Would you marry if you could not have children?

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DarkLight

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Women especially, if you could not have children, would you still marry? How would you understand this as a Catholic marriage if children were simply not an option?
 
DarkLight said:
Women especially, if you could not have children, would you still marry?
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Yes.
DarkLight said:
How would you understand this as a Catholic marriage if children were simply not an option?
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Of course it would be a Catholic marriage. Why wouldn’t it be?

Marriage is ordered to unity and procreation. If the man or woman is infertile, the marriage is still ordered to unity and procreation.
 
DarkLight said:
Women especially, if you could not have children, would you still marry? How would you understand this as a Catholic marriage if children were simply not an option?
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Yes, if I’d found the right person and if he were OK with not having children.

With our first, we started trying when my husband got a job offer for his first real job. Nothing happened for 6 months. By the time I finally got pregnant (much to my surprise), I had more or less given up on the whole project and had started to collect information on Russian adoption programs.

I’m not sure about your last question–I guess I don’t see the problem.
 
I am married with children.

I think I would have married my husband even if we knew for certain we couldn’t have children.

He’s a good man, we help each other be better, and holier people. We probably would have been sad about the lack of children.

I heard a priest once say that each of us have the task of assisting the other to get to heaven. It’s easier to have help than to do it alone, on my opinion.
 
Would I have married if I could not bear children in the usual way? Yes. If my husband was on-board, obviously. I would have pursued adoption and built a family that way.

Having said that, I cannot have more children. Would I marry again, should something terrible happen to my husband? Hell no.
 
1ke said:
Marriage is ordered to unity and procreation. If the man or woman is infertile, the marriage is still ordered to unity and procreation.
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It’s one thing to understand that intellectually. It’s quite another as a woman to look at a body that’s unable to bear a child and wonder how you could ever make a Catholic marriage work. With so much focus on motherhood where does the woman who cannot be fit in?
 
I also had a little bit of a scare with regard to cervical cancer right after our first was born. There was the possibility (that proved false) that I wouldn’t be able to have any more children.

I remember that I was pretty resigned to it at the time. Who knows how I would have felt about it as time went on, though.
 
Avocadomom said:
Would I have married if I could not bear children in the usual way? Yes. If my husband was on-board, obviously. I would have pursued adoption and built a family that way.

Having said that, I cannot have more children. Would I marry again, should something terrible happen to my husband? Hell no.
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I’ve seen discussions of this elsewhere, and from what I’ve seen, it’s very normal for married women our age (not just Catholic married women) to have your feelings about remarriage upon widowhood. I feel similarly. Marriage is such a big deal. I think it’s like knowing that if the house that you built burnt down, that you wouldn’t have it in you to build another house from the ground up.
 
DarkLight said:
It’s one thing to understand that intellectually. It’s quite another as a woman to look at a body that’s unable to bear a child and wonder how you could ever make a Catholic marriage work.
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I disagree.
DarkLight said:
With so much focus on motherhood where does the woman who cannot be fit in?
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I don’t see “so much focus” on motherhood, and I have no problem fitting in.
 
DarkLight said:
It’s one thing to understand that intellectually. It’s quite another as a woman to look at a body that’s unable to bear a child and wonder how you could ever make a Catholic marriage work. With so much focus on motherhood where does the woman who cannot be fit in?
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As long as one’s spouse wasn’t insanely eager to have kids, I think it could work out OK. A lot of men (even super Catholic men) are reasonably mellow about kids.

There might well be some awkward conversations, but not as many as some people seem to have. (I’ve had exactly one where it was clear that my interlocutors were VERY disappointed to discover that I only had two kids–we’ve since had another.) If one adopted, I think nobody would blink at a small family. When you have two Chinese adoptees, only a total imbecile is going to ask, “Don’t you think you should be more open to life?”

There are lots of good things that couples can do that they couldn’t do as well while tasked with a growing family. For instance, run that hypothetical singles group that we were talking about in the other thread.
 
DarkLight said:
It’s one thing to understand that intellectually. It’s quite another as a woman to look at a body that’s unable to bear a child and wonder how you could ever make a Catholic marriage work. With so much focus on motherhood where does the woman who cannot be fit in?
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Do you think St. Elizabeth was a bad wife before St. John the Baptist came along?

Certainly when Samuel’s mother, Hannah, was suffering infertility, her husband did not disdain her:
  • “Hannah, why do you weep, and why do you refuse to eat? Why do you grieve? Am I not more to you than ten sons?”* (1 Sam. 1:8)
    A husband who loves his wife will love her whether or not she can bear children.
The truth is, none of us know whether or not we can bear children before we try. Some believe themselves infertile, and find out otherwise. Others assume they can have children, their doctors can find nothing wrong, and yet they cannot conceive. One just never knows. That is part of the “for better or worse” part.

Yes, there are women who cannot have children who find those people very hurtful who nose into their “family planning” or who assume that anyone who wants to bear a child do it. That does not mean those women aren’t happily married.

I know a man who went through chemotherapy prior to marriage, and knew he couldn’t father children. Their marriage has been very good. They even took in a young relative who needed them, and they were a godsend to that young person when none of the other relatives could have done that.
 
Post-menopausal women marry validly all the time. Openness to children is the requirement. High statistical likelihood of biological children is not the requirement. After all, adoption is always a possibility and the Church would never declare a couple invalidly married if they discover they are infertile after marrying.
 
EasterJoy said:
The truth is, none of us know whether or not we can bear children before we try. Some believe themselves infertile, and find out otherwise.
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True story:

One of the neighbor girls from back home got pregnant, believing she couldn’t get pregnant because her mother had been infertile (??!!).

The neighbor girl had a shotgun wedding and then twins.
 
I have a friend who was told that she was infertile before getting married. When she was dating her now husband she told him that she was infertile and they both decided that they would get married and were going to adopt children. They got married and started the adoption process and while they were in the middle of the adoption …surprise…she got pregnant naturally :eek: I think she probably didn’t found out until she was like 7 months and they couldn’t believe it. Now they have two cute kids super close in age - one adopted and one biological and they still can’t believe that in the middle of the adoption process she got pregnant.
 
Well according to St Paul it was ok to marry simply so you did not ‘burn with passion’ 🤷
 
What if it’s not natural infertility, but a result of treatments that are needed, truly needed, for another condition? Or worse, if you’re perfectly capable of conceiving but physically unable to carry the child safely?
 
Xantippe said:
As long as one’s spouse wasn’t insanely eager to have kids, I think it could work out OK. A lot of men (even super Catholic men) are reasonably mellow about kids.

There might well be some awkward conversations, but not as many as some people seem to have. (I’ve had exactly one where it was clear that my interlocutors were VERY disappointed to discover that I only had two kids–we’ve since had another.) If one adopted, I think nobody would blink at a small family. When you have two Chinese adoptees, only a total imbecile is going to ask, “Don’t you think you should be more open to life?”

There are lots of good things that couples can do that they couldn’t do as well while tasked with a growing family. For instance, run that hypothetical singles group that we were talking about in the other thread.
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I added the emphasis. I think this is spot on. G.K. Chesterton used to help children at his house since he couldn’t have children. While many Catholics are keen to discuss the benefits of large families, which I fully agree with, by the way, we would do well to remember that Scripture warns even against the glorying in that.

Benedicat Deus,
Latinitas
 
Since any women even remotely in my age range would likely be past child bearing, yes. Any takers? 😃
 
Iheartcoffee said:
Post-menopausal women marry validly all the time. Openness to children is the requirement. High statistical likelihood of biological children is not the requirement. After all, adoption is always a possibility and the Church would never declare a couple invalidly married if they discover they are infertile after marrying.
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Seriously that was my point and my understanding as well.
 
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