Issue 26 - The Joy of Marriage, and the Grief of Children Lost
In the last issue I cited a study showing that, compared to marriage, parents were nearly 4X more likely to say that enjoyable jobs were “very” or “extremely” important for their children. Compared to marriage, twice the proportion of parents said that getting a college degree was “very” or “extremely” important. However, being married is a greater predictor of happiness than being “very satisfied” with work and compared to having a college degree doubles the odds of happiness. Being in a “very happy” marriage (as opposed to merely married) has more than 3X the impact as being “very satisfied” with work, and more than 8X the impact of a college degree. More evidence supporting what the Proverbs said many centuries ago: “He who finds a wife finds what is good and receives favor from the Lord.”
I made the mistake of reading this article while chopping onions this morning - a devastating account of the grief men feel when their babies miscarry or are aborted and their struggle to process it in a society that treats men as disinterested tagalongs in the pregnancy process. One thing this story highlights is the absolute cognitive dissonance that exists around the topic of abortion among secular people who correctly perceive the value of a life in the womb but can’t bring themselves to acknowledge the logical moral and legal endpoint of that perception.
Of the men discussing grief over abortion, the author writes “To their credit, all the men I spoke to made a point of saying they would never support a society that compelled women to give birth against their will.” And yet: “[He] never wanted kids; he also wishes, desperately, that the kids he didn’t want had been given a chance to live. And though the abortion was not his choice, he, like [another man interviewed] nevertheless believes he deserves to feel bad about it for the rest of his life.” In his own words “I’m not at peace with it. I don’t think I’ll ever get there. I don’t think I want to get there. It’s a flexible, ever-changing, undulating thing inside of you. That I not only took part in it, but I was willing. . . . You realize that you’ve murdered part of yourself. I know that sounds dramatic. I don’t mean it to be that way. But it is what it is.” Aside from highlighting the horrible truth about abortion, these interviews also highlight how desperately so many people need God’s grace, aside from their obvious need for salvation. Reading these accounts, I long for these men to feel the peace of God’s forgiveness.
I will also give credit to the article for being willing to rethink how we message pregnancy in our society. The author notes how in a desire to curb teen pregnancy we have gone too far in painting pregnancy as a life-destroying, dream-derailing catastrophe - something that may be hard to de-program after adolescence. The author was also willing to acknowledge that pro-choice messaging focusing on consequence-free sex for men was crass and wrong - in part because it minimizes emotional realities for men surrounding sex and pregnancy.
I really appreciate the author’s willingness to wrestle with these issues, and I also think it demonstrates God’s grace on our society that our consciences are not yet entirely seared around them. Realities about sex, gender, and parenthood continue to force their way into our social consciousness despite our best efforts to ignore them over the last fifty years. Christianity is the worldview that, because it is true, is best able to make sense of these realities. Let us pray that God would continue to make these realities more apparent, and that in doing so He is able to spark a revival in our society.