Elsewhere this week: Freezing eggs and why parents should ask more questions

Two pieces on parenting-related matters

Photo by Fons Heijnsbroek, abstract-art on Unsplash

Because of our family schedule, I limit speaking obligations that require travel to no more than two per semester. I’m traveling on one of those right now—to Asbury, Kentucky. It was a delight to speak about Cultural Christians in the Early Church last night with students and wider community at Asbury University. Today I get to speak about the book at the Lewis House in Lexington, just down the road.

In the meanwhile, the real heroes are the incredible friends from church and the community who are helping with the kids while I’m away for three days. I always feel guilty asking for help, but every time I do, I am just overcome with gratitude for the Body of Christ and for the everyday discipling that my kids receive from the saints in our church, including through such interactions as this week. Words cannot express how much we love the local church.

In the meantime, two new essays just out.

1. “Freezing Dreams and Selling Lies in Family Unfriendly America” —I appreciated the chance to review Natalie Lampert’s new book on egg freezing for Providence Magazine. A taste from my argument:

We are living in an age of apparent contradictions. On the one hand, U.S. birthrates are at an all time low, well below replacement rate. And yet, “between 2009 and 2022, nearly 115,000 healthy women in the United States underwent egg freezing.” Annually, their numbers swell, rising by 95% in some clinics during the 2020 shutdown. If people are choosing to have fewer children than ever, why are they investing so much in reproduction-enhancing technology? 

For half a decade, journalist Natalie Lampert investigated the recent egg freezing boom and what it means for our society’s view of women, fertility, and motherhood. She reports her results in her new book, The Big Freeze. Ultimately, the story she uncovers presents a sobering addition to journalist Timothy P. Carney’s argument that America today is deeply Family Unfriendly. 

How might our culture address the problem that Lampert rightly identifies as the culprit—that “so many women… do not feel free to be pregnant when we are fertile and young”? The answer is certainly not better access to egg-freezing—employers who are now gleefully offering this perk to their employees are merely facilitating what Carney calls the religion of “workism,” the practice of placing work über alles. Rather, the answer lies in healthy community, in rediscovering the beauty and wonder of families, in delighting in the blessing of friendships with other people, in welcoming the chaos of children all around. In other words, perhaps one of the most obvious answers to reforming this throw-away culture starts in the work of the church and in families banding together to delight in every image-bearer as a whole person. 

Does this mean that every single woman will and should have children? No. Motherhood, like marriage, is a calling. Singleness and celibacy are a calling for some as well. All of these paths are rooted in a rich theological tradition and deserve to be celebrated. Indeed, in my forthcoming book on recovering the value of children and motherhood that our post-Christian society seems to be losing, I note the emphasis of the early church in caring for single women. Looking down on mothers and looking down on single women are two sides of the same coin—both involve the devaluing of image-bearers.  

The ultimate dream each person has, deep down, is to be known and loved by God and by other people. This dream is to be found in community rather than in isolation. And this is a dream that cannot be frozen or sold. 

2. “Parents Should Ask More Questions”—I appreciated the chance to write this for the Institute for Family Studies Blog, advocating for making more informed decisions. I know it’s popular to criticize others for particular decisions they make (e.g., on schooling). But my point, rather, is that parents have to be more deliberate in thinking through options for their family, instead of falling into options that may or may not be the best for them and their kids. A taste:

   The surgeon general recently issued a warning: American parents are much too stressed. Politicians on both sides of the aisle agree and are standing by with their vastly differing views on how to alleviate that stress. But what if the problem is something more insidious than we realize? I propose that the issue is that we’ve outsourced too much of the basic day-to-day decision making about parenting to others. For the sake of our families, we should take it back. It adds up to this basic proposition: Parents should ask more questions.

   It really is remarkable just how many things in life today we do just because we fell into them—passively, without intent. Much of the time, the consequences of these (in)decisions aren’t terrible, so we just keep drifting along from one step to the next. In the case of many parents, we parent the way that we do because it just happened. But what if (as the Bruderhof motto humbly reminds), “another life is possible”? Perhaps we know that, yes, there are other options and possibilities; it’s just that we never quite took the time to think through them.