I was wondering if its wrong to get married and not be open to having children? Being a catholic i think you need to be willing to have kids when you get married. But, i have been diagnosed with nervousness and anxiety. Also, i cant stand pain and getting sick. So i couldn’t imagine having to go through childbirth. I’m just getting to that point in life when you get married, and i don’t know what to do about this? Or how to bring this up( or shouldn’t?) with the person i’m going to marry? thanks for the advice:thumbsup:
Open to having children for a Catholic means that you will accept children, if they occur, and raise them in the Catholic faith. There are conditions that may exempt husband and wife from the obligatory preservation of mankind. Pope Pius XII wrote: The reason is that marriage obliges the partners to a state of life, which even as it confers certain rights so it also imposes the accomplishment of a positive work concerning the state itself. In such a case, the general principle may be applied that a positive action may be omitted if grave motives, independent of the good will of those who are obliged to perform it, show that its performance is inopportune, or prove that it may not be claimed with equal right by the petitioner—in this case, mankind.
The matrimonial contract, which confers on the married couple the right to satisfy the inclination of nature, constitutes them in a state of life, namely, the matrimonial state. Now, on married couples, who make use of the specific act of their state, nature and the Creator impose the function of providing for the preservation of mankind. This is the characteristic service which gives rise to the peculiar value of their state, the bonum prolis. The individual and society, the people and the State, the Church itself, depend for their existence, in the order established by God, on fruitful marriages. Therefore, to embrace the matrimonial state, to use continually the faculty proper to such a state and lawful only therein, and, at the same time, to avoid its primary duty without a grave reason, would be a sin against the very nature of married life.
Serious motives, such as those which not rarely arise from medical, eugenic, economic and social so-called “indications,” may exempt husband and wife from the obligatory, positive debt for a long period or even for the entire period of matrimonial life. From this it follows that the observance of the natural sterile periods may be lawful, from the moral viewpoint: and it is lawful in the conditions mentioned. If, however, according to a reasonable and equitable judgment, there are no such grave reasons either personal or deriving from exterior circumstances, the will to avoid the fecundity of their union, while continuing to satisfy to the full their sensuality, can only be the result of a false appreciation of life and of motives foreign to sound ethical principles.
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Address to Midwives, Given by His Holiness Pope Pius XII, 29 October 1951