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Planned Parenthood: Wait a Second. Isn’t That An Oxymoron?

Planned Parenthood: Wait a Second. Isn’t That An Oxymoron?

Last updated on: September 14, 2015 at 1:04 pm by Melinda Selmys

Planned Parenthood: Wait a Second. Isn’t That An Oxymoron? 2015-09-14T13:04:29-04:00 Melinda Selmys

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One of the things that I really loved about Laudato Si was the way that Francis focuses on the beauty of the created order – and specifically the fact that its wild and creative fecundity is part of its beauty. Like Benedict and John Paul II before him, he criticized the rise of a toxic technocracy that tries to instrumentalize creation in accord with the needs of a highly efficient modern industrial society. And like those other Popes, he sees a link between the ecology of the natural world and the human ecology: the way that we treat and interact with our own bodies.

Parenthood is possibly one of the areas that is most stricken by this mania for planning. In our present culture we generally assume that pregnancies are supposed to be planned and that an unplanned pregnancy is a kind of personal failure, even a catastrophe. I’m not talking here about situations where having a child is a genuine trial – where there are factors like extreme poverty, lack of a stable relationship, serious health risks or rape involved. I’m talking about people in stable families with a stable incomes and reasonable accommodations.

The family size is planned. The timing of the children is planned. Everything is supposed to fit into a schedule. And when things go wrong, people go bonkers.

Here’s the problem: things go wrong. They just do. Parenthood is a creative process, and like all creative processes it involves a large quantity of inherent chaos. (Apparently there have been actual studies done showing that messy spaces lead to more creative thinking – which is my justification for the state of my house.)

Creativity is not regimented, it’s effusive. Yes, you have to try to assert some sort of control over it or it you will be literally overrun, but if you over-control it or micro-manage it, you will end up either killing the creative process or you will end up driving yourself insane.

A significant number of people literally choose not to have children because they think of a baby primarily as a source of chaos and inconvenience. The “child-free” often write about how liberating it is not to have to plan their lives around an infant — or rather, not to have their plans for their lives disrupted by the realities of parenting.

Most people, however, want to have kids but they want to have them in a way that is controlled and managed. So they have one or two (maybe three – there’s been a recent move towards acknowledging that “sibling love” may be important to a child’s development). Then they micro-manage, they sleep train, they set up “play dates,” and they hover over their children like obsessive spy-copters with radar trained to detect anything that might cause bumps or stains.

And they drive themselves nuts. Literally, nuts.

It’s not that these women are bad, crazy, or obsessive people, it’s that they’ve been taught an ideology which says that the only kind of responsible parenthood is planned parenthood. And if you think the planning is going to stop when the baby is conceived on schedule, think again. One of the fruits of a society where people only have 1-2 kids is that parents feel the need to perform up to a very high set of (often arbitrary) expectations.

After all, when a resource is scarce, competition is inevitable.

I don’t attend mommy groups because I’ve heard enough of the horror stories from women who do, but I’ve seen it even at the park. It’s not so bad out here in the country where I live, but if I’m in the city it’s like there’s a weird competition between the mothers to show who is parenting the most responsibly. Who planned ahead? Who brought the most bags full of snacks and drinks and sunblock and extra clothes? Who is teaching her 18 month old to count while pushing him on the swing?

It’s vicious, and God forbid that you should show up with a horde of children dressed like they just stepped off the set of Blake’s 7. God forbid that you should have more children than you can actually physically helicopter at one time. Clearly, if your child is more than five inches away from you for more than thirty seconds it’s because you’re neglectful. The child could trip and skin his knee, or bump his head, or some other unspeakable horror that should never befall a human being. You should have planned for this – before you got yourself pregnant with more kids than you could handle.

The thing is, micro-parenting isn’t very rewarding. It’s psychologically exacting, and most of the exaction is at the expense of the mother. Ironically, the very enslavement to domestic tedium that feminism fought so hard to eradicate has become a psychological necessity in the age of contraception. Whether it’s the birthday-party cupcake-decorating one-upmanship or the need to schedule your child’s life so heavily that you can never have one of your own, women have been pushed into an absurd standard of “planned” child-rearing that literally stifles the soul.

Being open to life means being open to its randomness, its chaos, its vicissitudes, its creativity. It means allowing the wild profusion of God’s grace to overwhelm the boundaries of your own plans. It means letting go, surrendering, not in order to become a slave to your uterus but in order to be set free from enslavement to your own anxieties, expectations and need for control. It means, in short, allowing the exuberant beauty of the wilderness to overwhelm your limited schemes so that you can enjoy your place in the natural order as a creative creature giving birth to the effusive tumult of life.

Just as a note, because someone is going to take offence in the com-box, my analysis does not belittle, demean or otherwise stigmatize women who have only a few children because they cannot have more than that. Women who are able to have only a couple of children (whether for physiological reasons, or economic ones, or because their partner flatly refuses to have more) are not generally suffering from a need for hyper-regulation. Rather, they are at the mercy of circumstances that they cannot control. In my experience, women in this position are delightful – they know that they may only be a mother once, and so they undertake it with a kind of reverence and gratitude that can be instructive to the overwhelmed mother-of-six. They’re even lovely when obsessively decorating cupcakes.

Photo credit: Melinda Selmys

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