Making Babies is a Good Thing!

I learned yesterday that one of my co-workers used to be a body builder. Now she's pregnant with her second; the joke is that she's a different kind of body builder today. <grin> Lame pun aside, I like the sentiment.

See, my wife and I have not -- as of yet -- been able to make babies. You can read a little more about that in my brief bio. [Being on the non-fertile side of things has been hard (harder for my wife), but God has been very good to us in bringing us dozens of kids we get to part-time parent, in a way.] I'm probably overly sensitive to the pro-baby paradigm because of our non-baby experience.

I really loved Brianna's post Sex Without the Babies. Making babies is a good thing! It's a beautiful gift. We wouldn't have had our recent Mother's Day without it. We wouldn't have us without it.

I think I'm also sensitive to this topic because of "our kids" -- high school and college-aged students who come over to hang out -- who are, themselves, mired in today's boundary-free milieu. For them, sex and babies are two totally different topics, so a video about how to have "sex without babies" fits perfectly with the worldview around them. There is an excellent blog post -- which I can't find now -- that points out that we have separated marriage and sex because we no longer link sex and babies (one of the most powerful things about marriage being raising children). And yet, for as disconnected as the ideas of sex and babies are today, I heard that 40% of women who find themselves in a crisis pregnancy are on birth control.

Forty percent. Almost half.

Making babies is a good thing, but it's difficult when you believe that sex and babies do not go together. That's a cultural idea that just so happens to be wrong.

May you enjoy your children today! May this weekend, through all the ups and downs, be filled with joy as you parent your offspring and raise up the next generation. Thank you for what you do. And may you find freedom, dignity, and beauty in your gift of making babies.

 ~Luke Holzmann
Filmmaker, Writer, Guardian