Read one of my favorite economists on the question of reproductive rights. Among other things, she makes the point that came home to my [older] husband and me in our first years of marriage. We thought we'd whelp out kids right quick (he was playing catch-up after all). Thanks to some wrenches in the works, we had to wait awhile. How we came to conceive at all is a minor miracle --maybe I'll tell that story some time. I think those of us who run in the circles of Catholic Orthodoxy don't realize how much we're influenced by the culture at large until we run up against little problems like infertility. Then you start to realize you bought into the whole "I am in total control of my fertility" myth more than was seemly. As a friend once said to me, "No matter what you do or what your attitudes, Providence has a way of showing who's in control."
Jennifer Roback Morse writes: Ask a thirty-five year old infertile woman whether she has “the ability to control her reproductive life,” and she may just smack you. Her pain is all the more poignant if she has been contracepting for years. Perhaps she did organize her life around the promise of reproductive freedom. But she discovers, too late, that this promise is simply an illusion.
RTWT, including the great concluding paragraph.
