Someone Other Than a Mother by Erin S. Lane

Author:Erin S. Lane [Lane, Erin S.]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Penguin Publishing Group
Published: 2022-04-26T00:00:00+00:00

Good Pleasure

“Humanae Vitae” had reasoned that children were not just a gift to the world but “the supreme gift of marriage” and contributed “in the highest degree to their parents’ welfare.” However, this was not exactly borne out in the books I pored over in my college sociology courses. It is not borne out in the books I pore over now. Marriage itself is a better predictor of life satisfaction than motherhood.[12] Within marriage, marital satisfaction, sex frequency, and affection have all been shown to be higher for couples without kids.[13] And while mental health varies greatly among parents, and over the course of parenthood, researchers have found that “there is no type of parent who reports less depression than nonparents.”[14] When I share this information with a dad friend, he tells me, “Parental happiness studies are overrated.” “I don’t know,” I tell him, “less depression sounds cool.”

Thankfully, since the invention of reliable contraception, some denominational leaders have publicly affirmed that couples can responsibly enjoy the gift of marriage, and sex, without also receiving the gift of children.

Two years before “Humane Vitae,” the General Assembly of the United Presbyterian Church (USA) put out a publication called “Sexuality and the Human Condition” that urged both married and unmarried couples to consider how their reproductive choices impacted their whole community, affirming “that God has put into our hands incredibly more effective and exact knowledge of the process of conception, including its control.”[15]

Population control was chief among the concerns of Katharine Jefferts Schori, then the presiding bishop of the Episcopal Church, when she gave a controversial interview with the New York Times. Asked if her denomination wasn’t interested in replenishing its ranks via reproduction (she mentioned that Catholics and Mormons had theological reasons for doing so), she replied, “No. It’s probably the opposite. We encourage people to pay attention to the stewardship of the earth and not use more than their portion.”[16]

Many rabbis have long allowed for the use of responsible contraception, reflecting a commitment to both the sanctity of life and a woman’s quality of life. Recently, the Central Conference of American Rabbis affirmed a fifty-year history of opposing legislation that would impinge upon a woman’s right to “weigh the tradition” alongside “her own personal decision” when it came to matters of healthcare, birth control, and abortion.[17]

Still, though plenty of people have made the argument that contraception honors life, the term pro-life remains the province of those who oppose reproductive interventions like birth control or, more often, abortion. I’ve often wondered if this isn’t conservatives’ main fear of the childfree: that we’re all sex-crazed, leisure-seeking, abortion-having hobbyists.

But this is the great fiction: The childfree are not a monolith any more than conservatives are. On both sides, if you want to even call it sides, there can be pleasure and piety, there can be ambivalence and certainty, there can be grief and relief, there can be hard realities and fragile hopes, there can be choice and life.

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