Nov 022007
I just got my Diocese of Richmond newsletter, “The NFP Messenger.” There’s a testimony by Pam Pilch, who tells how marital struggles and her mother’s bout with breast cancer was the impetus to get off the Pill and seek another family planning method. Eventually the “childfree by choice” lawyer found Natural Family Planning through the Couple to Couple League, discovered her fertility was a gift not a disease, and her and her husband became open to life. Today they are a thriving family of five.
29 Responses to “From "Childfree" to Mother of Three”
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Right, let’s celebrate contributing to the overburdening of the planet because we can.
(THIS IS A COMMENT TO THE MOST RECENT ENTRY, NOT THIS PARTICULAR ENTRY. CF ENTRY ABOVE.)
So this young lady’s mother (a woman who has given birth at least once) suffered from breast cancer. Please remind me how pregnancy is a surefire protection against breast cancer, again?
Besides, the anecdotal evidence of one woman proves nothing. One could just as easily point to the fact that murders in which minor children are the victims are most often perpetrated by their own parents as “evidence” that being childfree is the natural state for human beings, given the rate at which we abuse, abandon, and murder our own offspring.
Hi – I’m the subject of this newsletter – the attorney who was previously childfree by choice and now am glad to be a mother. I wanted to respond to the comments above. First, I don’t think I’m so much different from the women who pursue career in their 20s and then enjoy motherhood in their 30s. We do a lot of things to help protect the environment (including voting for Democrats), and to teach our children about sustainable living. Of course, we know that the best way for all of us to reduce consumption would be to cease existing ourselves. I doubt too many folks are up for that.
As far as my mother and her breast cancer, if you read the article carefully, I stated that I was aware that the evidence about whether oral contraceptives contribute to breast cancer was controversial. My decision to learn about natural family planning ( to LIMIT our family size naturally) was in order to lead a crunchier, healthier life with no artificial hormones. My mother’s breast cancer was worsened by the use of artificial hormones (HRT). This fact made me wary of using artificial hormones to control my fertility whether or not oral contraceptives worked the same way.
I never claimed that having babies reduces the risk of breast cancer, nor did I choose to have children for this purpose. This is so, although recent pronouncements from a major cancer study included long-term breastfeeding as one of the 10 best ways to protect against breast cancer.
As an NFP teacher in liberal Ann Arbor Michigan, I found that the greatest interest in learning natural fertility control was among (my fellow) liberal, crunchy-granola, highly-educated moms – women who like to eat organic and drive green cars. I like to do these things too. And I like not having to worry about the new study about oral contraceptives contributing to heart disease, or whatever is the new risk du jour (de jour?).
And I respect and appreciate those who see overpopulation as a threat to the global environment, but I enjoy teaching my children to care for the earth, and I enjoy the environmental benefits that long-term breastfeeding (and its attendant natural child spacing, never mind all the savings in bottles, packaging and pollution) has given our family.
Jessica, I hope that these negative comments above will not discourage you from continuing this terrific blog. Thanks for profiling my story and I hope you will continue getting the word out about the benefits of NFP (and not just for religious people.) Natural child spacing helps reduce overpopulation in a healthy way, especially ecological breastfeeding. And no one claimed that my anecdotal evidence had anything to do with the real risks of oral contraceptives, or the risk reduction of pregnancy. Plenty of real scholars have done work on this question, but I am definitely not one of them.
I just exercised my freedom of choice not to pollute my body with artificial hormones, and I was glad that NFP was available to me to help me plan my family when the time came to have one.
Re-reading my post, I meant to say “And no one claimed that my anecdotal evidence has anything to do with the real risks of oral contraceptive, or the possible CANCER risk reduction brought about by pregnancy.”
What if no one had children?
What would happen as we become older, who would check up on us?
When an elderly person can not drive anymore, becomes forgetful, to weak to shovel snow, or unable to carry groceries? If there is no adult child, niece, or nephew close by who is going to help them, who do these people call? Yes, governments have elder services, but it is usually a family member that says, “Dad, sorry you can’t live by yourself anymore.” The elderly can’t care for themselves, just like children can’t either.
There have always been single persons, but they had family ties with their siblings children. We always hear of news stories of the elderly dead for weeks or months in their home, with no one check on. In 1995, 700 people died in the Chicago heatwave, many were shut-ins with no family, dozens of bodies weren’t even picked up at the morgue only to be buried in a trenched out potter’s grave by the city.
Isn’t great how we give the life to our children, in return they care for us back. In an older article by USA Today, many older children care for their adult parents. Children might seem optional or a choice, but for survival in older age we need younger relatives to be there for us, even if it is to make sure we are getting the assistance we need.
“or the possible CANCER risk reduction brought about by pregnancy”
Pam, this is not to be argumentative. But the National Cancer Institute has come out and said that pregnancy does NOT reduce the risk of cancer in any way. There
It ate the rest of my comment and now I don’t remember what I started to say.
And my article about how I discovered natural family planning didn’t have anything to do with whether or not pregnancy reduces the risk of cancer. Thanks for the update on NCI position, but my only point was that my article didn’t actually make a claim about cancer and pregnancy one way or the other. Did any of the commentors read my story or are the comments just addressed to Jessica’s summary? It doesn’t really matter. I’m just curious.
I think they were mainly to the summary.
Pam,
Praise God that you chose to tell this beautiful story. It was not only enlightening, but encouraging for me. You demonstrate so well, through your own experiences, that postponing or actively pursuing pregnancy is never a “one-sided” issue, but experientially there are so many things involved. Having lived in Ann Arbor myself (and now a similar Midwest city,) as a student and young adult, I know that people, whether in their family planning choices (or anything else) are faith-based, eco-based, or politically-based, many have a tendency to stay in their own “camp.” But you show that there is something more to being a good citizen and steward of your own body than driving an hybrid car and eating granola, and that the decision to have children is not “because you were catholic”.
Thank you again for sharing, and my God continue to bless your beautiful family!
Wow, Moni – thank you so much!
What if no one had children?
I assure you, this will NEVER happen. Children of Men was FICTION, not a scenario ever likely to become reality. As alarmist rhetoric goes, this argument is preposterous. As dystopian science fiction goes, Harry Harrison’s Make Room! Make Room! about a nightmarishly overpopulated city, is far more likely to be our reality in fifty years.
What would happen as we become older, who would check up on us?
Friends? The nursing home staff I’m planning on paying with my Roth IRA?
Also, Pam is using the term “childfree by choice” incorrectly by saying that she used to be CF. Childfree people don’t have children and don’t want them EVER. We take steps to make sure that conception NEVER happens — I’d just as soon use NFP as a birth control method as play a game of Russian roulette. Seeing as how Pam has children now, clearly she just didn’t want them at that time. She was never childfree — she was “childless for now.”
Everybody goes through the stage where they don’t want children; that proves nothing. No one comes out of the womb wanting to be a parent. But if you decide that you do want kids and end up having them, you aren’t CF and you were never CF. There’s no such thing as a vegetarian who eats meat and there’s no such thing as a “formerly childfree” woman who now has kids. If you can abide the idea of having a kid, you’re not and never were CF.
That said, I still don’t think Pam’s example proves that somewhere down deep, all CF women really want kids. To put this idea forth is to presume that the commentator, an outsider, knows the individual woman better than she knows herself.
Pam, I think it’s more likely you were child-less rather than child-free.
Did anyone read my original article that this blog was based on?
You’re absolutely right – I didn’t realize that no one could be childfree by choice until they were either permanently sterilized or completely past their childbearing years without having given birth. Thanks for clearing up the terminology. My situation was that I hated kids…I didn’t want to babysit, I didn’t want to go to restaurants where parents took their children, I felt that pregnancy and breastfeeding were things I would never be comfortable wiht, and I didn’t want to have any of my own. When we got married my husband was clear that we would likely never have children. I was very committed to career and didn’t want to give up my freedom to travel, to read the New York Times on Sunday mornings, etc. (I also glared at women on airplanes whose babies cried.) I would have called myself “childfree by choice” at that time, though I did not take steps to become sterilized.
I later then became open to children, so I supposed if “childfree by choice” presupposes a permanent and inalterable state, I was childless, and, something that perhaps not all “childfree” folks are, I was anti-child.
I apologize that the incorrect designation was applied by the person who wrote my headline.
I guess the other thing that threw me about the term “childfree by choice’ was the presence of the term “choice.” ( I should say again that the term “childfree by choice” was applied to me by an editor, and I thought it fit, but clearly I was mistaken, not having been actively involved in the orthodox “childfree by choice” movement – I don’t believe it appears in my own description of myself.)
I guess I thought that anything one becomes out of “choice” also includes the freedom to have a change of heart. I was happy being childless, and I disliked children. I was strongly pro-abortion and felt at the time I would never change.
I see that the orthodox childfree by choice movement does acknowledge the possibility that a change of heart could easily go the other way – that a person who desires children at one time might have them and later come to regret it. Or would this also be seen as permanent and invariable?
I should say that I never wrote my original article for the purpose of getting into an argument about the meaning of “childfree by choice.” I disliked children and did not want to be a mother. At the age of 30, I discovered a healthy lifestyle practice and a spiritual path (Catholicism) that spoke to me, and I found that being a mother was more fulfilling than I had expected. I wrote this up for a local diocesan newspaper and it was picked up by an NFP blog.
I’m glad if my story has encouraged anyone, but I am by no means trying to make anyone else agree with me or my path. It has worked well for me and if others are encouraged to check it out for themselves, terrific.
I’m glad I turned out not to be “childfree by choice” (especially if the choice can only be made once and is permanent and irreversible).
I did read your article, and took into account that since you chose to publish it in a Catholic, anti-contraception publication, that it might come with an agenda of some sort.
So your argument is: “I didn’t want children at one time in my life. Then I converted to Catholicism and decided that I did want children!” Okay, great. I hope that makes you happy. However, I find that your story has zero relevance to my life. Also, your experience does not in any way qualify you to be a authoritative spokesman for the childfree community.
As arduously as you claim that because you “converted” from childfreedom to happy parenthood, your testimony proves nothing. Don’t count on that article moving anyone in the CF community to either convert to Catholicism or to want children. (Indeed, my foremost impression here why the folks on this board are so disturbed by our existence that they have to offer conversion stories about us, or demonize us as “evil incarnate.” I thought Catholics believed in a policy of “Love thy neighbor,” but apparently that only applies when one’s neighbors are married, childed Catholic couples. Everyone who makes a different decision must be assimilated, or shamed.)
It also does not appear to me that you were ever childfree, i.e. possessed of an active desire not to have children and committed to preventing pregnancy on a permanent basis. You were childless, i.e. open to the possibility of children coming along later.
Sorry, but the fact that you didn’t want children once and then changed your mind as you got older makes you an entirely typical parent, nothing more. The fact that you made the entirely ordinary life choice of delaying childbearing to concentrate on your schooling and career in your twenties does not make you CF, nor does it somehow qualify you to preach as though you were once one of us, because it’s obvious to me that you never were. First, you are a parent; second, you were never wholly committed to preventing pregnancy entirely, so therefore you were never CF.
A childfree woman, upon being told that hormonal pregnancy could harm her health, would then look into getting an IUD or a tubal ligation. To a CF woman, Natural Family Planning has an entirely unacceptable failure rate, and fertility is always undesirable, full stop. The point you seem to be missing is that any birth control method that requires a CF woman risk pregnancy on a regular basis is and always will be unacceptable. Perhaps this goes counter to the teachings of the Catholic Church, but as a childfree non-Catholic, I’m not concerned about that.
The notion of a couple of Catholic mothers trying to sell childfree women on both motherhood and Natural Family Planning seems like nothing so much as trying to sell the latest, greatest blood transfusion equipment to a group of Jehovah’s Witnesses. Face it, ladies, there is no market and no demand for what you’re trying to sell these folks, and there never will be.
Better to concern yourself with projects that might actually bear fruit, if you’ll pardon the pun. How about volunteering at an orphanage or fostering a child on weekends, if you care about children so much? Why trouble yourselves so much over the idea that other women don’t believe as you do?
Blue wrote:
So your argument is: “I didn’t want children at one time in my life. Then I converted to Catholicism and decided that I did want children!” Okay, great. I hope that makes you happy. However, I find that your story has zero relevance to my life. Also, your experience does not in any way qualify you to be a authoritative spokesman for the childfree community.
Pam wrote:
I published my story in a Catholic publication directed mainly at people who already practice NFP. If it doesn’t have any relevance to your life, that’s okay. You didn’t have to read it.
Most importantly, I never claimed to be – and don’t now – an “authoritative spokesperson” for the “childfree” community. I didn’t apply the term to myself, and am glad now to understand how the orthodox child-free by choice movement chooses to define the term.
Francois wrote:
Why trouble yourselves so much over the idea that other women don’t believe as you do?
Pam wrote:
I guess I could ask you the same question.
The use of words like “orthodox” to describe the childfree is laughable. We’re not a religious sect; there aren’t orthodox, liberal, and reform childfree people. The CF don’t have children and are committed to not having them, ever. In today’s society, that’s about as UNorthodox a choice as you can make, especially given the antagonistic attitudes of people like yourself.
And I chose to trouble myself with this article because you wrote a little “conversion story” in which you claimed to have once been childfree, and then Saw the Light and got better, when what you really did was have a completely ordinary journey toward marriage and parenthood that the majority of wives and mothers go through in our society. The title of your article here claims a relevance and authority that you do not have (as well as calls into question the existence of another and entirely valid life choice through the use of derisive quote marks) and I thought the false analogy being put forth should be cleared up before anyone bought into it.
In short — you’re a typical mother, Pam, not a born-again childfree woman. Your experience simply has no relevance to the lives of genuinely CF women.
Thanks for this response, Francois. I just want to state again that I have never claimed to speak for or to the official childfree movement. I wrote an article about how I came to learn about natural family planning, my editor applied the term “childfree” to the headline (without my knowledge – I did not give a title to my article in the first place) and apparently someone’s google-alert on “childfree” picked me up on this blog and drew angry objections.
It seems clear to me that neither I nor my editor was aware that the term “childfree” is a term of art defined by a specific community. When I first read the headline (after publication) I thought it fit, but I understand through the objections from this community at this blog that it did not apply to me. Okay. It doesn’t apply to me. Thanks for clearing that up.
I don’t bear any ill will toward members of the childfree community. And I definitely was not intending to reach this community specifically by writing my article (especially given that I published it in a publication that was most unlikely to reach this group).
I am not insulted by the assertion that my experience is ordinary and irrelevant to the lives of many women who may hear about it. I’m glad that I turned out to be a typical mother, and I’m glad that some other typical mothers who have contacted me about the article have found encouragement from my story.
I regret that my story has caused consternation among some members of the childfree community due to the inaccurate application of this term of art to my situation.
I’m sure that no one will be sorry to know that I am finished commenting on this thread. It has been very informative and I am glad for the insight I have gained from participating. My personal belief is that any time people who strongly disagree are able to “hear” each other, even if the disagreement ultimately remains, greater tolerance, peace and understanding are the likely result.
François, of course they’re going to refer to CF people as “orthodox,” just as fundies refer to atheism as a “religion.” They can’t think out of the tight little box they’ve constructed around themselves. And they project their desire to control other people’s lives onto everyone else.
Very intertesting! (I like babies. I think they are cute.) I am child-full? hehe
“And they project their desire to control other people’s lives onto everyone else.”
Not much of a reader, are you? Doesn’t seem like Pam really manifested any desire to control you or Francois, does it? Almost seems like you do have a little religion thing going on there, doesn’t it?
If Blue and Francois are so convinced then why be so defensive? Really. Get over yourselves. Pam is telling her story. Here is an idea, if you don’t like what you read, quit reading it! Hang out with people who choose not to have children, read articles by people with no children, watch movies with no children, and pump yourselves/and your sos with hormones to your heart’s desire. Oh wait! Heart disease is the leading cause of death for women and now they are telling us any woman who has used a hormonal contraceptive needs to see a cardiologist by the age of 50. Ok so, go pump yourselves with chemicals until your heart quits. Better?
radicalcaholicmom, I think what they are getting up in arms about is the misrepresentation of their beliefs – I’m sure you would feel the same if someone misrepresented your beliefs in a public forum such as this. It is never pleasent, so I’m sure they felt it was their right to defend and educate.
Pam is entiled to her opinions and it is a shame that her editor chose to publish her tale without further researching the terminology that was added on without Pam’s consent. But what everyone must keep in mind that everyone is entitleled to their own opinions regarding child bearing and their own bodies. I think that is where a majority of the strife comes in from the CF group – as it rightly should – it gets tiresome and redundant to constantly have to defend your choices against a group of women who urge and even get aggressive with you over your choice not to bear or not bear children. It is not a social matter anymore – we’ve reached a new century and have grown as a people. We are not at risk, as a planet full of people, of wasting away so it is no longer necessary to have a bunch of chilren. I think it has fully become a choice to made by a woman and her mate. If you chose to have a lot of children and can afford to have them and have the resources to support them then more power to you. If you chose not to have children then good for you as well. Choice, people.
I don’t understand why this issue persists, honestly.
Uh, just for the record, radicalcatholicmom, I’m a man. I’m now 46 years old and was vasectomized at the age of 32. I have not “pumped myself full of hormones” now or ever, and my heart is just fine.
Also many of the childfree women I have known have gotten tubal ligations because they had trouble with hormonal birth control and wanted to go off of it. I had my snip in part because the Pill left my wife feeling extremely moody and depressed after a few years, and I didn’t want her to have to endure that.
I don’t understand why this issue persists, honestly.
Heartily agreed, Calotype. I would think that the decision to have a child (or not) is between a husband and wife, full stop. For any outsider to attempt to influence such an intimate and weighty decision is the worst kind of hubris.
MDC: Perhaps you would do better to leave the word “fundie” at home. We are not fundamentalists, if that is what you mean by the term. For people so enamored with the splitting of infinitives of their own terminology, I should think you could be a bit more concerned about ours, and a bit less condescending. We have, after all, been around much longer and our terminology is free for the asking at many websites. We are Roman Catholics. Fundamentalists are protestants, and we have very little in common with them. If Pam was “childLESS” rather than “childFREE,” perhaps you could relegate your derogatory term “fundie” to the same place the word “nigger” belongs–in the ash heap.
Or, go on being so insensitive and expect the same from everyone around you.
God Bless your athiest heart.