Really Pro-Life

While reading Shoved to Them today, I came across a little anecdote that made me smile and chuckle a bit:

"What is your profession? Breeding?" He asked sarcastically.


"No," I told him. "I've chosen to be the Mother of Nations. We will populate the Earth."


I could tell he didn't get it, so (being the nerd I am) I did a little math for him. "If our children have babies at the same rate that we do, you will have 4 grandchildren and I will have 36. If we keep it going you will have 16 great-great grandchildren and I will have 1296. A few more generations and my decedents can touch every corner of the globe."


There was a long pause on his end, then he wistfully replied, "I would have liked to have had a little girl."

When my wife and I got married, we were required to take an NFP class. The class was... well it just was. I have some very confused thoughts and feelings about NFP. I understand that there are those that use NFP as a family planning method, while others use it in a way to try and help conceive. My wife and I have always used the phrase, "We want as many kids as God blesses us with." It really throws people for a loop. My wife grew up in a house of 4 kids and I in a house of 2. I would say both of us also grew up in lower middle class, or upper-lower class socio-economic situations. That is to say, both families may have had more children if we lived in higher tax brackets.

My wife and I had our "Monkey" 11 months and 1 week after we were married. We don't know how many we will have, but we are friends with families that run the entire spectrum. What is interesting though, is that at our parish we are friends with folks that have quite a few kids. In fact if you took our 10 closest friends at our Parish and added all our kids together, there would be 44. That's 11 families (including us) with an AVERAGE of 4 kids per family. This includes several families that have only 1 child and/or are newly married. Only 1 these families is officially "done" having children. In fact, only one family even has teenagers, the rest are 12 or younger. This is a lot of kids, and in reality when things are said and done, if you gave each family the average amount of kids, the number would grow from 44 to 56. Our parish has a couple hundred families in it, I honestly don't know if there is an exact count. But theoretically, using the same argument as in the above example, we would be a majority in the Church in one more generation. Meaning in about 25 years, there could be 170 - 224 kids, just from our group of 11. Let's just cut that in half - 80-110 new people in the parish in 20 years. Add to that all of us, and you have about 200 people, just from 11 families.

Now if you take 11 families with 2 kids each...using the same math, the number of people stemming from those families will be around 60.

60 v. 200... that is a BIG DIFFERENCE. That is what being REALLY pro-life is all about.