Hi everyone,
Thanks for your replies. I don’t have time to respond to each individual post or point raised, but this seems like a great forum - so much to think about!
My husband and I both work full-time and he goes to school part-time. My mother-in-law watches our daughter during the day, for free, which is wonderful. Despite that, though, we definitely need two full-time salaries right now - we own a house and real estate is astronomical these days. However, we should be able to afford to have me cut back my hours to part-time once my husband finishes school and is making more money. We will probably try for another baby then. We are in our mid-20s and I honestly don’t think people from older generations understand how hard it is for young people to make it these days. There’s a reason they call us the “boomerang generation.” We graduated from college 8 months after 9/11 as the economy was tanking and real estate prices were doubling or tripling (lucky us). We got married a year later. There was a time when a couple with 8th-grade educations could support seven kids on one income and send them all to Catholic school. That time has passed. Now you can both have college degrees and still struggle. When the rhythm method was the only option, it was easier for most people to afford large families. Perhaps that’s why it was God’s plan for doctors to not discover NFP until the sixties, when feminism was taking off and it would get increasingly harder to support large families and to live on one income. I know, it sounds kind of silly, but it’s possible. On the other hand, during the Depression it was much harder for people to afford children than it is now, and I don’t think they even knew about the rhythm method then, so I guess that blows that theory out of the water.
The NFP-only Dr. I go to thinks I probably have PCOS, which would explain my long cycles and confusing signs, and possibly a thyroid problem as well. The weird thing is I got pregnant very soon after I got married, without trying, and most people with PCOS or thyroid problems have trouble conceiving (though it’s not impossible). My last cycle was very, very long, and I’ve heard that PCOS gets worse with age. So it’s possible I won’t even be able to conceive another child, at least not without difficulty. If that’s the case, then we would never have had a child at all if we had been contracepting, or if NFP had “worked.” God works in mysterious ways! Yet for some reason it’s still hard for me to trust in Him entirely – I still have weak faith.
BTW, I did try a Clearplan monitor, and it didn’t work very well. It said I was fertile long before I was actually fertile. I think I heard that fertility monitors are unreliable in people with PCOS, so if I do have PCOS that would explain that.
So my question was more of a hypothetical one, since a) NFP is slowly getting easier for me and b) it’s possible I won’t be able to conceive again, at least not without medical intervention. I guess the verdict is in – if you can’t tell when you’re fertile and have a serious reason not to have children, you just abstain altogether. This still seems sort of unreasonable to me, though. I guess the reason is because it favors the wealthy – a wealthy couple would have a much easier time supporting a large family, and can therefore enjoy “marital relations” more often. A couple with serious reasons not to have children is probably already under considerable stress, whether financial, emotional or otherwise. Having to abstain altogether would just add more stress. This is not to say that all families with many children are wealthy. But most of them are at least middle-class and moderately successful in life. I just can’t buy that abstaining altogether is good for a marriage. Yes, there’s a huge over-emphasis on sex in this society, and yes, short periods of abstinence can be good for a marriage, but abstaining altogether would be extremely destructive to the marriage, I would think. But I guess as Christians we’re called to put nothing before God, not even our marriages. God has asked people to do far more difficult things. Jesus basically promised that life will be difficult for Christians. Thanks for the food for thought.
but we do what we can with what God gives us.
