The Maybe Baby Conversation
How do couples decide when and how many children to have? The Maybe Baby Conversation can Help.
During our engagement, we took lessons in a Fertility Awareness Method (FAM), then known as Natural Family Planning. Wanting to live a Catholic marriage, we accepted the Church’s wisdom and rejected contraception to follow her moral teaching. We’ve never regretted that decision.
Over six months, a private instructor coached us on how to use the method. One thing we noticed however, was that there was little attention or practical advice on how to arrive at our ‘pregnancy intention’ each month. All the focus was on how to apply FAMs to whatever that intention was.
With our first three children born in a four-year period, we got a crash course in the reality of parenthood. Chronic sleep deprivation, worry, and the frustration of constant chaos pushed us to our limits.
Conscious Parenthood
Painfully aware of the decades of responsibility ahead of us, we were at the pointy end of what the church calls ‘Conscious Parenthood’. Originally translated from the Latin as ‘Responsible Parenthood’, it calls us to consciously and carefully plan for our family.
“The mission of Conscious Parenthood requires that spouses recognise their duties toward God, toward themselves, toward the family, and toward human society, as they maintain a correct set of priorities.” – St Pope Paul VI, Humane Vitae n10
Over the following years, we muddled our way through with prayer, study, and input from mentors and spiritual advisors. God blessed us with two more children, and a growing ministry in marriage formation.
Our church has always affirmed the inestimable worth of the child and honoured the parents who raise it. Yet, raising a child is a tremendous responsibility drawing on the emotional, physical, spiritual and economic resources of the parents.
Thus procreation is not only about conceiving and giving birth to a child. It is also about forming and parenting that child into independent adulthood. Importantly, it includes introducing that child to the God who loves him or her.
There will be times in a couple’s life when we will discern the need to postpone a pregnancy for a period or perhaps indefinitely. As every married couple is unique, each of us must prayerfully discern for ourselves how many children God calls us to have and when to have them.
Godly decisions
The first question for couples is: are we deciding or discerning? The key difference between the two is the presence of God.
When we actively seek to involve God by basing our choices on God’s principles for living and prayerfully seek his guidance, we can be confident in the wisdom of our choices.
Throughout our married life, God will regularly place before us the invitation to be more life-giving. Sometimes this invitation will take the form of conceiving a child, at others it might be to invest more deeply in one or more of our existing children, foster or adopt a child not our own, care for an extended family member in need, to take up a ministry or get involved in a community initiative.
In seeking to follow him, God will frequently call us to reform our lifestyle to be more available to our spouse or family: we cannot make this discernment in isolation from the rest of our life, as our readiness to welcome another child or to be life-giving in some other way, needs space in our life in order to take root.
Maybe Baby?
The Maybe Baby Conversation is a discernment tool to help couples discern our pregnancy intention for the following fertility cycle. It works to keep us close as a couple, attuned to the other, to God’s presence, and to the stressors in our lives.
Based on section 10 in Humanae Vitae the Maybe Baby Conversation is book-ended with prayer and explores in a ‘correct set of priorities’, each spouse’s experience in their marriage, parenting, and finally their wider social circle.
It’s like a ‘check-in’ with each other on how we are going, inviting us to proactively respond to the needs of our marriage, family and society. It’s a practical way to enable God to influence our family planning and pregnancy intentions and to live the principle of Conscious Parenthood.
Having struggled to do this well in our marriage, we wanted to include guidance on this critical aspect of married life in the SmartLoving Fertility course. The Maybe Baby Conversation is one of the tools we wished we had had in our relationship toolkit from the beginning.
The marriage act is for procreation.
That is obviously how God intended the world to continue. And Jesus himself reinforced what marriage has always meant, as He said: “in the beginning.”
Through the centuries the Catholic Church has always taught this truth to her children.
We must say and believe that “God has not changed”; even if someone counters that with, “God has not changed – but we have!”; because that is no excuse.
For our eternal (not passing) happiness, we must live with Heaven in mind and not let ourselves become materialistic. Admittedly that is difficult in a world where happiness, pleasure, and comfort are our greatest natural desires. But Jesus said if we want to come after Him we must take up our cross daily and follow Him.
He lived a life of simplicity and hard working poverty. Although we naturally desire to have a nice home and be well fed and well clothed we must realise that most of the world’s people cannot and do not have very much at all in the way of material goods..
We do have to work, including in the care of the home and of the children who are God’s perfect creation and His gifts to their parents.
But we need to ask for the Grace to be content with our lot – even as we work towards improvements. And we need to remember the poor; for, as Jesus said, “they will always be with us”. And his Judgment of us, as He said (my mother taught me this from her knee), and as it is documented in St Matthew‘s Gospel, Chapter 25, will depend, not on how comfortably we managed to live, or on wealthy we became, but on how we treated Him in the poor.
So let us pray for the Grace to live humbly and not to become attached to worldly goods for their own sake. If we pray and ask Him, and wait patiently for Him, God will certainly help us, as He has promised.
If we live one day at a time and consider the needs of those who are poor and/or need our help, we will be touched to find how God will help us to manage everything – and what peace this will bring.
Hi Anne B – and thanks for your thoughts. We largely agree with you – The marriage act is for procreation. But the church teaches that it is also for the unity of the spouses. These two purposes (the unitive and procreative) are inseparable (Humanae Vitae n12). This unitive sentiment is also present in the scriptures from the beginning: “Man leaves his father and mother and the two become one flesh” (Gn 2:24).
Certainly God has not changed, but the Church’s understanding and interpretation of these complex situations has deepened over the centuries, and her language and explanation has also become fuller and more nuanced.
We agree – materialism is a challenge, especially in wealthy, developed countries and is heightened by social media which is full of ‘boastful materialism’. In resisting the allure of materialism, God’s grace is essential, and so being attentive to our faith and seeking a direct personal relationship with God so that we can share in his life on earth and in heaven is necessary for couples to discern his will for them and to receive the grace he offers.
Importantly, the church affirms that the discernment around the number and timing of children is for couple alone in consultation with God (and their spiritual director if they have one). It is not for others to judge them, as we cannot know their circumstances. Many carry hidden wounds which can be profoundly disabling. Others suffer from subfertility.
This article is promoting a contraceptive mentality. A contraceptive mentality is NOT Catholic.
The ‘potential’ of Catholic marriage is the procreation of children.
Hi Mary Lou – indeed, a contraceptive mentality is not supported by the teachings of the Catholic Church – and this article is NOT promoting it, but it’s opposite – the call for couples to remain open to life and in active discernment with God.