Infertility in the LDS Church is such a weird place to occupy because it's the place where so much of the Church's messaging on sex and gender, on Complementarianism and traditional divisions of labor within the community, completely fall apart.
Being a parent may be the most important thing some people will ever do. I have no issue at all with people saying this about themselves to describe their own journey through the world. But that's not universally true for everyone because of someone's gender or alleged propensity for reproduction. The fact that infertility exists at all is all the evidence you need of that. If it were somehow necessary for a person's salvation or exaltation for everyone to have children, it wouldn't be withheld from anyone.
Having children is not the most important thing I will ever do. For me, there are entire lists of priorities and experiences that are more important for me. The greatest happiness and joy I could ever know is not being withheld from me. My life is complete and joyful without children in it. It is not only possible to be happy without children, there are many aspects of happiness and self-fulfillment that I have access to that parents will never know. Those who have spent their entire adult lives as parents shouldn't pretend to know what my life is like, or expect me to be unhappy in it. It's far from the worst thing that could happen to someone. It's definitely nowhere near the top of the list of the worst things that have happened to me. Those who act as if it is are useless to and unprepared for ministering to infertile individuals and couples in any meaningful way. Especially when the most important message many of need to hear is "God has a plan for you that will ultimately be better for you than having children."
So why do people, including church leadership, continue to treat having children like it's essential to our salvation, when neither the gospel of Jesus Christ nor any of the covenants we've made present it that way?
Power consolidation. Boundary maintenance. Cultural curation for the kind of person who treats children as an identity marker and avatars for their own influence on the world.
It's how the Church is trying to ignore the problem of dwindling membership, which this exact messaging has caused, instead of addressing the problematic gender disparities reflected in this messaging.
No one is entitled to have children, then to use those children as a means of self-fulfillment, spiritual education, or approximations to the divine experience of being God. Even if you can have children, this is a harmful way of viewing children because it makes having children all about the parents and their needs.
You don't have children to meet your needs. You have children to meet their needs.
I didn't need to have children to learn that lesson, or many of the other lessons that people needed to become parents to learn. There is more than one way to approach that kind of selfless love, in all kinds of relationships. Parenting is one of many, not the only kind of selfless love, and certainly not the most important kind of selfless love for many people.
And what kills me in talking to members of the Church who try to push back against this perspective is this: they claim to be the arbiters of the ultimate form of selfless love because they are parents. But these are the same people who will pound on the single piano key about parenthood to such an extreme that it alienates other people. And when they do, and someone tells them it's harmful, they're the first ones to say that what they're doing is more important than anyone else's feelings. They talk of a selfless love they don't actually possess—not for people outside of their family and, I would argue, not for anyone inside of it either.
All this to say: the Venn Diagram overlap between people who don't respect or value people at church with infertility and the people who also enmesh themselves in disturbing ways with their own children is a circle.
Catch neither one of us wanting to be at church with them as adults.
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