It has taken me five pregnancy announcements (I am currently pregnant with my fifth child) to stop apologizing about it. Before, I would quiver when someone would ask, “But was it planned?” or emphatically declare that they are almost two years apart when someone would, in shock, ask “But what is their difference in age, one year?”
I have not only stopped apologizing this time around, as I am a little annoyed. Why do the vast majority of people have only negative things to say? Only a small minority of Catholics or other people of good-will actually say congratulations and rejoice with you. When we told a neighbor we were expecting, she said, “Well, you know what’s best.”
Not only have I stopped apologizing, but I would like every woman in the world to stop apologizing, especially every woman in line at the abortion clinic. Why can’t I have a baby? I am happily married, I am interested and take pleasure in childhood education, we don’t have much money but we have a steady income. I am healthy and young and I have no medical conditions which make pregnancy dangerous. If I can’t have another baby, who can? It doesn’t matter what conditions you are in, whether they are ideal like mine, or heartbreaking like the woman in the abortion clinic, no one needs to apologize.
But It’s Not Responsible
Define responsible. I happen to think it takes a great deal of responsibility and generosity to rise up to the task of raising children. Of course, there are some negligent parents who never try to rise up to that task. The ones who do are vastly more responsible and generous five years into parenting than they were when their first baby was born. The demands of raising children will cultivate a wide range of virtues and good habits in you like patience, waking up early, spending less money, working harder at home, and being a good role model. If you have a large family, these demands are higher on you and on the children also. It is an opportunity for all to grow in responsibility and generosity. In your professional life, people value virtues like hard work, tenacity and resilience that help you overcome obstacles and be a better worker. So, why not in the family life?
But Your Children Will Have Fewer Things
Ah, you mean financially responsible. Yes, there is no getting around that one. The more children you have, the less material and financial wealth for each one. Even if you are the queen of England, this rule still applies. For a person with a materialistic world view in which money or what it can buy equals happiness, a large family will never make sense.
Another baby means less material wealth to go around in a family. However, it means more wealth of every other kind to go around. More humanity: it is one more person. The weight of this sentence is incalculable. One more child, one more brother or sister and everything that entails: love to give and receive, talents to share, growth to watch. There is more spiritual wealth. There are even more opportunities to grow in virtue: more opportunities to share, to be selfless, to learn to play with others and work with others.
“Worthy of our attention also is the fact that, in the countries of the so-called Third World, families often lack both the means necessary for survival, such as food, work, housing and medicine, and the most elementary freedoms. In the richer countries, on the contrary, excessive prosperity and the consumer mentality, paradoxically joined to a certain anguish and uncertainty about the future, deprive married couples of the generosity and courage needed for raising up new human life: thus life is often perceived not as a blessing, but as a danger from which to defend oneself.” (Familiaris Consortio 6)
But You Can Avoid It
Most people from older generations say something like, “In my time, we couldn’t avoid it. Now you can.” So now contraception is more widespread and very readily available. Even if your contraception fails, which in itself is abortifacient, there are morning-after pills and abortion. An important moral question: just because something is technically possible, is it good? This is a topic for an entirely separate article.
Even though I “can avoid it”, why should I? The joy and the beauty of a large family is entirely lost.
But Your Children Will Have Less Attention
This might come as a surprise, but children like playing with other children, especially sibling and cousins. Of course, it is great for parents to give children much quality time (not necessarily material possessions) and undivided attention, and that might be more challenging in a large family. There are challenges, but there are also benefits, which is more siblings. Siblings are playmates in childhood and lifelong friends in adulthood, even after parents’ deaths.
Our generation has also taken on a more unbalanced, over-attentive, “research-based” form of parenting: helicopter parenting. Parents hover over their poor only child or two children, controlling and “educating” their every move. This is much easily balanced in a large family.
But It’s Too Hard on You
Our pleasure-seeking, entertainment-addicted culture also finds it hard to understand that true joy only comes with self-gift. True rest only comes after hard work. I usually say to people, “Yes, but everything that is good requires hard work” and they can agree. Plus, if you think it is so hard on me, why don’t you offer babysitting or meals instead of unwanted advice?
What is the Contraceptive Mentality?
This all come down to the way our culture looks at babies, whether they are planned or unplanned, from a happily married woman or a single woman in the abortion clinic. Babies use up money, which challenges a materialistic world view and babies require hard work and self-gift, which challenges a pleasure equals happiness worldview. I have realized that people only say congratulations if it is your first baby and you are over thirty years old, have travelled and eaten in many restaurants and “lived a little”. They will also congratulate you if it is your second baby, very well-spaced, and you are looking for the opposite sex. All other cases will raise criticism.
Babies are generally not welcome in our culture. Large families are confusing. When I read what Saint John Paul II defines as “contraceptive mentality” in Familiaris Consortio in 1981, I understood why.
On the other hand, however, signs are not lacking of a disturbing degradation of some fundamental values: a mistaken theoretical and practical concept of the independence of the spouses in relation to each other; serious misconceptions regarding the relationship of authority between parents and children; the concrete difficulties that the family itself experiences in the transmission of values; the growing number of divorces; the scourge of abortion; the ever more frequent recourse to sterilization; the appearance of a truly contraceptive mentality (FC 6).
This need for apologizing when a woman’s body does what it is very naturally and physical geared to to, get pregnant, is connected to the contraceptive mentality. It is not just babies that aren’t welcome anymore, it is a general breakdown of family life and a hostile environment to the establishment and healthy flourishing of family life.
The social and cultural changes that Paul VI spoke about in his prophetic encyclical Humanae Vitae have certainly been significant and profound. In the last 100 years that contraception has become more widespread and available, there has not been a merely technical change in regulating fertility, but instead a huge paradigm shift on relationships, love, family, marriage and, of course, babies.
20 thoughts on “Stop Apologizing for Being Pregnant”
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I couldn’t agree more with this article. When I was pregnant with my third, so many people asked if it was planned- and that was only my third! I usually answered that question with silence and stare ( planned or unplanned, it’s nobody’s business- it’s a rude, invasive, and generally ghastly question. Is privacy COMPLETELY dead in the 21st century?) Now, expecting my 4th, even my OB asked if we were “done” after this one. If I’m behaving myself I’ll quote Tolstoy: “Life is too long for absolutes, always say ‘perhaps.’ ” In either case, I will say this much: when I was newly married (and not yet Catholic) I was set against children. I didn’t want any. At all. I was also a deeply selfish person and, consequentially, quite unhappy. My children have taught me (and continue to teach me) so much and I think brought me closer to the kind of person God wants us all to be- loving, generous, self sacrificing.. I thank God every day that He opened my eyes and taught me those lessons. Western culture (now, anyway) really is a Culture of Death. The bottom line is that you can’t expect any other reaction than condemnation of “excessive” pregnancies from a society that legalizes post- natal “abortion”, late term abortion, physician assisted suicide, and on and on. One can’t bleed a stone. Stop looking to popular culture to find affirmation for a Christian life, as Gertrude Stein wrote: there’s no “there” there.
Karen- re ” no male suffers one nanosecond from pregnancy. ALL the misery falls on women.” Please see
http://www.catholiclane.com/america-is-post-abortive/.
I have personally seen numerous fathers weeping outside abortion businesses. I have personally encountered numerous grandparents who were anxious to get to heaven to meet and kiss their aborted grandchildren.
Guy, Texas
This is so true. Women are made to feel ashamed or embarrassed because our bodies have behaved like healthy adult female human bodies. The normal course of nature is that intercourse will, at some frequency, result in the woman becoming pregnant. A contraceptive mentality has become so ingrained in our society that even married women feel guilty if they become pregnant when other people, often with no stakes in the pregnancy, judge that they should not have become pregnant. The contraceptive mentality has become so ingrained in our society that unmarried women feel obligated to provide boyfriends with sex as the price of proving whether they are worthy of love. When they become pregnant, the boyfriend may demand that they have an abortion because he “did not sign up to become a father”, as if the use of contraception is some kind of unbreakable contract the woman makes, to have an abortion if her awful, female body, does the female thing and sustains a pregnancy. (Left unsaid, of course, is the truth that BOTH parties knew contraception does not always work.) Abortion is fundamentally misogynistic, expecting women to deny the reality of the female body and envision ourselves as, essentially, broken, lesser versions of men.
If you are pregnant, whether you are married or unmarried, you have the right to have your baby, and no one has the right to tell you different.
I married in 1971 and the children we hoped for did not come immediately as we thought they would, so we fostered two sisters aged about 2 and 4. They were with us for about six years before returning to their mother full time. Not long after the start of our fostering, our first child was on his way! We went on to give birth to five more. Most people were pleased to see our large family and often wistful they hadn’t had more. However, others were more hostile – one man, noting us with the two foster children and baby in the pram, had the audacity to say he hoped we weren’t going to have any more! Now grown up, all of them are in professions that directly help their fellow men and women. I’m here in England, which in a generation, the Muslims will be in a majority because they are the ones having large families.
Congratulations! One of the biggest surprises with my last few pregnancies was the number of women with 2 or 3 kids who’d come up to me with tears in their eyes telling me they’d wished they’d had more. But truthfully, I never received anything other than congratulations on my pregnancies, even if it sometimes seemed the person was saying it in a perfunctory way. It would be a lie to say I was always happy to discover I was pregnant, but each time the idea of a new child in the family would very quickly grow on me.
“It doesn’t matter what conditions you are in, whether they are ideal like mine, or heartbreaking like the woman in the abortion clinic, no one needs to apologize.”
I agree. No woman should feel the need to apologize for her pregnancy, for giving birth, for getting an abortion, or for choosing to avoid pregnancy.
interesting that you omitted choosing to prevent pregnancy.
In answer to the ubiquitous and rude question “how do you divide your love between “so many” children”, we reply “but we DON’T divide it! We multiply it!” It’s literally true. The more children you already have, the more love your new child gets from the family.
Peter K remarks on Sep 30 at 5:35 “. . . interesting that you omitted choosing to prevent pregnancy.”
What do you think “choosing to avoid pregnancy” means? It can be done by not having intercourse, by using contraception, or by having one partner surgically sterilized. And none of those things requires an apology.
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Thank you for your article – yes to everything you wrote! That inner urge to apologize or explain why I was pregnant every single time was so strong. Many times, I tried to avoid conversations around number of children (hard to do that of course when they’re al with you…) because I would often be rewarded with this uncomfortable silence of “oh, so you’re better than me?” Once, there was even a look of disgust – and that was inside a church after Mass too! And I think we only 6 or 7 kids then. But it is all good – each child is a blessing and God has been generous with us beyond measure in all our needs and more. He will be so with your family as well – congratulations! Praying for a safe pregnancy.
If a woman has been adhering to Catholic teaching, people are justified in guessing whether the baby growing inside her was really her choice. Unless she has “serious reasons” (Humanae Vitae) for avoiding pregnancy, she must accept when it happens, unless of course she and her husband have decided to have a completely no-sex marriage.
On the other hand, if I know the woman has been using contraception, I can assume that she’s pregnant because she wants to be, and congratulations are in order.
If I receive wonderful news that was not actively chosen by me, congratulations would still be in order. Life is always wonderful news.
Not every woman who has an unexpected pregnancy is thrilled about it. And it’s not her fault if she’s not thrilled.
Thank you for noting this. Also, no male suffers one nanosecond from pregnancy. ALL the misery falls on women. The writer of this article is dooming millions of women to wretched lives because she’s too weak to accept criticism.
“But My Body! My Self! My career! My choice!” Since you doing this will negatively impact all of us, hurt my 1.3 kids, and endanger the whole earth, there is an exception to the absolute right to abortion, and, now, the absolute right to infanticide so a woman can kill her newly born: the exception is that you cannot claim benefit of our [im]moral principle. All women and girls who want to kill a child at any time, including the newly born, they can invoke the principle; but not you if you want to let a child live. Height of diabolical irony: these demonic harpies virtue signal you. Guy, Texas
Switch to decaf!
Thank you Julie for your enlightening article! I’m sharing it to my friends.