Removing the link. . .

We have fairly effectively removed the link between motherhood and womanhood, fatherhood and manhood.  It began a very long time ago.  The birth control pill was the reason but the nail in the coffin that killed our association of sex with love and love with children and femaleness with motherhood and maleness with fatherhood.  It has become positively neanderthal to connect what we have so effectively made separate and distinct.  No one, even those who tend to a traditional understanding of marriage and family, seem quite willing to surrender the latitude such a distinction has provided for those married to define themselves and their relationship without necessarily even considering children and their roles as mom and dad.

While it is certainly easy to trace the history of this along with the injustice proclaimed of women who must carry and raise the child while men get off lightly with just the sex, it was never quite that simple.  The end result of this has been the devastation of very structure of the relationship between man–woman and, indeed, the very definition and identity of each.  The individual autonomy which is provided when conceiving and raising a child can be banished from life or simply consigned to one of many and a less than salutary option has not proved to be a beneficial as thought.  Women who wish children are released from the choice of marriage to pursue a sanitized version of conception with the forms of reproductive technology already available to them and men are afforded the same option (though one less chosen, to be sure).  It is not that we do not need children or want them, we seem not to need or want the relationship that provided the context for children -- at least until modern times.

Is that all children are?  Are they merely a choice for some or are they inherent to the shape of marriage and family?  It is harder and harder for anyone to say that children are not merely one choice among many choices and certainly not essential to the life of the individual or a couple.  We have not merely released both men and women from the burden of also seeing themselves as fathers and mothers but have laid bare the very foundation of parenthood and raised questions about its value or necessity at all.  If we could, we just might find a way to justify and laud purchasing children as products through retail outlets, allowing the buyer to design tailor made children the way we would customize a car for delivery.  Then the cycle might be finally complete as we bypass parenting to make a consumer choice for or against a child.

The lessons of the sociology and psychology applied to parenthood have been learned so well that Christians routinely have fewer children than secular folk or the nones.  We go our secular world one better and insist that the only real link between being male and a father or female and a mother was an invented one and certainly not the intention of God in creation.  In so doing, we have shows just how far from the world of Scripture our lives have fallen.  What is most concerning is that this does not seem to be viewed as a problem among many Christian folks much less those outside the faith.  It has become the effective normal for those who claim to be Christians as much as for those who do not.  The autonomous self does not quickly surrender its autonomy for any cause -- religious or otherwise.