This isn’t advice, just a true story.
When my wife and I were 40, we’d been married 18 years, and had two children, a son 10 and a daughter 7. And guess what? We found out that we were going to be parents again.
This was not exactly a planned event, and a major complication arose. The OB/GYN who had delivered our other children had dropped his OB practice due to arthritis, so my wife consulted a GYN she had been a patient of in the past. The first advice, quite unsolicited, that she received, was how easy it would be to make this “problem” that had arisen “go away”. The advice was not taken.
Skip ahead 17 years. This little “problem” graduated from her Catholic high school with 3 gold medals (academic, religion, and biology), and the Governor General’s medal for the school, as well as the senior student of the year award for her community contributions. That latter award involved getting her name on a trophy (first girl to do so, also for the GG medal), As an interesting touch, one of the names already on the trophy is the name of our present family physician. In university on scholarships, she was admitted directly into honours molecular biology and biochemistry at the start of her second year, and starts a co-op placement term this spring with a major cancer research agency. They had given her her first interview for finding a placement, and contacted the co-op office and said to stop giving her more interviews, because they wanted her then and there for an 8 month (as opposed to the normal 4 month) placement.
Through the years this happened, I freely confessed that there were many occasions on which I had just stood back and looked on in wonder. We had the chance, of course, to intervene and stop this from ever happening. We rejected the chance, but not because we ever imagined something like the above would come to pass.
If there’s a moral to all this, it seems to be that people should be very, very careful of taking these matters into their own hands, if only because there is simply no way of knowing what one would be thwarting. (The only interventions I’ve ever heard of that seemed understandable at all were a few cases I know of where a pregnacy would be fatal to the mother well before any prospect of viability for another child came to pass.) Remember: When God called Moses, he was very long suffering with him as he rattled off potential problems, and only got angry when Moses told Him to find somebody else (Ex. 4:14).
Blessings,
Gerry
