issues… One was to get one’s house in order for the right sort of guest. Holidays were a time when domestic magazine in the United States heightened class aspirations through consumption and well-crafted, selective generosity. Inviting into one’s familial celebrations those whom Christ suggested were indeed the form of His presence would have meant risking association with those who were to be kept at a distance. Those who followed this servant would have found it somewhat awkward, at the least, to celebrate his arrival on a simple ass when the hearth and home had been shaped by a habituation of aspiring, middle-class status.”29

This passage and image absolutely pierced me:

“The editors chose for the December 1956 issue an image of a “modern Madonna” waiting with her child in the midst of “uncertainty” and in the blessing and vulnerability of a “borrowed” life. The accompanying poem appeared as an appeal from the Methodist Committee for Overseas Relief… The mother in the photograph is not named. Neither is the poet. But the words name each child, each little one, as created miraculously—as created gratuitously by God. To put this same point differently, here the gift of a child is narrated as a borrowed gift, as one that is not fully a parent’s own… Here a reading of Mary, of the “hers” to whom the poem refers, is crucial. The Son of the One God was not Mary’s possession but a gift to the world. The uncertainty of Mary’s pondering—even in the fear of uncertainty—is a crucial part of the magi story, as they bring to Jesus signs of his royalty, but also of his death.”30

And so, we come to the close of Holy Hygiene:

“Family norms for domesticity, the promotion of science, and mainline Protestant faith became intertwined in a nation marching forward, intent on forging a better future for itself through carefully calibrated procreation. The baby, the child, the well-timed and well-planned household became in the last century the site at which providence and progress coincided… by one reading of Together, the future of the world depended on responsible parenting, disinfecting, and planning ahead for the sake of “our” children in the world of tomorrow.”31

What began with the Wesleyan quadrilateral distinctives of Scripture, Tradition, Reason, and Experience—while beneficial to early Methodism in aiding adaptation to local place and culture—became a “tendency to adapt uncritically” with experience becoming the prime criterion. Those who were sufficiently culturally adapted “may have had few theological resources from their rather elastic theological tradition with which to push back.”32

I wonder, when we look back, what resources from the Christian tradition we will have drawn from in our time.

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I’m not quite sure how I stumbled across this book last year, but I bought a used copy immediately.

A year or so later, at the time I finally got around to reading Stiven Peter’s excellent The Case Against In Vitro Fertilization published at Mere Orthodoxy, I was pleasantly surprised to see him mention this obscure book I was in the midst of.

Hall introduces her project with an advertisement from the front cover of Carolina Parent, a magazine of the Triangle region of North Carolina. The uncomfortable question which lingers becomes. “What if a woman partook of Duke’s boutique services and ended up with a baby who was, well… common, or unique in a way some might not consider quite the right sort of unique?”

The overarching premise of the book is that genetic manipulation, sex-and-disability selective abortions, “designer babies” and all manner of eugenic and classist thinking in regards to family formation has solicited moral outrage, and rightfully so. However, she posits that the social pressures which middle-to-upper-class women face of “when to expect and whom to expect”1 have been bearing down for decades.

And so, we will come to see how current medical techniques in the realm of fertility and family formation do not necessarily create these attitudes, so much as coddle and distill them. The quietly aggressive possibilities today continue to warp our “social imaginary”2 toward what seems not just plausible—but right and good.

And perhaps our current medical possibilities don’t just warp our collective moral vision, but blind it. The proper limits of the body or the givenness of begotten children—these realities no longer compute. We cannot see them.

She describes women who “feel a responsibility to be discriminating. They have deemed it their task to be choosey for the sake of their family’s future, or even their nation’s future… in ways that involve meticulous timing and intense quality control… in sum, to give birth to and then form a child who will cohere to the expectations of her family, friends, and neighbors.”3

Hall argues that “the new era of reproductive biotechnology actually poses many of the same old ethical questions: ‘Who is my neighbor?’ and ‘Am I my brother’s keeper?’ both came to mind. Also, I kept wondering, ‘Who do you say that I am?’”4

In a word, she will show how “the supposedly brave new world of biotechnology overlays an old world of fear, shame, and class aspiration.”5 The intense comparison inherent in each of these areas is palpably felt today, just as we see in the advertisements and photos from history.

“The irony beneath this book involves my belief that the very Protestant tradition that should have emphasized a sense of divine gratuity, human contingency, sufficient abundance, and the radical giftedness of all life came in twentieth century America instead to epitomize justification by meticulously planned procreation.”6

She discusses how the “allure of respectability” eventually led to her own Methodist tradition (toward which the whole book has an eye) being “tempered with virtues of middle-class propriety and urbane congeniality.”7

Using “the language of health, domestic hygiene, human responsibility, and divine providence intertwines so that there arises a fear of being associated with suffering, together with a responsibility, whenever possible, to distance one’s family from those mothers who seem, in contrast to the ‘clean family', careless.”8

“The implications of the divide between planned and ill-begotten reverberate throughout debates on public school funding, immigration, and regional family planning.”9

“This combination of patriotism, the balanced family of four, the assumption of proprietary leadership, and the depiction of “The Christian Family” is compelling… In a 1967-68 Gallup poll, Methodists were named the religious group “most liked” by members of other denominations. As this friendly form of neighborly leadership hit home, it did so with a powerful rhetoric of “responsible parenthood.”10

As an observation and brief aside, this term is not a monopoly of the Protestant world or of the Lambeth conferences. It first makes an appearance in Catholic teaching—correct me if I’m wrong—in the 1968 encyclical Humanae Vitae11 as contrasted with the 1930 Casti Connubii, which makes no such mention.12

“If this salvific, nuclear family is configured within an American meritocracy, it takes but one more slight step to suggest that family planning for human “capacity” is the means through which a nation will redeem the world. Thus, Christian parents are not only permitted to space their children, but family planning… is a ‘religious obligation.’”13

As a Methodist herself, Hall describes a large motivation for this work “derives from a fear that my own church has been responsible for baptizing the divide between children perceived as chosen and children perceived as just occurring through default. This has had implications in civic conversations about both selective terminations and immigration from Latino-Catholic countries. The national obligation to plan one’s family for quality and quantity control has become an assumption of twenty-first-century life.”14

This book will “consider how mainline Protestants in the United States came to see themselves as the forgers of a new worldwide domestic order through the promotion of properly calibrated, usefully capable children.”15

“As Weber read the American version of Protestantism, “this asceticism turned with all its force against one thing: the spontaneous enjoyment of life and all it had to offer.”16 He saw American culture on the verge of requiring the economic calculation of every moment and every life.”17

Rightly does Hall declare that “the affirmation of life to which Christians are called eschews this entire schema of appraisal, even at the risk of seeming to be “filled with new wine.”18

Each chapter, including the introduction and conclusion, begins with a selection of hymnody. These are meant to linger and contrast—a bit painfully—with the messaging of the contents presented in each chapter, providing a jolt of otherworldly vision.

Christians are called to see differently, after all.

Her presentation is gentle but searing, allowing “the hymns to sit as a historical testimony to otherwise.”19

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Currently, I am reading through Amy Laura Hall’s book Conceiving Parenthood: American Protestantism and the Spirit of Reproduction.1 I am less than a third of the way through, but even still it is making a lot of things click in a “so this is how we got here” kind of way. Our social shaping and moral reasoning has been quite malleable, to say the least! Current attitudes did not arrive in a vacuum.

Anyways, it deserves a bigger treatment and at least a few rants, but I’d like to focus on a couple particularly demonic sounding ads.

I have some (perhaps rhetorical) questions. They are paired with quotations that have been mulling around in my mind and also in a mess of a google doc. As I see it, there are always, always, always three interrelated considerations in fertility and sexuality conversations — the body, sex, procreation.

How we think about one is inextricably tied up with the other two—and vice versa. Of course, each deserves its own treatment. But I am fascinated by the interplay between the three (obviously.)

These ads seems to be a perfect case study in how the trio interacts. Consider this a primer on what I’m constantly preoccupied with thinking about, and perhaps things to come.

The Body

• How is the woman’s body construed? How have we been taught to think about the female body? In the year 2025 with much more information available2, what have we ourselves been taught?

• Is there an attitude of dominance and mastery, or understanding and reverence?

• Who is the expert? What messaging do we receive from medical experts today?

• How has our theology interacted with embodied concerns generally?

• Do our Christian communities approach the body differently than secular society? In what ways ought we?

“When I came in and sat down and looked around, I realized it was a Roman church full of plaster statues and bad art, realistic art. I hated the statues; all the emphasis on the human body. I was trying to escape from the human body and all it needed...

I saw the bodies standing around me on all the altars... and I remembered that they believed in the resurrection of the body, the body that I wanted destroyed forever. I had done so much injury with this body…

But could my vapor love that scar? And then I began to want that body that I hated, but only because it could love that scar. We can love with our minds but can we love only with our minds?”

- The End of the Affair, Graham Greene

Sex

• How is married sexuality construed? What are the relational dynamics here?

• Are women not supposed to enjoy sex? Is it just for their man’s pleasure or what?

• What role do biological realities play? Is the fact of fertility a given? Is it a thing to be turned on and off, gotten rid of, or a reality to be navigated together?

• What attitudes has the man been imbibing? Does he have any ongoing agency or role to play here?

• What have we been implicitly or explicitly taught about married sex? In what context ought we to have been formed in this area?

“The divinization of eros is not innocent. Even false gods require offerings... Eros, be it through high art, touches depths in us for which we have no words. It calls forth a sacrificial impulse of which we may not be aware - except in the darkness of the night. It matters to resolve freely in advance, in the light of day, at which altar we wish to perform it.”

- Chastity, Erik Varden

Procreation and Children

• What’s the messaging here about pregnancy? Children’s role in a marriage?

• Do there seem to be any givens about the reality, the fact, of fertility in marriage?

• Do we have a concept of children as gift or a product of the will?

• How were we taught to handle the discernment process of welcoming children?

“There are reasons, then, to think that the intrinsic vulnerabilities and luck within ordinary procreation are structurally necessary for understanding its “biological success” as a gift… “In Sandel’s hands, the gift analogy allows him to draw a sharp contrast between an “ethic of willfulness” and the “claims of giftedness,” which enables him to stay above the metaphysical fray by arguing that an ethic of gift supports crucial virtues. Specifically, the ethic of willfulness reshapes “three key features of our moral landscape—humility, responsibility, and solidarity.” Humility is constituted by the refusal to engage in mastery over life through retaining an “openness to the unbidden.” Moreover, increased mastery would mean our talents are not “gifts for which we are indebted,” but “achievements for which we are responsible.” Enhancement would thus mean “the explosion, not the erosion, of responsibility.” It is one of the benefits of being “creatures of nature, God, or fortune” that we “are not wholly responsible for the way we are.” As areas of life “once governed by fate” are transformed into “arena[s] of choice,” parents of disabled children will bear a greater (social) responsibility than when genetic screening was not an option. Such an explosion of responsibility also threatens our solidarity with those less advantaged than ourselves… Pessimists might regard the costs of our virtues of controlling fertility as a reasonable trade-off for the option of not creating (putatively) miserable individuals. And if we have pessimistic expectations about the world, then such a tradeoff seems even more attractive… As Sandel editorializes, the “drive to mastery… misses the part of freedom that consists in a persisting negotiation with the given.”

- Confidence in Life,

What rhetorical and theological resources were Christians drawing from, upon seeing ads such as that?

What kind of teaching and catechesis would we ourselves have needed to resist the implicit messaging?

What equivalent messaging do we receive today?

Do our Christian communities explicitly teach anything particularly unique about the interplay of the body, sex, and children? Or is our formation all hearsay and cultural osmosis?

Our sexuality is the building block of the most intimate bonds—with our spouse and children, yes, but including ripple-effects across broader society. Moral reasoning and action is never contained to the individual.

Any attempt to grapple with a Christian anthropology can’t go far without having these moral concerns of the embodied human person addressed. These concerns are not at all theoretical, but reveal our conception of what formation ought to consist of for the Christian. The depth of our discipleship will be revealed in our witness—a witness that is embodied in some way.

For all our painstakingly articulated orthodoxy, what witness does the fruit of our orthopraxy provide?

Erik Varden states in his book Chastity that “…the disorder we carry is more than we can sort out on our own. Like musical instruments, we must be harmonized, rightly attuned by a pitch not of this world.”

I’m not a robot and neither are you, so ramble to your heart’s content in response to these open-ended questions.

(I solicited feedback in a note a while back, and received some insightful and illuminating thoughts and messages from all manner of backgrounds. But I wanted to open this up to the email list. Because believe me, I don’t expect anyone to keep up with social media feeds—on Substack or elsewhere.)

Your email address will not be collected (but if you want . Thank you so much.

Let us begin.

*updated to say the survey is now closed, and I’ve removed the link.

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Thankfully, most of my thoughts are now out of my system and the writing out of my hands. Thanks for the welfare checks as my original article nears 18,000 views.

Now my mind is swirling with some particular feedback and such, including peripheral topics for days that could be their own essays.

At the risk of having a tiny Matthew Lee Anderson on my shoulder, reminding me of the spiritual risks of vainglory and the sharing of others' praise, I am pulling together some of the most heartening and intriguing tidbits from recent days. If nothing else, this is a place for me to revisit them for reference. And to remind me that I’m not insane. That perhaps going out on a limb was worth it.

Alas, this is nothing fancy. Just a stream of some of the not-so-public comments I want to hold onto, some of which might be of interest to you good folks. (I mean, is anyone really hate-subscribing to Substacks these days?)

With these things, one can simply try to be as clear as possible, and anticipate common misunderstandings. (The top ones being 1: You’re saying I have to have a million kids??? and 2: You’re saying I have to practice abstinence-only NFP???)

I’m going to admit I sleuthed this guy on the internet, because folks who think like this are becoming a rare breed. (I only sleuth for good. It’s the Life Considered pledge.)

Fairer Disputations and Tsh Oxenreider generously shared the original article, and then Tim Challies and Phylicia Masonheimer came across the Mere Orthodoxy version soon after publication.

Author of the (incredibly depressing but excellent) book Cheap Sex, whom my husband also had as a sociology professor.

I’m wondering if some of these “dearly held forgone conclusions” have become golden calves. Ones we are not willing to have messed with or questioned.

So I think it's a good conversation for all of us to continue having, especially as Christians. No area of life should be off limits to our individual and collective faith.

Katelyn and I went to the same undergraduate school but at different times, so we never crossed paths. And only learned we had the same alma mater a few years ago, after connecting on Twitter. It is The Year of Our Lord 2025 and apparently anything is possible.

Technically Human

Christians Need to Talk About Sex

I’ve shared here and elsewhere that when I told my Dad I was writing a book about contraception, his first question (after a beat) was, “But what am I going to tell my friends?” His next question: “How much is there to say about a condom…

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9 months ago · 102 likes · 47 comments · Katelyn Walls Shelton

A preamble

Questions of babies—and plans regarding babies—casually pervade many a conversation.

Whether it’s a play date, women’s get-together, playground hang, chats during pregnancy or after birth, it’s what parents are bound to talk about at some point. During the time I was on Instagram, questions of plans regarding children made appearances often in Q&A’s, photo captions, or newsletters of prominent evangelical women writers, podcasters, Bible teachers, ministry ladies. The topic comes up quite frequently in person and online.

I’ve also noticed sterilization is alluded to or outright talked about as a logical, sensible matter of course in all these instances.

We may have read lots of books and heard lots of teaching on various aspects of sexuality. We hear about lust, same sex attraction, purity culture, sex outside marriage. We hear about the bonding delights of married sex and the vague goodness of children. But when push comes to shove, many of us were left to our own devices to navigate sex and fertility together. We often weren’t guided to consider—in any robust way at least—how they relate, how to steward them together over the course of our marriage.

Unfortunately, the topic is compartmentalized into questions such as “how many do you want?” and internalized as such. In lieu of proper teaching and discipleship, even our most popular marriage books talk about sex as if fertility were hardly even a matter of consideration to navigate.1 If conversations online and in person are any indication, there is a lot of confusion and lack of guidance on these two as a package deal.

These discussions are completely intertwined with (and revealing of) everything else related to our view of sex and children, body literacy and women’s health, our married relationships and the life of faith as a Christian. I’ve had one foot in the Catholic world for a few years now, learning and gleaning quite a bit.2

Our engagement with the topic is anemic by comparison, lacking a commonly understood vocabulary. Developing one would help our marital discernment as we honestly wade through what more-and-less morally valid reasons there might be to avoid a child within marriage, and licit means of doing so—aided by some semblance of a theology of the body.

Those topics need their own deep dives. But as someone who now can now speak a bit of both languages in this department, I’d like to share some overarching, amateur observations. Apparently they’ve been helpful to others. Let’s begin with some low hanging fruit.

Vasectomies abound in Protestant and broadly evangelical spaces. I’m sorry to be so frank, but it’s true.

(My husband and I have also come across quite the handful of Catholics who aren’t shy about saying so, either, oddly enough).

They are, for the most part, de-stigmatized. estimates—and this sounds about right, based on observations and interactions—that 40-50% of men 38 and over in evangelical spaces have had the procedure done. Why is this? And why might it still be “deeply immoral”?3

Let’s start with what’s been the default

1. What moral issue?

2. Just do it for your wife who’s been the one enduring the childbearing. Simple.

3. Don’t ask, don’t tell. Hush-hush.

4. Or on the flip side - because deep down we know we’re coping with the inherent weirdness - joke about it.

This has served no one. It’s gotten us where we are today. And you shouldn’t feel the need to swim the Tiber if you care about these things.

Okay, let’s unpack some categories for consideration. Why should we care about rampant vasectomies?

1. Distorts the ends of medicine

I borrowed this phrasing from Matthew Lee Anderson’s shrewd essay on the subject, which is paywalled but worthwhile.

Medicine and health care generally is, by normal definitions, for the purpose of healing or aiming toward health. Fertility is a sign of health in both men and women. Consider all the medical interventions that tamp out and suppress our fertile bodies with a sledgehammer!

As I ask elsewhere, “Where do medical techniques, procedures, and approaches go beyond assisting toward health, wholeness, and dignity? When do they cross into the realm of creating new narratives—about the givenness of life? The reality of human nature? The meaning and purpose of our physical bodies?”4

Anderson describes how “medical interventions that damage the body are justified not on grounds of “avoiding harm” but healing the body. There is room within such a framework for preemptive interventions, to be sure: we can anticipate disease and dysfunction. But interventions that damage in order to preserve the body’s proper functioning are categorically different than interventions that damage when no disruption or dysfunction threatens.”5

2. Infantilizes adults

“I’m on a pastoral staff… and the others look at me like I have three heads any time this topic comes up. I rarely get more than “So what we just have as many kids as we can??” from them or anyone else.”

These are the kinds of anecdotes that pop up everywhere. They’re puzzling! We’re adults with agency.

We neuter animals because they cannot control themselves or act with the agency of human beings. They have no relational stakes in the game of reproduction to contend with, because they are not made in the image of God. I would hope our ways of relating to our bodies and our spouses look different than the animals—or children, for that matter. Such infantilization is degrading.

3. Asks little (in fact, nothing) of men in the way of understanding and working with the nature of his wife’s design

How’s our knowledge of a woman’s anatomy and reproductive system? The basic changes it goes through monthly? Do we know what ovulation is, at the very least? These are good places to start in understanding what God has made. After all, we’ve been given a default pattern to work with, quite literally built into the female body.6

One person offered this: “I think a big part as to why many Christian men don't have that understanding in their wives is that there isn't much discussion around family planning leading up to marriage. In the time leading up to my wedding and now newly wed, this [discussion thread] and Life Considered has been the only place where I've seen anyone around me discuss this kind of thing.”

He’s not alone. I’ve received numerous such stories and comments from all sorts of people. It’s safe to say we’ve all been failed in some way on the basics here. But when we know better, we can do better. I hope that’s true for individuals, pastors doing premarital, and marriages. This is foundational “Live with your wife in an understanding way” kinda stuff.7

Permanently sterilizing one’s body abdicates all necessity of needing to attend to this part of your wife—and therefore this part of your shared life. But marriage includes a partnership in navigating the cyclical nature of fertility. It is a shared endeavor. “Set it and forget it” techniques and attitudes put high priority on avoiding the inconvenience of attending to one another, as I heard someone put it.

In this spirit, “taking one for your wife” seems vastly overrated. If you’re going to “take one for your wife” in avoiding pregnancy, perhaps do so by remaining cognizant of your shared fertility and remain a partner in navigating it throughout the fertile years God gives you. That seems more manly than abdicating any ongoing responsibility and participation.

4. Denies the givenness of and reverence due the body

We don’t even have to use the word sacramental here. Christ’s own incarnation confirms the body we’ve been given deserves respect. It holds glory.8

Anderson says he has “little patience for hasty dismissals that evangelicals are ‘gnostics’ because they speak about heaven or think communion is only (though never merely) a symbol. But the uncritical accommodation of a superficially innocuous practice like vasectomies comes from somewhere, and until evangelicals face up to our deep entanglement in the spirit of the age our witness to the truth will remain impotent.”9

Deliberate alteration or suppression of the body’s healthy functions for the sole purpose of having sex seems profoundly disturbing. Attempting to physiologically stamp fertility out of the body for the purposes of not having to “deal with it” on a monthly basis seems like a rejection of our embodied selves. It’s the ideology of machines.10

The logic inherent in physiologically erasing fertility through hormonal contraceptives and IUDs continues on in sterilization. Harmful alteration of our proper functions is degrading to the person, whether male or female. “In the past, doctors would describe such interventions as ‘mutilation’—a term that has fallen out of favor, but which I think the Christian still has a stake in.”11

5. Prematurely closes off opportunities to routinely communicate in marriage

Going back to number 3, we ought to attend to the other. The dance is physical, but also relational.

When procreation is on the table each month for this season of your marriage, you are faced with communicating about it in some way. You have to talk about it—your family life, fears, desires, finances, physical health, support structures, challenges, hopes, what God might be asking of you together in marriage. Here are some questions to consider together when it comes to welcoming children.12

This discernment surrounding pregnancy, as explains, is “not a decision we have to make anew every month, but it is a decision we have the opportunity to reaffirm or revisit every month.”13

Voluntarily shutting down a foundational part of married life, never needing to be discussed again, is a loss. What does that do to a relationship? These matters are shared and intimate. We ought to be close enough to have those conversations, and reaffirm any intentions together. If not, perhaps this vulnerable communication is something to work on in marriage.

6. Prematurely closes off opportunities to remain in conversation with God

Does our relationship with the Lord include matters of sex, fertility, and childbearing? If not, why not?

Chapman again: “This is one of the gifts of… not artificially manipulating our fertility with surgery, pills, or devices. It gives us the freedom to not make permanent decisions about our family size in the face of temporary problems and invites us to remain in conversation with God about His will for our family.”14

7. Is often done on the heels of grief, in a spirit of fear, or during the throes of temporary challenges

Anderson describes how “these accommodations have made their way into Protestant moral theology by way of the logic of ‘exceptions.’ …evangelicals need “grave and serious reasons” to move forward, to only employ these means with “prayerful discernment.” As one moral theologian once quipped about this approach to abortion, the net effect among the mainline churches has been abortion on demand with tears... There is almost a pathological intellectual heroism at work in the mentality that we can affirm ‘exceptional’ practices without allowing them to become pervasive in our communities.”15

This one comes after years of observation and hearing many stories. There are resounding themes when it comes to making permanent decisions or definitive declarations, and these seem to be common ones.

Miscarriage and pregnancy loss are earth-shaking, often traumatizing. Pregnancy fears and physical challenges are very real. Parenting demands much of us, and is exhausting and overwhelming at times—particularly when all the children are quite young. We need a hopeful imagination to see beyond the most intense years, and move forward with faith in the God who is with us, and for us.

What if you change your mind in a year or two? We absolutely have “freedom to not make permanent decisions about our family size in the face of temporary problems.”16

8. Normalizes the pressure put on couples to decide once and for all to be “done”

The option—and now its universal acceptance—has created some unnatural pressures all around. Feel free to resist this definitive, black and white thinking about childbearing as the default course. Though universally accepted, we don’t need to medically finalize such things that belong to an intimately shared life.

The amount of anguish I hear from those who acted rashly—and now regret or mourn that decision—is gutting. Perhaps we were never meant to hold the weight of such pressure to permanently decide.

9. (Even more) starkly reveals our preferred tradeoffs, choosing certain things over the blessing of children

Every choice in life is a tradeoff. We’re always choosing one thing over another thing. But as Wendell Berry puts it in his novel Jayber Crow, “To love anything good at any cost is a bargain.”

Anderson posits that “In turning away from God, we have lost confidence in life… we’ve lost the ability to look at life and say that it’s good, that it’s a blessing, that it’s worth having. And I think that that has happened largely because we have embraced Mammon. We’ve embraced the comforts, the material comforts of upper-middle-class aspirations. And the deadening effects of money have crowded out fertility.”17

Perhaps we are all wrapped up in some way with the spirit of the age and resistant to the blessing of children, for reasons we won’t readily admit. Perhaps there are quite personal, physical, or practical reasons to consider. They are worth discussing with our spouse and praying through in order to discern the best way forward. To that end, here’s a list of questions that could be of use.18

Sterilization remains an overtly aggressive means of rejecting of the gift of children. Its very nature is violent, and it sends a message.

10. Is often done with an attitude of being owed deterministic control over childbearing

There is a difference between agency and absolute, air-tight control over our very nature. The difference seems to be humility, an openness to living within certain limits.

Perhaps we need some creaturely humility with our prudence. And humility has a generous spirit. Such humble generosity will answer differently to the questions “How many do you want?”19 or “So, are you done?”20

As reflected on the unknowns and loss in being willing to receive the gift of children, “Before I was married, I thought this meant being “open” to a dozen mischievous children a la the Old Woman Who Lived in a Shoe. And it does mean that for some. For others it means fewer children. For some of us, it means loss. For some of us, tragically, it means no children at all.”21

11. Communicates in a quite jarring way how much we idolize unfettered, unencumbered sex

It should be incredibly strange to think that there could not possibly be any other way to avoid pregnancy. Objectively, there are other methods (just stating facts, see point 14 as I’m not writing a book here) which don’t do damage to one another’s bodies—while also inviting or requiring being cognizant of the cyclical nature of shared fertility. If a person cannot be bothered even with those, I’m concerned about what that communicates.

What kind of people are we forming?

I wonder how much our attitudes and actions reveal us as people formed in virtue and the fruit of the Spirit. I also wonder how much our handling of sex and procreation is back-fitted to a culture pervaded by the pornographic lust in the air we breathe. That air is, by nature, sterile and self-serving.

It’s instructive to observe the lengths we’ll go to, the medical interventions we’ll subject our bodies to, in order to have pleasure without the possibility of children in sight. “…we know our idols by the violence we are willing to countenance. What begins with the worship of sex ends with the glorified scissors of the operating table.”22

12. The prospect of the death of a spouse or children

More children aren’t a replacement for lost children, or a spouse who passes away. But shutting down the opportunity to procreate has real implications for situations of tragedy and remarriage, which do happen.

13. The Christian witness

There’s some things we should retrieve as part of the whole Christian heritage. A cohesive sexual and reproductive ethic—one that speaks something distinct about the goodness of our created selves—is desperately needed today.

Do we handle our bodies, sex, the welcome of children differently than the secular world? If not, why not?23

In a succinct reminder to live set apart in our embodied selves, Anderson states, “Our calling as Christians is to conform our bodies to the death of Jesus, carrying in our bodies the dying of Jesus so that the life of Christ may be manifested through them to the world—whether that is as we age and die, or whether that is as we wrestle with fertility and infertility, or whether that is while we live our ordinary, quotidian lives… through the possession of our vessels of honor.”24

My hope is for us to think more robustly of our lives in this world beyond transactional accounts of merely what we can do that “isn’t technically forbidden because the Bible doesn’t speak to it directly.” That is a low bar for the Christian, and frankly a boring way to think.

14. It’s the lowest hanging fruit to tackle before we can figure out what the heck was going on with Augustine and the rest of those ascetic church fathers’ views on sex, desire, and procreation

Plot twist?

We haven’t even touched on interpretations of, and weight given to, the story of Onan, natural law, or Christian tradition… marriage as sacrament in Catholicism… female desire… theologies of suffering… apparently Aquinas and Aristotle… “each and every act”…implications of God the Father eternally begetting the Son… openness toward the blessing of children themselves… discerning a “clearly felt moral obligation” (Anglican) or “just cause” (Catholic) to space or avoid pregnancy… whether one is Full Humanae Vitae NFP or Humanae Vitae Adjacent, etc... among many other fun things!

Alas, I am a mere laylady. (To be continued. By someone.)

*As a bonus, I leave you with a set of quotes from a podcast (shared previously) which I commend to you

“One of the reasons why we don’t think it’s a big deal is precisely because this technology, these techniques, have shaped our thinking without us really deciding ever to think about the ethics…” // “You are trying to peel back and get beneath very deep assumptions that people have, very deep intuitions about the ways in which our wills relate to the world more broadly... a sense that the will is triumphant and we should just be able to choose these things. And this isn’t just a problem in bioethics, it really is globally pervasive.” // “There’s no underlying sense of nature, or the goods of our bodies. Everything is subject to will, and the will is animated by that sense of compassion, the urgency of resolving the felt pain and suffering people have… this contrast between will and nature is really central.” // “…there is no givenness that we are beholden to.” // “We are all implicated in the types of attitudes and practices that O’Donovan is worried about. It’s not just something out there.” // “These technological revolutions have shaped things as much, or maybe more, than the ideas.” // “At some level, we have to come to terms with our own flesh… my encounter with my body just on its own is not good news, and the only way that becomes good news is hearing the gospel that Christ died and rose again, and the body is the sort of thing that will be raised with Christ.” // “…even medicine itself has lost touch with these categories of what’s natural, what’s appropriate, and has become an instrument of serving people’s wills, of allowing people to fulfill their vision for their own lives, regardless of whether or not it is curing real disorders…” // “We should take seriously the fact that we are all implicated in this, and find quotidian ways of resisting these manners of thinking… There are all sorts of ways in which Christians are unwilling to contemplate or be attentive to the limits of their flesh… We have, in very ordinary ways, embraced the manipulations of our bodies according to our wills such that we want to live our preferred lives.” // “On these issues… I have been approached by many men in evangelical churches who have no qualms, no compunctions about getting vasectomies. And I find that very astonishing. I think being rigorous to evaluate our own practices in our own communities and to question the things we’ve taken for granted is absolutely crucial before we attempt to proclaim the good news of nature, as it were, to the world.” // “I’m just a load of joy to be around… bringing light and happiness everywhere I go.”25 (Can relate.)

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1

Ramblings

Evangelical Sex VS. Catholic Sex

(Note: this post is definitely meant for adults. I don't get crass or graphic, but it's a mature and sensitive subject…

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3 years ago · 432 likes · 175 comments · Emily Hess

5

The Path Before Us, with Matthew Lee Anderson

#595: The Question of Vasectomies

TLDR: Why vasectomies are still problematic…

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2 years ago · 21 likes · 13 comments · Matthew Lee Anderson

9

The Path Before Us, with Matthew Lee Anderson

#595: The Question of Vasectomies

TLDR: Why vasectomies are still problematic…

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2 years ago · 21 likes · 13 comments · Matthew Lee Anderson

11

The Path Before Us, with Matthew Lee Anderson

#595: The Question of Vasectomies

TLDR: Why vasectomies are still problematic…

Read more

2 years ago · 21 likes · 13 comments · Matthew Lee Anderson

12

Blessed Endurance

Practicing Prudence Without "Planning" My Family

This essay is in the first person for a reason. While I believe the biblical principles here should be considered in any Christian marriage, I am obviously not in authority over anyone else, and this is not the same as having a conversation with a friend who, for whatever reason, doesn’t feel it prudent to welcome another child…

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a year ago · 28 likes · 24 comments · Leah

13

Through a Glass Darkly

Family Size, Soul Ties, and Fatherhood

Friends, if you are reading these words, I want to thank you for still being here. Because after I published my Q&A on IVF last week, a whole bunch of people no longer are. I lost more subscribers over that piece than anything else I’ve written here. I don’t regret writing it, though. I did the very best job I could to present those teachings with chari…

Read more

2 years ago · 104 likes · 13 comments · Emily Stimpson Chapman

14

Through a Glass Darkly

Family Size, Soul Ties, and Fatherhood

Friends, if you are reading these words, I want to thank you for still being here. Because after I published my Q&A on IVF last week, a whole bunch of people no longer are. I lost more subscribers over that piece than anything else I’ve written here. I don’t regret writing it, though. I did the very best job I could to present those teachings with chari…

Read more

2 years ago · 104 likes · 13 comments · Emily Stimpson Chapman

15

The Path Before Us, with Matthew Lee Anderson

#595: The Question of Vasectomies

TLDR: Why vasectomies are still problematic…

Read more

2 years ago · 21 likes · 13 comments · Matthew Lee Anderson

16

Through a Glass Darkly

Family Size, Soul Ties, and Fatherhood

Friends, if you are reading these words, I want to thank you for still being here. Because after I published my Q&A on IVF last week, a whole bunch of people no longer are. I lost more subscribers over that piece than anything else I’ve written here. I don’t regret writing it, though. I did the very best job I could to present those teachings with chari…

Read more

2 years ago · 104 likes · 13 comments · Emily Stimpson Chapman

18

Blessed Endurance

Practicing Prudence Without "Planning" My Family

This essay is in the first person for a reason. While I believe the biblical principles here should be considered in any Christian marriage, I am obviously not in authority over anyone else, and this is not the same as having a conversation with a friend who, for whatever reason, doesn’t feel it prudent to welcome another child…

Read more

a year ago · 28 likes · 24 comments · Leah

19

Blind Mule Blog

How many do you want?

Yesterday as I was scrambling to clean the house, I was thinking about how the Lord comforts us all differently, giving us different benefits, unique portions. Andrew and I just celebrated our fourth wedding anniversary. We were living with my parents in the aftermath of Hurricane Helene, and I hadn’t washed my hair in many days. I whined about it, and …

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2 years ago · 59 likes · 8 comments · Sarah Rowell

20

Blessed Endurance

So, Are You Done?

I’ve been hearing it since the birth of my second child. At that time, God had given me a daughter and a son…

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2 years ago · 74 likes · 31 comments · Leah

21

Paging Dostoevsky

Bleeding Heart

A note to readers: the topic of this essay is more personal than usual and deals with pregnancy loss. I understand if you feel the need to skip this one. Otherwise, thanks for reading…

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a year ago · 74 likes · 43 comments · Kelly Garrison

22

The Path Before Us, with Matthew Lee Anderson

#595: The Question of Vasectomies

TLDR: Why vasectomies are still problematic…

Read more

2 years ago · 21 likes · 13 comments · Matthew Lee Anderson

“It is easy for me to imagine that the next great division of the world will be between people who wish to live as creatures and people who wish to live as machines.”

― Wendell Berry, Life is a Miracle

Anyone who has spent time following discourse surrounding the topic of technology will find much concern, enthusiasm (or ambivalence) falling into several major categories. Oft discussed are smartphones, social media, screen-based learning, dating apps, pornography, ChatGPT, LLMs, and AI of various kinds and degrees. Their issues are legion and we must heed warnings of them. These developments hold potential of harm to psyche and soul, our views of sexuality, cultural transmission of values or lack thereof, relationship formation, cognitive development, loneliness, and more. Still, despite the importance of seriously grappling with these prominent technologies, we must also devote attention and careful consideration to a somewhat neglected (but no less important) topic: medical technology.

Here we will examine how western society has come to approach the deeply human matters of medicine while ruled by the ideology of machines. Using Neil Postman’s book Technopoly, special consideration will be given to matters of fertility and mortality as it relates to his chapter The Ideology of Machines: Medical Technology.

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When it comes to our human relationship with any sort of technology, Jeffrey Bilbro has noted that any analysis “must build on a coherent anthropology, a robust understanding of who humans are and what our telos is.” This coherent anthropology has historically been provided by religion and philosophy, often in tandem. This understanding has lagged behind—or been warped and forgotten— amidst the dizzying pace of technological change, leaving no facet of life untouched. For context, Postman juxtaposes our moment in time with the changes wrought by the printing press. While drastically changing communication and society, culture had around 200 years to settle into that new normal before the next major society-altering inventions.

Our current moment commands intense consideration of fertility and mortality. Matters of life and death have always pervaded societies, yet the techniques available today have eroded much of the givenness—and many of the natural guardrails—long associated with the good purposes of reproduction and sexuality, along with the expectations associated with life’s beginning and life’s end. Our former tools have given way to, as Postman puts it earlier in the book, “the idea that if something could be done it should be done.”1 and traditional thought-worlds are therefore made to be “invisible and therefore irrelevant… so that our definitions fit the new requirements.”2

The way in which a Technopoly operates is not, therefore, by way of neutrality.

In fertility and mortality, evaporating natural limits have left a void. What fills it, providing those new requirements? What now grounds our understanding of these experiences of the human person? What role does the practice of medicine play in our collective understanding of health, dignity, control, morality?

In her journal article What is Medicine For? Kristin Collier provides a compelling image to hold urgent questions: “Consider an analogy. Modern scientific medicine is like a massive boat propelled by cutting-edge technology. The boat is impressive, moves expediently, travels great distances, but in which direction and towards what destination? Science and technology alone cannot know. The metaphysical thing you do not see, which directs the boat to its proper, good destination, is the rudder of philosophy. This philosophical rudder is essential for aligning the direction of science and technology with the good goals of medicine. Who is attending to the philosophic rudder of medicine today? The powerful and profitable tools of science and technology, though necessary to medicine as a profession, have created a myopic lens through which medicine’s gaze has been captivated for at least a century and probably much longer.”

Indeed, one could read her entire paper as a response to Neil Postman’s chapter The Ideology of Machines: Medical Technology. The thirty year gap only increases its prescience. Postman states, “Philosophers may agonize over the questions “What is truth?” “What is intelligence?” “What is the good life?” But in Technopoly there is no need for such intellectual struggle. Machines eliminate complexity, doubt, and ambiguity. They work swiftly, they are standardized, and they provide us with numbers that you can see and calculate with.”3

Matters of our fleshy, embodied life are with each of us constantly. No one evades them. So what are we to do with the streamlined, standardized methods which have encroached into the most delicate and ontological of human experiences? Medical science itself cannot tell us. Where do the goals and limits of modern medical practice now come from… and how did we get here?

In this chapter, Postman looks at historical vignettes which highlight the changing perception and work of physicians. He begins with the invention (or discovery) of the stethoscope in the early 1800’s. By today’s standards, such a simple tool could be seen as laughably benign. Yet he explains, “A somewhat less trivial objection raised by doctors was that if they used an instrument they would be mistaken for surgeons, who were then considered mere craftsmen. The distinction between physicians and surgeons was unmistakable then, and entirely favorable to physicians, whose intellect, knowledge, and insight were profoundly admired.”4

Here we glimpse the last vestiges of a long-standing perception of physicians. This is reflected in the social deference bestowed to the discipline over the “mere craftsmanship” of surgeons. The sharp distinction reflects the purpose of physicians as compared to surgeons, including the disposition and qualities necessary for each profession at the time the stethoscope came into the picture.

Postman continues, describing how the introduction of certain instruments changed the physician’s encounter with patient: “But a serious objection raised by physicians, and one which has resonated throughout the centuries of technological development in medicine, is that interposing an instrument between patient and doctor would transform the practice of medicine; the traditional methods of questioning patients, taking their reports seriously, and making careful observations of exterior symptoms would become increasingly irrelevant. Doctors would lose their ability to conduct skillful examinations and rely more on machinery than on their own experience and insight.”5

Taken on its own, one could argue the benefits of various machines and instruments which aid physicians in their healing. Indeed, few people desire to go back to an age before life-saving measures and myriad advancements have been a mercy to us all. Imperceptible changes came with the way the use of such tools altered the emphasis given to examining disease over the patient as a whole—and objective knowledge over the subjective. The introduction of the stethoscope was the beginning of an ever-accelerating change in the work of physicians.

In summarizing the mental shift, Postman explains that now, “Medicine is about disease, not the patient. And, what the patient knows is untrustworthy; what the machine knows is reliable.”6 Postman goes on, positing that “subjective forms of knowledge have no official status, and must be confirmed by tests administered by experts. Individual judgements, after all, are notoriously unreliable, filled with ambiguity and plagued by doubt… Tests and machines are not.”7

Dangers abound in eliminating the incalculable, relying excessively on metrics. As physician Josh Briscoe asserts, “Health has both objective and subjective facets. You can’t just look through one facet. You may miss an insidious tumor if only you relied on a patient’s symptomatic reports. You may ride rough-shod over someone’s existential distress if you only saw the normal tests and scans. What does it look like to pursue health in obstetrics, pediatrics, psychiatry, oncology, hospice, and so on? What does health look like with cancer, with bipolar disorder, with quadriplegia, with Trisomy 13? We’re so inclined to let our metrics, given to us by our technology, and our diagnoses lead the way that we may miss opportunities to see, sustain, and restore health.”

We go on to learn from Postman how the further parceling out of specialized tasks and procedures inevitably changed the way information was gleaned. This change altered the relationship of medical providers to patients, and the physician’s own learned skills and insight. Postman continues, “By the turn of the century, medicine was well on its way to almost total reliance on technology, especially after the development of diagnostic laboratories and the discovery and use of antibiotics in the 1940’s. Medical practice had entered a new stage. The first had been characterized by direct communication with the patient’s experiences based on the patient’s reports, and the doctor’s questions and observations. The second was characterized by direct communication with patients’ bodies through physical examination, including the use of carefully selected technologies. The stage we are now in is characterized by indirect communication with the patient’s experience and body through technical machinery. In this stage, we see the emergence of specialists — for example, pathologists and radiologists – who interpret the meaning of technical information and have no connection whatsoever with the patient, only with tissue and photographs. It is to be expected that, as medical practice moved from one stage to another, doctors tended to lose the skills and insights that predominated in the previous stage.”8

It is worth considering what assumed skills and insight doctors lost in the fragmentation wrought by specialization. The most prominent might be the interplay of the physical with the emotional, mental, and spiritual. It isn’t entirely reasonable to expect a majority of providers working in our current medical system to have the ability—or time—to attend to all facets of the human person. We can be enormously grateful for specialists seeking excellence in their professions, even as we hope they are also formed in the humanities. The specialist’s labors toward healing require intricate understanding, focused research, and diligent, dedicated time. The quality of our health has truly benefitted.

At minimum, a skill to revive and fiercely protect would be points of initial contact with patients. In his essay, In Defense of Human Doctors, physician Brewer Eberly notes, “There remains an assumption that it only takes that long – through prewritten templates, skillful interruptions, and tortured rituals of expectation-setting (“we only have time to discuss one problem today”) – for the necessary data to be strip-mined from the patient’s story.” Yet he implores, “When it comes to the first moves of primary care, in which we are often welcoming patients to speak of their sufferings for the first time, silence may be the most intelligent form of communication we have.”

As “indirect communication” has become commonplace, however, our expectations of being met in suffering still rely on other people—not machines—to bear witness to it. Medical professionals and society at large each play a role in recognizing the one in distress. In the words of Leah Libresco Sargeant, “Women are particularly vulnerable to pressure to make their ailments conform to expectations… Without actively intending it, people in distress rely on our expectations of illness to find a way of being recognized.”

What do we expect responses to illness and ailments to look like?

In matters of women’s health, this most often looks like menstrual complaints being met with assurances of pain being “normal” or given a prescription to suppress their cycle with hormonal contraception, instead of a solution to the root cause. In matters affecting procreation, couples are routinely told to endure three miscarriages before a traditional provider will—potentially, and not always—look into causes of miscarriage or infertility. Even so, many women and couples end up being handed the vague non-diagnosis of “unexplained infertility” and shuffled along to IVF, bypassing a path toward health altogether. Caitlin Estes, a Certified FertilityCare Practitioner, captures the experience with many OBGYNs as “a shockingly short journey from “Oh, don’t worry: just come back if you haven’t conceived in a year… I’ll probably see you next month!” to “There’s nothing more we can do for you. We recommend trying IVF.” What happens in between is often rushed, chaotic, confusing, and a bit soul crushing. You go in with the determination to do whatever it takes, but it’s not long before you’re wondering if it should really be asking so much of you physically, mentally, and spiritually.”

In matters pertaining to end of life, this looks like illness and ailments—whether of the body, mind, or social support—increasingly being seen as a mark of “eligibility” for voluntary death. An opposite approach to death includes unrealistic expectations of artificially prolonged life at any cost. Both approaches resist a truly good death, meeting challenges with either a heavily controlled extension or termination of life.

Devoid in these cases of women’s health, reproduction, and death is an acknowledgment of the just support due the suffering of persons. Acknowledgement of the finite and dignifying limits we ought to work within are, however, vital.

Continuing on, we are introduced to a shadow side of this ability to specialize, particularly paired with the American ethos. Postman notes how America, from its earliest stages, looked upon European medical methods as “mild and passive.” By contrast, Americans “accepted the imperative to intervene, to mistrust nature, to use the most aggressive therapies available.”9 Side effects from such aggressive approaches now “can be solved only by the further application of technology.”10 Citing common procedures in medicine today, he follows with the astounding rates of interventions required to deal with their ramifications.

The compounding cycle is, in many cases, perpetuating its own problems.

As for the healthcare women routinely receive, you don’t have to look far to hear stories of the reverberating side effects of hormonal contraceptives. This is a realm of research finally gathering steam and credibility, as the excessive prescription of the pill has left behind mental, relational, and physical harm requiring further damage control. The ubiquitous use of hormonal birth control often leads to depressive symptoms requiring antidepressants to manage, some of which routinely alter the experience of sexuality for huge swaths of their users. As for end of life care, aggressive approaches commonly result in further ailments needing tending to. For those terminally ill or in natural decline, these are tender and complex realities to navigate. The most dignifying of palliative care can help temper the painfully prolonged cycle of technological interventions necessitating each other.

We are told that “As the training of doctors changed, so did the expectations of patients.”11 As such, “if a patient does not obtain relief from a doctor who has failed to use all the available technological resources, including drugs, the doctor is deemed vulnerable to the charge of incompetence… Moreover, doctors are reimbursed by medical-insurance agencies on the basis of what they do, not on the amount of time they spend with patients.”12 Here we have a vicious, mutually reinforcing cycle. Is it any wonder we come to expect aggressive, automated, plug-and-play care unless taught or shown otherwise?

As a result of these morphing innovations and subsequent expectations, “There are no longer methods of treating illness; there is only one method – the technological one. Medical competence is now defined by the quantity and variety of machinery brought to bear on disease.”13 If earlier adoption of this method was utilized with less technological finesse, we now have the mechanical precision beyond prior belief.

But not all medical competence aims toward health. Not all methods seek dignified wholeness. Not all medical practices and procedures are free of machine thinking. Rightly ordered agency gets eclipsed by illusions of control.

Take, for instance, the basic physiology in women of childbearing age. Their cycle has four distinct phases: follicular, ovulatory, luteal, and menstrual. These impact the mood, energy, creativity, and emotion of women in various ways. As with the four seasons, perpetual sameness wouldn’t serve nature well. The dancing interplay of shifts in weather, flora, and fauna—including the hidden activity at work even in winter—reflect the female body. While research has moved forward proving the necessity of menstrual cycles for long-term health—including their importance as the “fifth vital sign” of overall health—girls and women (and the men who love them) are still routinely left in the dark about the workings of their bodies. They are prescribed hormonal contraceptives for everything from acne to birth control to painful or irregular periods (at alarmingly young ages). The implication of such an approach by medical providers is that female reproductive issues are irrelevant until procreation is a concern, menstrual cycles are optional (not integral), and symptoms temporarily patched and suppressed aren’t important enough to address for the sake of overall health.

Machines have on/off switches. Female physiology should not. It is complex yet understandable. Being more like a garden and in need of similar attention, it strains, revolts, and withers when treated in uniformly programmed ways.

As L.M. Sacasas contends, regarding the generally cold and impersonal standardization in modern life, “Of course if you insist that the human being operate like a machine, with the efficiency of the machine, with the regularity of the machine, the predictability of the machine, the fleshy creature breaks down, rejects that, reacts against that, and we’re beginning I think to feel that more implicitly or more viscerally…”

If “Medical competence is now defined by the quantity and variety of machinery brought to bear on disease,” then what has anchored medicine, undergirding its own telos? The Hippocratic Oath, while never a universal given, was historically a source of unity among medical practitioners. Acknowledging the current tension, L.S. Dugdale explains that “Oaths make clear what kind of art doctors practice… yet, the question is not simply whether the medical profession is moral, but what kind of morality it professes. In a divided world, physicians must seek unity on the fundamentals.”

Even so, physician Brewer Eberly has identified three challenges for talking about health: Not agreeing on what health is, the medical instrumentalization of what we talk about, and the collective vision of health—the “communities that make love coherent and possible.”

In medical practice, we observe this incongruence in the primacy of the male body (or hormonally flattened female body) in research trials. The lack of medical training to identify biomarkers of fertility in women’s cycles, aiding a picture of overall health. The ubiquity of hormonal contraception as the uniformly offered solution to women’s menstrual ailments. As FertilityCare Practitioner Caitlin Estes aptly points out, “When physicians aren’t even taught how to properly understand, diagnose, or treat underlying medical issues that cause infertility, it’s not surprising that vulnerable women are then sent off to “fertility specialists” who have learned the science of bypassing much of the body’s physiology. When you don’t understand something, you can’t work with it—you just have to work to control it.”

We also see these challenges confusing the end goals of women’s health, where healing and restoration of health is substituted with circumvention and violent creation. As the manifesto Stop Hacking Humans succinctly explains, "The lab setting then opens the door to further extensions of body hacking, all the while leaving the underlying condition unresolved.”

We see yet more instrumentalization of human experience in the growing markets for egg and sperm. The procedures involved with undergoing In Vitro Fertilization. The practices of intense genetic testing, ranking, sex selection, or modification of pre-implanted embryos. The worldwide surrogacy market. The research into artificial wombs. The bestowing of legal parenthood after the assembled patchwork of composite material and processes to create a child. The assumptions inherent in first trimester genetic screening. Elective abortion—of naturally conceived children, or those carried by surrogates and not up to quality-control standards. Stem cell research and use of aborted fetal remains. Indefinite storage or destruction of frozen embryos.

We also see these three challenges Eberly describes when considering the navigation of life’s end—namely, decisions around whether and how to artificially extend life or whether to entertain assisted suicide. Ethan Schimmoeller writes of our modern wrestlings: “Where death cannot be defeated, its authority can be subdued by professional discourse and once more recapitulate medicine’s drive to master death. Taken together, our novel surrogates for traditional ways of caring for the dying unite to deny and evade death, despite the irony of admitting the technological limits of medicine.”

Lack of agreement on the definition of health, plus a utilitarian pragmatism—combined with an absence of communities of love—leaves ready ground for an ever-expanding instrumentalization of human experience.

These challenges have, overall, tilted toward one side of the equation. Embodied friction is currently met with a well-oiled path to the achievement of desires, ease for medical providers, or the benefit of the medical system at large. Optimization of this path becomes the norm. In the words of L.M Sacasas, “The implicit demands of our social structure—economic and technological—is that the body is a point of friction, that hampers the efficiency of the system, the overall techno-economic system.”

Postman acknowledges the stranglehold these developments have had on medical practice at the systemic and granular levels, and therefore how dissatisfied many physicians were even three decades ago. He notes that “Doctors themselves feel restricted and dominated by the requirement to use all available technology.”14

This could very well be applied to the minutiae of today’s electronic medical record documentation, the tests and methods used out of an abundance of caution to avoid malpractice, as well as morally dubious practices affecting sexuality and the delicate beginnings and ends of life. It seems there is no terrain of traditional, modern healthcare untouched by Technopoly. The current systemic models of profit above all have crushed the spirits of many medical professionals. Those who entered with hopeful aspirations of patient-centered healing have become disillusioned with the simultaneous limitations and requirements set upon them. As a result, incredible numbers of professionals are leaving healthcare, as physician Edwin Leap recounts. Those who remain are often themselves in need of mending, indications of a lack of nurturing formation and humane expectations along the way.

Brewer Eberly also quotes from Technopoly that “In the eternal struggle between God and Mammon, the clock quite unpredictably favored the latter.” He contends that if medicine is an art like music, modern practices have condensed and truncated the proper sound of it. Seeing people and assisting them toward health is complex. “Like a song, suffering cannot be hurried along.” Thus, his direct primary care practice has sought to “inhabit a musical relationship with time.”

How are people handled from embryonic stage until last breath? What care do the elderly and infirm deserve? Should children be assembled and tweaked products? How ought we define their parents? What is our definition of health? What does health look like for girls, women and their hormonally complex bodies? What is sexuality for? Are gametes and wombs raw material used toward the end result of the reproductive process? What are children owed? How do we navigate death?

Collier elsewhere posits, “If medicine is no longer working from a divine anthropology, what then happens when learners are given big terms and concepts that are important to patients and medicine: terms like “justice,” “humane,” “dignity,” “compassion,” “ethics,” or even “person?” Modern medicine, with only a mechanistic anthropology, cannot possibly have any idea what these terms really mean because they are no longer rooted in the source that renders them intelligible concepts. These words are often thrown around during professionalism lectures, but they are mostly understood, if at all, only in a vague, hollow sense.”

Absent an anchoring telos, the void is always filled. Answers come by way of standardized technique. The echo of its answer often resounds with the hollow ringing of dehumanization. Altruism is often the veneer.

Oliver O’Donovan, in his 1984 book Begotten or Made?, a treatment of personhood and the fitting boundaries of reproductive techniques, identifies how a blind virtue of compassion—when untethered from anything beyond itself—can become the driving motivator for action: “Compassion is the virtue of being moved to action by the sight of suffering–that is to say, by the infringement of passive freedoms. It is a virtue that circumvents thought, since it prompts us immediately to action. It is a virtue that presupposes that an answer has already been found to the question “What needs to be done?,” a virtue of motivation rather than of reasoning. As such it is the appropriate virtue for a liberal revolution, which requires no independent thinking about the object of morality, only a very strong motivation to its practice.”

Our crisis is partly one of a reductive vision of the created person. And a person is not just a body, but a soul. According to the Catechism of the Catholic Church, our personhood is wrapped up in a body-soul unity, a composite of the two. We are more than mere matter. Personhood ought not be reduced to biological functions severed from the soul. This approach is an affront to human dignity. Here is where the spark of Technopoly’s intrusion ignites all manner of disagreement, confusion, and incoherence in the modern practice of medicine, the handling of our bodies.

Postman notes in an earlier chapter that Tool-Using Cultures did not see tools as intruders. “They are integrated into the culture in ways that do not pose significant contradictions to its world-view… Medieval theologians developed an elaborate and systematic description of the relation of man to God, man to nature, man to man, and man to his tools. Their theology took as first and last principle that all knowledge and goodness come from God, and that therefore all human enterprise must be directed toward service of God. Theology, not technology, provided people with authorization for what to do or think.”15

However, in clarifying the transition from Tool-Using Cultures to Technocracies, he states that “tools play a central role in the thought-world of the culture. Everything must give way, to some degree, to their development.”16 Lastly, in the transition from a Technocracy to a Technopoly we develop “the idea that if something could be done it should be done”17 and that traditional thought-worlds are made to be “invisible and therefore irrelevant. It does so by redefining what we mean by religion, by art, by family, by politics, by history, by truth, by privacy, by intelligence, so that our definitions fit the new requirements. Technopoly, in other words, is totalitarian technocracy.”18

Today we are offered a kind of magic. And absolute control is our modern version of magic.

Postman explains, “What is significant about magic is that it directs our attention to the wrong place. And by doing so, evokes in us a sense of wonder rather than understanding. In Technopoly, we are surrounded by the wondrous effects of machines and are encouraged to ignore the ideas embedded in them. Which means we become blind to the ideological meaning of our technologies.”19

Mary Harrington has explored the ongoing religious, philosophical, and political dynamics of how we relate to human nature, drawing “on the first half-century of the transhumanist era—an era that began with the contraceptive pill—to show that much of the contemporary confusion within the Right concerning technology, and especially biotechnology, stems from the coexistence within the conservative coalition of two mutually incompatible metaphysical paradigms for the “human”: one that assumes humans have a stable nature and another in which no such nature need be assumed.”

Where do medical techniques, procedures, and approaches go beyond assisting toward health, wholeness, and dignity? When do they cross into the realm of creating new narratives—about the givenness of life? The reality of human nature? The meaning and purpose of our physical bodies?

Physician Josh Briscoe explains the current challenge of parceling out the moral and practical aspects of medicine: “This is the subtle education clinicians get throughout training and onward for the rest of their careers: ethics is what you do when something goes awry. Everything else… is just normal. This siloing of ethics into a land of quandaries and conflicts lulls us into believing that there aren’t other processes that shape how we come to see and even generate those quandaries and conflicts.”

Fortifying this line of thought, Postman writes, “Undeniably, fewer and fewer people are bound in any serious way to Biblical or other religious traditions as a source of compelling attention and authority, the result of which is that they make no moral decisions, only practical ones.”20

If theology was once more formative and influential than any useful tools or experts of the day, it begs the question of whether this is still true today.

Pope Paul VI’s 1968 encyclical Humanae Vitae, along with the 1987 Donum Vitae, 1995 Evangelium Vitae, and 2008 Dignitas Personae, have perhaps been the most clearly defined and religiously authoritative writing—and John Paul II’s Theology of the Body one of the most comprehensive—on matters of embodiment, sexuality, procreation, and the dignity of the person within Christianity. Their prescience remains, with a wide appreciation for their stabilizing influence. Contemporary moral challenges have, however, illuminated holes in the lack of widely-held and authoritative Protestant stances on ethics surrounding matters of procreation—though some have been acknowledging and seeking to fill these holes in moral formation regarding the body generally and assisted reproductive technology in particular. Calls for good Protestant ethicists have been made, alongside explanations of reasons for the lack.

Catholic teaching has inspired innumerable books aiming to form thought and practice in the medical disciplines. Lawyer and bioethicist O. Carter Snead similarly draws on such principles in his popular-level book, What It Means to Be Human. It contrasts the prevailing expressive individualism at play in abortion, artificial reproductive technologies, and end-of-life issues with our human networks of “uncalculated giving and graceful receiving.”

Preserving or restoring these networks of uncalculated grace might be the most humane work set before us. Here is where we’re shown another way, outside of calculated thinking. Here are places where we give and receive in accordance with the teeming life—and unknowns of death—in our midst. Briscoe elsewhere reminds us, “Being human also means being frail, vulnerable, and mortal. It doesn’t tarnish our dignity to acknowledge these realities or live under them.”

Harrington also connects the “biolibertarian” thread between women despising their own offspring—a natural consequence of sex—to the despising of any life thereafter: “Full term abortion and euthanasia on demand don’t just demand to control the stuff of life itself. Such measures also attack the presumption that we are directed toward one another: that humans are relational beings.”

When it comes to embracing the intricately uncontrollable reality of our reproductive systems or the trials of a good death, networks of human community are indispensable.

We ought to revive the principles of ars moriendi (“the art of dying well”), suggests Lydia Dugdale, internal medicine physician and medical ethicist at Columbia University. In her book The Lost Art of Dying, readers are shown how the ars moriendi tradition—which originated with Christians living through the Black Plague—starts with living well. Dugdale’s emphasis on human dependence and mutuality in a good death is poignantly summed up when she writes, “community does not materialize instantly at a deathbed; it must be cultivated over a lifetime.”

Additionally, she is honest about modern medicine’s barriers to this kind of good death, suggesting a rekindling of virtues necessary for the dying to meet those challenges. Dugdale suggests that dying well necessitates coming to terms with our mortality, living and dying amidst others, combating an excessively medicalized death, approaching death with courage, conceding to our bodily frailty, and respecting the spiritual.

When it comes to our penchant for fragmented and manufactured reproduction, Kerri Christopher writes of the existential questions we would rather not confront: “When it does work, IVF bequeaths to a child some uncomfortable truths: that he has his origins in an act of masturbation rather than sexual union; that doctors selected him from among his siblings as the most likely to survive; that his siblings were thereafter discarded, or remain on ice. He will spend his life wrestling with how his existence—something objectively good—could come from something so distorted. If his mother used a sperm donor, this child might spend his adult years trying to find his half-siblings, or even his father. He’ll be grateful to be alive, but deeply confused about what family means. For the rest of her life, his mother will carry these weights in her soul.”

These are disturbing quandaries which a respect for rightly-ordered limits would mitigate. The proper bounds of creatures ought to be nestled within human networks of “uncalculated giving and graceful receiving” which interdependence provides. This approach excludes no one, and aids the flourishing of all.

Gritty blessedness can and should be seen in those living lives of overflowing familial abundance and physical health, to be sure. However, those living lives of singleness, infertility, or disability—along with our common experience of the end of life—offer their own unique, needed witness to this goodness. We are free to acknowledge suffering. If we will eschew the allure of resolving lack with a mechanized dehumanization, we can find a richer experience in the enveloping care of others.

As Wendell Berry illustrates regarding the particular case of a beloved, dying Burley Coulter in his short story Fidelity, “they thought with regret of the time when the thing that was wrong with him had been simply unknown, and there had been only it and him and him and them in the place they had known together. Loving him, wanting to help him, they had given him over to “the best of modern medical care”—which meant, as they now saw, that they had abandoned him.”

Our finite selves need the riches of belonging and shared virtue. These are more vital to a humane society than promises of life and death on our tightly grasped terms.

Demanding these fiercely managed terms often leave us committing “ontological violence,” as Michael Hanby has described it. However, a full-throttle “violence against the order of nature has consequences, whether we face them or not. Suppressed questions return, often with a vengeance.” What ontological questions are we suppressing? What consequences can we expect once the blinders of denial come off?

Postman comments, “Through it all, the question of what was being undone had a low priority if it was asked at all. The Zeitgeist of the age placed such a question in a range somewhere between peevishness and irrelevance.”21 Innovations and the availability of normalized procedures march forward, irrespective of moral qualms and pesky existential concerns.

In the case life’s end, the mere availability of assisted suicide (euthanasia, Medical Aid In Dying) puts the onus on others to justify their own existence. For the woman carrying a child with Downs Syndrome, what kind of freedom is there to say no to abortion when the assumed norm says otherwise? In the case of the conception machine’s use of donor gametes and surrogate carriers, or the creation, handling, selection, and modification of embryos—perhaps artificial wombs in the future—what it means to be human is now ostensibly up to individual will.

But the option of control weighs heavy on all sides. Our personhood is no longer infused with transcendent meaning, and instead subject to rational calculation. The availability of a normalized choice—to systematize the process of creating and ending life—transforms itself into a heavy expectation.

But these offers of a forced mastery put us in denial of our finitude, making us anxious. Physician Brewer Eberly notes how with more technical expertise in the realm of medicine and death comes increased grasping for control. And this grasping is accompanied by denial and anxiety. These twin temptations cause us to either attempt extending life indefinitely or hasten death prematurely. The same could be said for attempts to circumvent the proper and given functions of the body.

Denial and anxiety in procreation often manifest similarly to those facing death. The resulting control can manifest in fleeing, running from, avoiding—or alternatively seeking out, hastening, forcing. Fear is a good motivator. How much of medical care fosters an attitude of fearful grasping (physical, social, ethical ramifications be damned)?

Chilling yet self-evident is Postman’s statement that “Technological change is neither additive nor subtractive. It is ecological… It changes everything.”22 Mass availability and acceptance of a given medical technology creates inescapable scales of change. Though agency on an individual level remains, the reverberations throughout culture are not easily avoided.

For instance, Pope Paul VI recognized that something detrimental to the body-soul unity of sexual expression might also be detrimental to society at large. In this case, the source of downstream ills could be said to be the very modern notion of an assumed physiological separation of the unitive and procreative aspects of even married sexuality—whether through chemicals, devices, or surgeries. Widespread social change since the availability of the pill—combined later with other medically invasive contraceptive, abortive, and reproductive technologies—have vindicated the warning, if nothing else has. An assumption of physical sterility has been the source of no end of trouble, whether physiological, social, relational, or moral.

The resulting cascade of practices in medicine and norms in culture would not be possible without the medically sterilized unbundling of the unitive and procreative goods of sex. The objectification of women as objects of sexual pleasure and the objectification of children as engineered products are, indeed, two sides of the same coin.

As for death, the extremes of indefinite, artificial extension at any cost and abrupt extermination via euthanasia are both slow-burning phenomena. They arrived with welcome advances in medicine, but alongside a loss of theological and spiritual anchors for preparing for death—anchors which communally understood practices such as ars moriendi had provided.

Our approach to fertility and sexuality, death and mortality all share the fate of ecological transformation. “Like some well-known diseases, the problems that have arisen as a result of the reign of technology came slowly and were barely perceptible at the start.”23

We can note the dependency of second (and third) wave feminism on the erasure of embodied sex differences, as opposed to substantial moral progress.

We observe the detrimental social effects of ubiquitous, physiologically-altering contraception on casual sex, pornography, and the formation of marriages. Many are shrewdly rethinking the sexual revolution’s tradeoffs, indignantly recognizing the observable, studied effects of hormonal birth control on the body, brain, and interpersonal relationships, and learning of the necessity of real and healthy menstrual cycles.

We see how the ubiquitous use of hormonal birth control has led to poor mental health, often requiring antidepressants—many of which routinely and permanently alter the experience of sexuality for huge swaths of its users.

We experience the lack of training medical students receive for understanding, diagnosing, and treating underlying causes of reproductive health issues. Abortion and birth control are touted as the pinnacle of women’s health, while knowledge of (and care for) the basics of female physiology remain astonishingly elusive. Organizations such as FACTS seek to help professionals in traditional medicine fill these gaps, starting with fertility awareness-based methods. There could be a glimmer of hope for the hormonal intricacies of women to be routinely attended to. In the meantime, women are able to seek out Natural Reproductive Technology and Restorative Reproductive Medicine for practitioners trained accordingly, the efforts of which the Ethics and Public Policy Center has recently platformed.

We hear the women routinely being dismissed, ignored, or given meager band-aid solutions like the pill. Instead of investigative answers to their health complaints, they might receive drastic care when it’s too late. (The average time for a woman to receive a diagnosis for endometriosis is somewhere between three to eleven years.) The exclusion of menstruating, pregnant, and breastfeeding women from research trials—as documented in the book Invisible Women—creates gaps in vital knowledge for women’s health. Finding cures to pregnancy-related ailments such as hyperemesis gravidarum are given far less weight than the availability of automated sterility.

We can reflect on the inherent assumptions of prenatal screening. The procedures, process and implications for personhood inherent in IVF. The dehumanizing markets for even “elite” eggs and sperm or the normalization of freezing one's own eggs. The routine practices of genetic testing and sex selection of embryos, paving the way to a modern eugenics facilitated by products such as test kits for whole-genome sequencing—perhaps with IVF supplanting natural procreation “as the responsible method for producing children” in the future. The moral quandaries inherent in surrogacy’s exploitation of women, along with its disposability of children not up to contracted, quality-control standards. The inevitability of artificial wombs appears immanent, along with the normalization of children engineered from composite parts, with parents defined more by family law than natural obligations. Undesired children are aborted, desired ones become manufactured products. We eschew life through violence on our bodies and new ones, yet also force them into existence through more of the same.

We observe the increasing acceptance and implementation of legal assisted suicide (or euthanasia, Medical Aid In Dying). The vulnerable are now ushered toward death, despite noncompliance with its legal implementation. We even have suicide pods, the bleakest image of our cultural ennui. But death always has a social dimension implicit in it, despite assisted suicide being framed as patient autonomy. We can rightfully ask how churches ought to approach the euthanasia experiment where it is legal, and how we all can advocate for and participate in better end of life care.

Flattening the unruly aspects of a teeming humanity is something a machine can do quite efficiently. An approach of conquest is always more streamlined than nurtured care. Bypassing the goodness available within embodied limits skews toward dehumanization of the person. And there are always interrelated and compounding ramifications: physical, social, spiritual.

These ecologies can be changed or destroyed in a brief period of time, as we see in nature and in culture. Destruction is always easier, after all. Creation and cultivation toward health is more complex. Humans are complex. Care of the person requires attention and time ordered toward health, wholeness, and dignity.

Pope Francis captured the spirit of this approach in his description of such people as “artisans of the common good.” Dignified care of the body-soul unity—the art of attending to the whole of the person—is not lucrative, nor is it able to be supported on a mass scale with our current systems. Wendell Berry likewise writes in his book The Unsettling of America, “I conceive a strip-miner to be a model exploiter, and as a model nurturer I take the old-fashioned idea or ideal of a farmer. The exploiter is a specialist, an expert; the nurturer is not. The standard of the exploiter is efficiency; the standard of the nurturer is care. The exploiter's goal is money, profit; the nurturer's goal is health…”

Postman summarizes his conclusion of the chapter with three observations: “First, technology is not a neutral element in the practice of medicine: doctors do not merely use technologies but are used by them. Second, technology creates its own imperatives and, at the same time, creates a wide-ranging social system to reinforce its imperatives. And third, technology changes the practice of medicine by redefining what doctors are, redirecting where they focus their attention, and reconceptualizing how they view their patients and illness.24

The reigning ethos today is one of dominance, exerting complete mastery over nature. Moreseo than dignified agency working with our givenness toward true health, anything less than the utmost control over our bodies is increasingly seen as unacceptable. But absolute control is the language of machines. We are a composite of body and soul, human persons made for love, belonging, and wholeness. The cultivation necessary for this requires investigation, time, and intimate knowledge. It allows for—even requires—a high standard of agency as opposed to a steamrolled dominance.

Fear is a great motivator. We often choose, on the one hand, to seize the promise of control by fleeing from or suppressing the reality of fertility and mortality. Or we may choose, on the other hand, to grab hold of control by way of seeking out, hastening, or forcing these experiences in an effort to seize that which we feel we are owed when it comes to procreation and death.

We ignore finitude to our own and others’ detriment. The gift of our bodies, the begetting of life, and the embrace of a creaturely death can all be warped into something beastly. In a grimly mocking way, that beast returns uncontrollable.

We would do well to remember the proper agency we do have. Postman reminds us that even in the midst of a medical Technopoly, there remains “what the individual can do irrespective of what the culture is doing; and what the culture can do irrespective of what any individual is doing.”25 We are constrained to varying degrees by the ecology forming around us, but we still have our choices to make. Will we choose to be more human or machine? We ought to reckon with our own limits of embodiment, reveling in the givenness of human nature and of life itself. Unburdened from the tyranny of instrumentalization, we might just find a humane freedom.

A warm thanks to for—several months back—extending the offer to to work through this chapter of the book (and then reading and making preliminary suggestions). Though the Technopoly read-through ended up having to be cancelled, I’m grateful for the nudge to put some long-marinading thoughts and other people in conversation with Postman.

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articles, essays

parents, children

• I Had A Helicopter Mom. I Found Pornhub Anyway. — Isabel Hogben, The Free Press

• How The Online Pornography Epidemic Is Creating A Generation Of Dopamine Addicts / Testifying Before Congress — , Preserving Our Humanity

• Dear Christian Mom Of Boys — , Dear Christian Parent

• Planting Our Flag In The Real World: Parents Take The Postman Pledge — Matt Stewart, Front Porch Republic

• Taking The Fight To Big Porn — , Commonwealth Dispatches

• Parents Can't Fight Porn Alone — & , First Things

• Historic Ruling For America's Children And Families — Michael Toscano, Institute For Family Studies

• The Internet Comes Of Age — , Commonplace

general, sociology

• Shock & Awe — , Attention Span

• Addicted To Novelty — , Commonwealth Dispatches

• Celebrities Against Pornography — Jonathon Van Maren, First Things

• How To De-Addict Gen Z From Porn — Sean Fischer,

• Shut It Down — , Reactionary Feminist

• Sex In The Frame — , First Things

• The Problem With Everything Being Pornified — , GIRLS / The Mass Trauma Of Porn — , After Babel

• Feminine Opposition To Porn Is Not Hysterical — , Women’s Work

• A Return To Love — , Paging Dostoevsky

• More Young Women Will Pursue Family Life If Good Men Step Up — , Institute For Family Studies

• Conservative Women's Aunt Lydia Problem —

• Ban Porn Now — Joshua Heavin, Mere Orthodoxy

• Women Need to Stop Reading Porn — , The Credo Catholic

• Research & Sociological Reporting — Institute For Family Studies

• Essays & Opinion Pieces —

• More Essays — Verily

theological, spiritual, relational

• Porn Taught Us More Than Church Ever Did — , The Bogan Theologian

• A ‘Personless’ Purity Isn’t Pure At All — Chase Krug,

• Repentance and Forgiveness in a Pornified Age — Liana Graham & Scott Yenor, First Things

• Talking About Sex In A Pornographic Culture — , Mere Orthodoxy

• Five Sons, Hope, and Reconciliation —

• The Digital Allure Of Being Attended To / It's Good For Young People To Be In Romantic Relationships / Pornography And The Threat Of Men / Your Body is a Temple, So Act — , You Are Not Your Own Substack

• Beyond Eye Bouncing — , Patterns For Life

• Christians Are Not Ready For The Age Of "Adult AI" / There Is No Christian Defense Of Pornography / Female Culture Is Being Pornified — , Digital Liturgies / The Age of AI Porn Is Here / The Case for (a New) Purity Culture — , First Things

• Lust: The Deadly Sin Of Lesser Desire — Mark Watney, Dappled Things

• Pornography's Big Lie: The Fear Of Missing Out — Mark Sanders, Harvest USA (thanks to for reposting)

• Why Christian Men Need Friendship, Not Just "Accountability" — , Digital Liturgies

• Freedom From Porn Addiction — , Plough

• Do You Struggle With Sexual Sins In Your Relationship? — , Managing Your Fertility

• Sexual Sin Archives — , Every Woman A Theologian

• Freedom From Sexual Sin — Dr. Juli Slattery, Authentic Intimacy

podcast episodes

a few memorable and pertinent ones from the Life Considered archives

• Put Social Media In Its Place with — Mere Fidelity — A fascinating conversation in which he gleans from the public data we are now more familiar with, but adds his own hypothesis on the short vs. long-term effects of digital worlds for girls vs. boys: that the social-positioning skills girls learn via social media (while very unhealthy when channeled those ways in the short-term) is actually translatable to the real world in some sense, as we always need social finesse to get along in life. And with all the girls out-schooling men in university settings, they actually do better (in one sense) in the long-term of adulthood. However, the worlds boys inhabit online in their formative years are more of the video game and pornography variety. These do not have as bad effects (as social media does for girls) in the short-term. However, his hypothesis is that this contributes to the male crisis due to the fact that there are no real-life translatable skills to be gleaned from the artificial simulations of video games and pornography. So ultimately, they are more handicapped to navigate the actual world as men if that is how they spend their boyhood and adolescence. Of course, the immediately detrimental effects we see in girls are nothing to scoff at. But it does pose questions to pay attention to, regarding the gender-specific short vs. long term effects across society.

• Where We Talk About Porn with , Grace Emily Stark & Cassondra Moriarty — The Natural Womanhood Podcast — “People talk about how their lives were just destroyed… there’s a lot of compounding tragedies.” — “We’ve divorced sexuality from the physical realities of what it is and what it leads to.” — “Fertility awareness puts sex and sexuality in the context of your whole life, the wholeness of your person.” — “Seeing parts of the human body being used for all the things they are used for… breastfeeding, childbirth… that helps you have a much better context for what the body is for. And it can help you break one of the lies of pornography: that other people’s bodies exist for my pleasure.”

• Honest Marriage Series: Sexual Sin with Josh & — Verity — A conversation with her husband, including her story of consuming the written erotica (pornography in book form) many women tend to gravitate toward.

a film + some beauty

• The Heart Of Man — Saw this in theaters when it released during my brief stint living in NYC. (Here’s some trailers and additional videos.) Tony Anderson—whose capacity to create beauty is otherworldly—made the music for the film. You can listen to that companion album here. *Shameless plug for his wife ’s own gorgeous writing.

books

asterisk if I have not personally read, but have been recommended

• Cheap Sex — Mark Regnerus — My husband had him as a sociology professor at UT Austin. Depressing but realistic, and full of insightful data.

• Rethinking Sex — Christine Emba — Somewhat lame and obvious conclusions, but it raises the bar from the floor to… slightly above the floor.

• The Case Against The Sexual Revolution* and A New Guide To Sex In The 21st Century*— — The woman with the most soothing voice writes about the most intensely sensitive topics.

• Feminism Against Progress — — I’ll read everything she writes, sensible and level-headed as she is. Some insights in here regarding the objectification of women that accelerated with the dawning of our “cyborg” era of liberation from bodily limits.

• Your Brain On Porn* — Gary Wilson

• The Porn Myth* — Matt Fradd of Pints With Aquinas

• Addicted To Lust* — Samuel L. Perry

• The Boy Crisis — Warren Farrell and John Gray — Thoughts here.

• The Anxious Generation* — Jonathan Haidt of

• You Are Not Your Own: Belonging To God In An Inhuman World — — Not exactly specific to the topic, but he frames problems of human degradation and personal straining in piercingly insightful ways. Deserves a re-read.

• Beauty — Roger Scruton — Some really wonderful portions on the beauty of the human body, eros, profanation and desecration. Thoughts and quotes here.

• Glittering Vices — Rebecca Konyndyk DeYoung — “Drawing on centuries of wisdom from the Christian ethical tradition, this book takes readers on a journey of self-examination, exploring why our hearts are captivated by glittery but false substitutes for true human goodness and happiness.”

• Unwanted: How Sexual Brokenness Reveals Our Way to Healing* — Jay Stringer — This explores “the why behind self-destructive sexual choices to help readers work towards freedom.”

• The Agony of Eros — Byung-Chul Han — Thoughts and quotes.

• The Four Loves — C.S. Lewis — That chapter on eros is iconic.

• Theology Of The Body In Simple Language — Pope John Paul II — An accessible, succinct version of the original text for us common folk.

• The Soul Of Desire — Curt Thompson — A beautiful book on a relational community’s ability “to reshape our imaginations, hold our desires and griefs together, and invite us into the beauty of God's presence.”

• Sex and Virtue — John S. Grabowski

• From Object to Icon: The Struggle for Spiritual Vision in a Pornographic World* — Andrew Williams

• Chastity — Erik Varden — Far from a didactic lecture on the virtue, this was a gently lyrical (and at times surprising) exploration of human nature and the human heart. The heart of the person as expressed in sexuality, with all the complexity and potential therein.

• The Death Of Porn: Men Of Integrity Building A World Of Nobility — Ray Ortlund — Thoughts here.

• Sexual Sanity for Men* — David White

• Sexual Sanity for Women* — Ellen Dykas

• The Sex Talk You Never Had* — — “Unsure what is biblical and what is cultural, many women come to dating and marriage misunderstanding their own sexuality: hating their bodies, fearing sex, or driven by unchecked sexual desire. But what if we could learn about sex from the perspective of a loving, gracious God?”

• It’s Time To Talk To Your Kids About Porn* — Greta Eskridge

• Helping Your Kids Know God's Good Design* — Elizabeth Urbanowicz

• Raising Wise Kids In a Sexually Broken World* — Laurie and Matt Krieg

organizations, practical resources

for parents + caregivers

• Defend Young Minds — Here are the widely appreciated Good Pictures, Bad Pictures books, along with other parental guides and such.

• Protect Young Eyes — “We show families, schools, and churches how to create safer digital spaces.” (founded by )

• Into The Light — Parenting and Pornography series, TechSafe tutorials

for the general public

• Fight The New Drug — A “non-religious and non-legislative nonprofit… We aim to decrease the demand for sexual exploitation through education while helping individuals live empowered lives free from the harmful effects of pornography.”

• Adult Content Filtering Tools: A List

for men

• Easy Peasy Method — A secular resource

• Strive21 — From Matt Fradd of Pints With Aquinas

• Freedom Course — From Matt Jacobson

• The Samson Society — Group meetings

• Bethesda Workshops — An intensive addiction workshop

• Into The Light — Documentary, teaching series, and podcast

• Pure Desire Ministries — Groups, clinical counseling, and podcast

for women

• Magdala Ministries — “The need for women to be accompanied in the journey towards healing from addiction has gone sorely unmet, and that’s why we’re here.”

• Bethesda Workshops — An intensive addiction workshop

• Into The Light — Documentary, teaching series, and podcast

• Pure Desire Ministries — Groups, clinical counseling, and podcast

for marriages

• Fight For Love Ministries — Podcast, book, and extensive hub of help

• Good Catholic Sex and Reclaiming Catholic Intimacy — While these aren’t sexual sin specific, I appreciate the reverent yet full appreciation for the goodness of sex—alongside the deeply, inherently relational aspects within marriage. Here you’ll find theologically informed (yet immensely practical) help for intimate matters within marriage. Matters people may not know how to talk about… or for good reason, want to Google. Rare gems.

for more on women’s physiology and fertility ethics: the [female] body: a compilation

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Last winter, punted a book review request to me. Seeing as I had precisely zero published essays to my name, this was quite flattering. However, I soon realized how invested I had become in investigating and reading about the constellation of factors involved with the topic. Anyone who has received this newsletter for a decent amount of time will notice some recurring themes. So, this was hard work—yet so fun. Who knew I was waiting for such an assignment where I could explore zoning, walkable urbanism, women’s health, and a dystopian novel by in the same piece? A very Life Considered essay.

The Worthwhile Mess of Living

Thanks to for writing the book, and for the editorial help of Felix and Veronica at The European Conservative.

Here are a few other reviews (from people you can’t go wrong reading in general). They each take on their own angle, providing a variety of emphases pulled from the book and colored by their own perspectives.

• Free The Children — , First Things

• Why Aren't Americans Having Children? — , Current

• The Value Of Homemakers — , Current

• Bringing Up Babies — , Claremont Review Of Books

• Make America Family-Friendly Again — Robert VerBruggen, Institute For Family Studies

• Honey, We Shrunk The Family — , Christianity Today

• Resist Pelagian Parenting — , The Gospel Coalition

• How America Became 'Family Unfriendly’ — , The Dispatch

• What Makes America Family Unfriendly? A Q&A With Tim Carney — , The Public Discourse

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*Annnddd I found those typos in the piece… yikes. Please overlook, forgive, etc.

“Let me outline briefly as I can what seem to me the characteristics of these opposite kinds of mind. I conceive a strip-miner to be a model exploiter, and as a model nurturer I take the old-fashioned idea or ideal of a farmer. The exploiter is a specialist, an expert; the nurturer is not. The standard of the exploiter is efficiency; the standard of the nurturer is care. The exploiter's goal is money, profit; the nurturer's goal is health — his land's health, his own, his family's, his community's, his country's. Whereas the exploiter asks of a piece of land only how much and how quickly it can be made to produce, the nurturer asks a question that is much more complex and difficult: What is its carrying capacity? (That is: How much can be taken from it without diminishing it? What can it produce dependably for an indefinite time?) The exploiter wishes to earn as much as possible by as little work as possible; the nurturer expects, certainly, to have a decent living from his work, but his characteristic wish is to work as well as possible. The competence of the exploiter is in organization; that of the nurturer is in order — a human order, that is, that accommodates itself both to other order and to mystery. The exploiter typically serves an institution or organization; the nurturer serves land, household, community, place. The exploiter thinks in terms of numbers, quantities, "hard facts"; the nurturer in terms of character, condition, quality, kind.”
― Wendell Berry, The Unsettling of America: Culture and Agriculture

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What follows is by no means an exhaustive list (and it will be an ongoing, running one meant to be referred to at leisure). It is simply an effort to compile many previously shared links, as these topics often come up… yet I am always scrambling to compile or find what has stood out to me as worthy of sharing over the course of this newsletter. I’m still living and learning and will add to this accordingly.

The articles and essays are ones that have been so impactful that many of them simply came to mind, from the depths of memory, as I put this together. That’s the wonderful thing abut deliberately choosing writing to share on a weekly basis. Some piece may have been a wonderful read from that week, but also… I might never forget it.

Below, I have especially tried to categorize the reading into 1) physiology, 2) sociology, and 3) theology, ethics.

One beautiful realization throughout the several years of creating this newsletter is the fact that all knowledge is interconnected, and female embodiment and the world are more intertwined than we often realize. The lines blur yet they’re worth considering together… and that’s kind of the point of this whole endeavor at Life Considered. So, these categories surrounding female embodiment exist more to serve you in finding general trains of thought—rather than defining hard-and-fast boxed labels to complex topics. :)

And finally, because this is the internet: Sharing something is not 100% endorsement of every word and all that jazz. Read, learn, and synthesize wide knowledge, folks!

I hope there’s something of value for everyone here.

Most links have been shared in the regular newsletter. If it has an asterisks I haven’t properly gotten to or explored yet, but am familiar enough that I know it would be worthwhile for someone in the meantime.

books

physiology

• Taking Charge Of Your Fertility* — Toni Weschler — More a systematic reference book than one I’ve read cover-to-cover.

• The Garden Of Fertility* — Katie Singer

• This Is Your Brain On Birth Control — Sarah Hill — I want to scream much of this from the rooftops. She also has a new book The Period Brain.

• The Fifth Vital Sign — Lisa Hendrickson-Jack — Helpful in many ways. Practical, and expands on some topics from Toni Weschler’s book.

• Period Repair Manual* — Lara Briden

• In The Flo — Alisa Vitti — A little woo-woo-y in some parts, but the general idea of cycle-syncing and such is not entirely weird at all.

• What's Going On In My Body?* — Elisabeth Raith-Paula — The companion book to the Guiding Star Cycle Show Workshop.

• The Happy Girl's Guide To Being Whole* — Teresa Kenney — Especially helpful for girls and young women.

• Fertile Ground: A Pilgrimage Through Pregnancy* — Laura S. Jansson

• Mom Genes — Abigail Tucker — Fascinating stuff about the science behind maternal impulses.

• Ina May's Guide To Childbirth — Ina May Gaskin — Quite good. Pair with this wonderful panel Serena Sigillito was part of.

sociology

• The Rights Of Women — Erika Bachiochi — Even if it takes you a few months (as it did for me) it’s worth it. A favorite book of 2022.

• The Genesis Of Gender — Abigail Favale — Brilliant and somehow not overbearing, but incredibly readable.

• Rethinking Sex — Christine Emba — Somewhat lame and obvious conclusions, but it raises the bar from the floor to… slightly above the floor.

• Cheap Sex — Mark Regnerus — My husband had him as a sociology professor at UT Austin. Depressing but realistic, and full of insightful data.

• The Case Against The Sexual Revolution* — — The woman with the most soothing voice writes about the most intensely sensitive topics.

• Feminism Against Progress — — I’ll read everything she writes, sensible and level-headed as she is.

• Invisible Women* — Caroline Criado Perez

• Wholistic Feminism* — Leah Jacobson — Founder of the Guiding Star Project. We have an actual copy on our bookshelf, waiting to be read.

• Mothers, Children, And The Body Politic — — A wonderful and needed look at the way Christians have (and still do) show honor and dignity to the “useless” in society.

• Abortion and America's Churches — — Phenomenal.

• Conceiving Parenthood: American Protestantism and the Spirit of Reproduction — Amy Laura Hall — History can reveal a lot about our current state.

• Exogenesis — — What a society could look like if we don’t take our good bodily limitations seriously.

• Family Unfriendly — Timothy Carney — Reviews from myself and others. I begin mine talking about the book Exogenesis above.

• Hannah's Children — Catherine Pakaluk — Should honestly be bundled and read together with Carney’s book above. Each fills in gaps and illumines answers the other doesn’t get to. Thoughts.

• Natality: Toward A Philosophy Of Birth — Jennifer Banks — Reviews here and here, with a roundtable here.

theology, ethics, relational & spiritual depths

• For the Body — Timothy C. Tennent — More quotes and commentary than anyone asked for can be found here.

• Women, Sex, and the Church — Erika Bachiochi — A primer on Catholic teaching and why and how it matters, but I would heartily recommend it to women of any Christian background (or even those without.)

• Study Guide To Humanae Vitae* — — “It is an important topic to discuss and a great resource in understanding why the Church so strongly guides us towards honoring our dignity within intimate relationships and God's very hand in procreation.”

• Contraception and the Orthodox Church* — Tikhon Alexander Pino, PhD — Here’s an interview with the author.

• Maternal Body — Carrie Frederick Frost — h/t , because this was certainly intriguing.

• The Language Of Your Body* — Christina Valenzuela — It “delves deep into this and other groundbreaking questions, using the wisdom of saints like Hildegard von Bingen, Pope John Paul II and Thomas Aquinas to explore this unique, fundamental aspect of God's design for female bodies.”

• A Brief Theology of Periods* — Rachel Jones

• Flourishing In Your Cycle* and The Sex Talk You Never Had* — — “Though I still face some of these symptoms, I’ve learned much about my body’s design and how to support it each month. What’s more, I learned how to walk through my monthly cycle spiritually.”

• For the Body — Timothy C. Tennent — A helpful primer.

• Earthen Vessels: Why Our Bodies Matter To Our Faith — — Listened on audio a few years ago. Definitely helpful in framing our physicality as essential to faith and our life in this world.

• Confidence In Life — Matthew Lee Anderson — Moral philosophy above my paygrade, but worth the struggle to wade through.

• Walking Through Infertility* — — Biblical, theological, and moral counsel for those who are struggling.

• Infertile But Fruitful* — Leigh Snead — “This candid yet caring book is a help for those struggling with infertility — wives and husbands — but it’s also a tremendous resource for priests, physicians, counselors, and the loved ones of anyone bearing the cross of infertility.” Here's an excerpt.

• Begotten Or Made? — Oliver O’Donovan — This is an updated edition with an introduction by (which is worth the price of admission). Here’s a helpful discussion on the book.

• Theology Of The Body For Beginners — Christopher West — At time too conversational in tone and corney in delivery, but one I had been meaning to read.

• Theology Of The Body In Simple Language — Pope John Paul II — A succinct version of his original text with no funny business added. Quite helpful.

• These Beautiful Bones — — She’s won me over with her essays. This one is the “non-sex Theology of the Body book.”

• What It Means To Be Human — O. Carter Snead — Here’s a conversation he had with Leah Libresco Sargeant on its themes of dignity and dependence.

• Motherhood: A Confession — Natalie Carnes — Found via this review years ago and listened on audio during my second pregnancy, often to and from prenatal appointments in the dark. Honestly a most beloved book, and due for a re-read.

articles, essays

physiology

• Body Literacy Is the New "Sex Ed" — & Katie E. Vidmar, Public Discourse

• 5 Fertility Myths That Keep Women In The Dark About Their Reproductive Health — , Institute For Family Studies

• How An Online Elective Changed Med Students’ Minds On Fertility Awareness — Natural Womanhood / Yes, Why DO Women Keep Saying Birth Control Has Side Effects? / Foolish Women — Fertile Faith,

• Fertility Awareness Before "TTC" — and , Whole And Holy

• The Problem With Excluding Menstruating, Pregnant, And Breastfeeding Women From Research Trials — / Your Stories Of Being Excluded From Male-Centered Medicine — Other Feminisms / A Variable Normal — ,

• Birth Control Pilled — Katherine Dee, The American Mind

• Alien Anatomy — , Themelios

• Listen To Women: Birth Control's Side Effects Are Real — , Newsweek

• Coming Off The Pill: Olivia's Story — Anne Marie Williams, Natural Womanhood

• Doctors Are Lying About The Pill... Again — , The Credo Catholic

• Problematizing Fertility, Normalizing Disease — , The Public Discourse

• Women's Healthcare Needs More Than A Band-Aid Solution / Why I Won't Use Hormonal Birth Control — , Washington Examiner, Technically Human

• Want Babies? Treat Infertility's Root Causes — Emma Waters, The Heritage Foundation

• From Treating Infertility To Improving Reproductive Health, Restorative Reproductive Medicine Is Changing Lives - So Why Are ACOG and ASRM So Afraid of It? — , Natural Womanhood

• What I Went Through To Meet My Daughter — ,

• Rethinking Women's Reproductive Health — Abigail Favale, Church Life Journal — But really everything she's written over there.

• A Different NaPro Story: Leah Libresco Sargeant Speaks On Loss And Kindness — Simcha Fischer

• She Was Told To Suck It Up, Then Needed A Hysterectomy — , guest post by Missy Ewing, The Catholic Feminist

• A Look Inside the Endometriosis Epidemic — , Public Discourse

• I Wasn't Hysterical. I Was Sick. — Abigail Anthony, The Free Press

• The Endo Warriors — Abigail Anthony, Fairer Disputations

• Why Are So Many Girls On SSRIs? and Are You Asexual Or On Antidepressants? — , GIRLS

• Reproductive Health: Archives — Verily

• Pregnancy Conversation: Uterus and Embryo ‘Talk’ To Each Other During Implantation — Aamir Khollam, Interesting Engineering

• Let's Talk About Stress, Baby (Part 1) — , The Everything Free Life

• Could Scientists Be Close To A Potential Cure For Severe Morning Sickness? — , Institute For Family Studies

• How Does The New Postpartum Depression Pill Work? / The Role Of Nutrition In Treating Postpartum Depression — Kristen Curran, Natural Womanhood / Why Is Progesterone So Important? / Wading In Deep Darkness — , Fertile Faith

• Why "The Weaker Sex" Should Hit The Gym — Rachel Lu,

sociology

• Our Bodies, Our Anger — , First Things

• Love Potions — Hannah Rowan, The Lamp

• A Return to Love — , Paging Dostoevsky

• Rethinking Complementarity: From Stereotypes to Icons — Abigail Favale, Church Life Journal

• What Does It Mean To Be A Woman? — and Abigail Favale, The Public Discourse

• Designing Women — , Comment

• Let The Body Testify — , Plough

• Whose Body? Whose Self? — , Acton Institute

• What Is Beauty For? — Rachel Roth Aldhizer, Mere Orthodoxy

• In The Shoes Of The Woman Considering Abortion — Kirsten Sanders, Plough

• Why Does Higher Ed Throw Women Under The Bus? — Angela Franks, Church Life Journal

• The Intellectual Life Of Doctoral Student Mothers — Eileen Reuter, Church Life Journal

• Reclaiming Time: Why Women Should Challenge The Productivity Industry — , Fairer Disputations

• After Roe v. Wade and Dobbs v. Jackson — Erika Bachiochi, Plough

• Don't Forget the Fathers: How Pregnancy Centers Champion Family Formation — Alexander Hettinga, Institute for Family Studies

• In This House of Death: What Does Sanctity of Human Life Month Mean In 2026? — Nadya Williams, Mere Orthodoxy / Reproductive Wrongs — Nadya Williams, Fairer Disputations

• Whither Feminism? — Andrea Mrozek, Comment

• Men's Jeans Don't Fit Feminine Curves — , Writer’s Blog(ck)

• The Reproductive Justice All Women Need — , Fairer Disputations

• Free The Womb, Free The Home, Free The Family / Vindicating The Female Body / Femina Machina / In Praise Of The “Whoopsie” Baby — , Women’s Work

• Sex In The Frame / Thomophobia — Mary Harrington, First Things

• Women Around The World Are Being Butchered — , The Credo Catholic

• Feminism: This Is Why No One Likes You Anymore — , One Tired Mother

theology, ethics, relational & spiritual depths

• The Cross of Fertility in Christian Femininity —

• The Foundation Still Stands — Hannah Lang, Further Up & Further In

• Embodied and Consequential — Keith Lowery, Stuff I’m Thinking About

• Talking About Mary — , The Unquantified Life

• Mother Of The Unborn God — Brad East, Commonweal

• Stay In My Heart — Valerie Stivers, First Things

• Float — Lisa Nikkel, Comment

• You Matter: A Meditation on the Human Body —

• The Marian Gift Of Dependence — Margarita Mooney Clayton, Comment

• Heartbeat Of The World — Caitrin Keiper, Comment

• Motherhood: A Nightlife — Nadya Williams,

• The Theobiology Of A Mother's Voice — Kristin M. Collier, Church Life Journal

• Power In The Blood — Brad East, Hedgehog Review

• Polishing Kernels: Bodily Control as New Gnosis — Hayden Nesbit, Mere Orthodoxy

• Why I Hated My Body — , Musings From the Hearth

• This One's About Sex / Christians Need To Talk About Sex — Technically Human / Protestants Against The Pill — First Things / Shaping Conscience On Issues Where Scripture Is Silent — Katelyn Walls Shelton, Mere Orthodoxy

• Terrence Malick And The Fecundity Of Commitment — Dawn LaValle, First Things / Terrence Malick's Openness To Life — William Randolph Brafford, First Things / Malick's Masterpiece — Matthew Schmitz, First Things

• Kazuo Ishiguro's "Never Let Me Go" And The Theology Of The Body — , Gathering Light

• My Experience Of Teaching A Catholic Sexuality Class To Young Adults — , Searching For Shalom

• How Fertility Awareness and NFP Healed my Views on Sexuality and Marriage — Frances P. Starr, Natural Womanhood

• Toward A Protestant Theology Of The Body —

• The Hidden Costs Of Prenatal Screening — Sarah C. Williams, Plough

• The Quiet Return Of Eugenics / Womb Service: The Moral Dangers Of Surrogacy — , The Spectator

• Renting Wombs, Rending Hearts — Grace Emily Stark, Verily

• Ukraine’s Surrogacy Industry Has Put Women in Impossible Positions — Alison Motluk, The Atlantic

• The Dark Side Of The Global Surrogacy Trade — Julie Bindel, The Telegraph

• Surrogate Pregnancy: A Christian Perspective — Alexander Haines, Plough

• Illusions Of Control And The Ableism Of Big Fertility — Patience Sunne, Public Discourse

• Artificial Wombs, Artificial Love / The Egg Freezing Industry's False Promises — , The Public Discourse

• Is It Adultery? The Use of Third-Party Gametes in Assisted Reproductive Technology — Evan Lenow, Southwestern Journal of Theology

• Medical Miracle Or Abomination — Martha Moruza Hepler, Wanderings Through The Crimson Twilight

• How Much For A Dozen? — Patricia Patnode, The American Mind

• Human Battery Hens — Carl R. Trueman, First Things

• The ‘Wild, Wild West' Of The American Egg Donor Industry — Rina Raphael, The Free Press

• Artificial Intelligence ‘Beginning To Make Decisions About Who Is Brought Into The World’ — Wendy Tuohy, The Sydney Morning Herald

• Mail Order Eugenics — Abigail Anthony, National Review

• One Embryo. Three Parents. The Future Is Already Here. — Lydia Dugdale,

• Designer Babies Are Teenagers Now—And Some Of Them Need Therapy Because Of It — Emi Nietfeld, Wired

• Essays on Infertility And Procreation — Matthew Lee Anderson

• Infertile but Fruitful: The Devil and Delay — Leigh Snead, Church Life Journal

• IVF: In Defense of Personhood —

• It Is Good To Be Here — Anonymous, Dappled Things / Why I'm Against IVF, As An IVF Baby — Olivia Wrafter, The Critic

• The Embryo Adoption Problem — Rachel Coleman, Church Life Journal

• Surrogacy And The Challenge Of Fair-Mindedness / Why I Won't Sign The Nashville Statement / Embryo Adoption And Our Moral Imaginations / On Controversies and History: The SBC and IVF / Is There a Right to Have Children? / Breaking Evangelicalism's Silence On IVF / Responding to Dr. Wayne Grudem on In Vitro Fertilization / Why the Church Needs the Infertile Couple / Nature's Claims / The Question Of Vasectomies / Post-Mortem Procreation parts one + two —

• Reclaiming Personhood In The Public Debate over IVF — Alexandra DeSanctis, Public Discourse

• The Tragedy of IVF — Carl R. Trueman, First Things

• Embryos As Schrödinger’s Persons — The New Atlantis / The Troubling Questions Raised By Sex Selection Through IVF — Deseret / A Locked Chest — The Lamp / 5 Things President Trump's Executive Order On IVF Gets Wrong — Institute For Family Studies / Sex Isn't For Babies — Other Feminisms / Parents Are Not Their Children's Authors — First Things,

• Trump Should Make Birth - Not IVF - Free — , Compact

• Why Not IVF: Not Your Average Catholic Response —

• The Case Against In Vitro Fertilization — Stiven Peter, Mere Orthodoxy

• Blessed Is The Fruit of Thy Test Tube? — , The Pallinode

• Fertility — Beth Casteel, Dappled Things

• The Immorality Of IVF — , The Gentle Nudge

• The False Promise of IVF: A Resource Guide / IVF: Questions and Answers — , Through A Glass Darkly — Also appreciative of her wisdom here on whether Catholics—and I would contend Christians generally—can morally say they are “done” having kids.

• Everyone Is Against Eugenics; No One Will Cut Its Lifeline — , Happy Despite Them

• Designing Savior Babies — Katelyn Shelton, Technically Human

• So What If the Bible Doesn't Mention Embryo Screening? — Brad East, Christianity Today

• Resist The Conception Machine — Michael Hanby, First Things

• Big Tech Meets Big Fertility — , Public Discourse

• Against Hacking Babies — Ken Meyers, Mars Hill Audio

• Machine Antihumanism And The Inversion Of Family Law — Jeff Shafer, The Upheaval

• Biotechnology Against Privacy — Philip D. Bunn, Comment

• Stop Hacking Humans — & , The New Atlantis

• Imago DEI: Human Nature, Technology, And The Progress Dilemma — , The Heritage Foundation / Abominations, But Ethical — Mary Harrington

• What Is Medicine For? — BMJ Leader / Religio Medici — Kristin M. Collier, The Lamp

• Unsouling The Patient: Notre Dame's Lessons for Medicine — Brewer Eberly, Mere Orthodoxy (more from Eberly at The Veritas Forum, Mere Orthodoxy here and here, Comment, Plough here and here, and The New Atlantis)

• Bring Back Hippocrates — Lydia S. Dugdale, Plough

• How Catholic Institutions Are Responding to the Physician Deficit — Teresa A. Donovan, First Things

• A Theology Of Health — Charles C. Camosy, The Public Discourse

• The Church, the Medical Profession, and Applied Ethics — Michael Porter, Mere Orthodoxy

• Christian Bioethics In A Secular World: In Search Of Ethical Common Ground — , The Public Discourse

• We Need Good Protestant Ethicists — Carl R. Trueman, First Things / The Need for Protestant Ethicists: A Response to Carl Trueman — Matthew Arbo, Mere Orthodoxy

• Sexual Ethics, Freedom in Christ, and the Need for Deeper Conversations — Jonathan Voos, Finding Balance

• We Resemble What We Worship — , Further Up & Further In

• On Sex And Freedom —

• Why Sex Matters — R.J. Snell, The Public Discourse

• Evangelical Sex vs. Catholic Sex — , Ramblings

• I Talked About Women's Health In Church — , Ruthie’s Up To Something!

• From Social Gospel to Contraception — , Mere Orthodoxy

• Birth Control And The Purpose Of Marriage (Part 1 + Part 2 + Part Final) — , The Bookshop Barista

• An Anglican Pastoral Theology Of Contraception — Ben Jefferies / Anglican Pastoral Theology And Contraceptives — Jay Thomas, The North American Anglican

• Contraception: A Symposium — First Things / A History Of The Protestant Debate Over Contraception — James A. Altena, Touchstone

• Ministering to Women Includes Physical Health — , Christianity Today