Sterile Families: Are We Dogs?

I avoid the subject of religion in the office, not because I shy away from our Catholic faith or because I find any shade of embarrassment in it. No, it is because my boss and a few coworkers are very Evangelical Baptists who take any alternative perspective on Christianity to be an insult against them. Why, once I let be known that I could happily go a Sunday or three without hearing a sermon only be told that not having a sermon "ain't Biblical." I mentioned that the Catholic Mass is significantly older than Protestant rites and does not necessarily foresee a sermon unless the bishop is there to deliver it. I think I would be met with more tolerance drinking martinis in the Middle East.

Today these same fine folks were discussing their preferred methods of sterilization after having children. One, who is "saved" (from what?), let it be known that she "got her tubes tied" during the c-section to deliver her third child. Another said his mother forced his father to get a vasectomy after child #2 only to need a service herself due to cancer. And another's got "fixed" the day her daughter was born. They looked at my unease in utter confusion and a polite that quietly said, "I cannot believe you are so prissy that you refuse to acknowledge how normal and necessary these things are."

Sterilization and contraception have come full circle on our day. The early feminist pioneers of these methods of contravening children were invented for the purpose of positive eugenics. Promoters, like Marie Stopes and Margaret Sanger, intentionally targeted poor and minority communities for these products hoping to weed them out of the general populace while more suitable types proliferated at a controlled rate.

In our own day the poor continue to reproduce like rabbits and, unlike fifty years ago, when blacks had more stable marriages and lower illegitimacy rates than whites, they generate children into broken environments. By contrast, the bourgeois American white collar workers have grown accustomed to certain things: a reasonably sized house, one good vacation a year, exorbitant university educations and savings to go along with them, and general comfort. The idea children are a calling unto their own is utterly removed from this lifestyle. Children represent a few years of annoyance followed by a decade of congratulatory events, games, graduations, and engagements.

Most bothersome is the attitude toward the marital act in this bourgeois mindset. The couple see intimacy as something more essential than children and financial comfort more important than meeting minimal financial support. The partners inevitably objectify each other as means of fulfilling desires. They are not one flesh any longer than it takes for both of them obtain their wish and go back to their own entertainments.

Perhaps the two bravest things one can do today are to take up a religious vocation and to start a true Catholic family. Both constitute total abandon to normal ambitions and comforts. The family may have it harder, as the monk in his cloister is removed from a social and financial system pitted against him. The family must remain as one, even as Christ and the Church are one, against the vicissitudes of a derisive society that looks at each additional child as a downgrade in potential future vacations.

Their more secular counterparts will have the opportunity to be happy, living comfortably and without bother, with nothing growing on their consciences, and enjoying each day and each sensation as it comes in their sterility. Then again, I may be describing my old sheepdog Godfrey.