“Every child, a wanted child.”
This is the catchy slogan population control advocates have coined that Planned Parenthood and other abortion advocates have championed.
On the surface, as with much of their rhetoric, the phrase sounds appealing.
Yes, we can all agree that every child ought to be desired. Yet, this implies that some children are not wanted. And that’s where we can expose their rhetoric as shallow and rotten.
The pro-aborts need to answer what do we do with the supposed “unwanted” children? They argue mothers ought to be allowed to put them to death. There, problem solved. The children wanted are allowed to survive till birth. The ones unwanted can be put to death.
This is madness! Murdering innocent babies? That’s the “compassionate,” “proper” stance? Never!
Every child, a wanted child? Yes, of course, right on! Every single child is wanted, in actuality.
Hundreds of families are waiting with baited breath to adopt babies around the country. So, even if a pregnant mother does not desire to raise the child she is bearing, many families remain ready, willing, and able to care for that child. Thus, every child is desired.
What’s more, every single person who comes into existence was willed to be alive by God. God desires every person to exist. Everyone is wanted by God. And not just for an earthly existence. “God desires that all men be saved [to Heaven]” (1 Tim 2:4). Thus, God gives every human person an immortal soul, and wants for each person to spend eternity with Him in Heaven.
“HOW THE RHETORIC OF FAMILY PLANNING HURTS CHILDREN”
Susan Martin had an article published recently on thepublicdiscourse.com ((LINK)) that discusses the personal impact this “every child, a wanted child” mantra had on her personal life. Her article is titled, “The Deadly Dance of Perfectionism: How the Rhetoric of Family Planning Hurts Children.”
Susan’s father had an unusual profession. Rather than be a mailman, an accountant, or a truck driver, Susan’s father worked for the Population Center. His job was to promote the ideology of population control abroad, in the effort to convince other cultures from around the world to adopt the West’s version of so-called “family planning.”
With a father spouting the “every child, a wanted child” intonation for a living, Susan relates feeling as a child the desire to be “wanted” by her father. In order to constantly be “wanted,” she thought she needed to be the perfect child, in order to be “worthy” of his love.
She says her father would consistently check in on her to see how happy she was feeling, given the different circumstances in her life. This led her to be worried about always needing to make the “right” choices in order to keep feeling desired by others. At any proverbial fork in the road, she may error in making the wrong decision, and then no longer be “wanted” by her father or by others.
Our author relates several other personal anecdotes of how this “every child, a wanted child” became internalized for her. Among the stories she shares, Susan relates how, when she was 10 years old, her mother and her population-control-pushing father interpreted the death of his sister, Susan’s aunt, to an overdose of sleeping pills. They blamed it on how “she could not control her own fertility.” Susan took this to mean that growing up and having children was a “dangerous” enterprise that might cost her her own life. After all, she was led to believe, her aunt had “lost control” of her fertility. Thus, having too many children, Susan was told, led her aunt to take her own life.
Susan laments, “Any time I was rejected in a friendship, I interpreted it as a final judgment on my worth as a human being. Any time I attempted a new undertaking, it had to be perfect. I already knew that I had to continually win my parents’ approval and attention to continue to be ‘wanted.’ It was only natural that the same should apply to my other relationships.”
As if that wasn’t enough, this desire to be in control in all matters of life really took their toll. “Well into college and graduate school, my perfectionistic quest to be wanted corroded my soul, mind, and body. There were now so many conditions being placed on what could make me desirable—as a student, as a potential mate, or as an employee—that I couldn’t win. I could no longer reliably know how to make myself desirable in the eyes of the world,” Susan describes.
She goes on to describe how she would accost any other women who dared to speak against her and her “fragile ego.” She said she had a feeling of superiority over anyone who held differing views on political, cultural, or intellectual issues. She would run them down to boost her self-image to anyone who would listen.
We will conclude with Martin’s following assessments: “The effects of the family planning rhetoric of the 1970s changed a generation… Classifying human beings as ‘wanted’ and ‘unwanted’ has insidious and enduring effects. Instead of family bonds, it creates groups of human beings who have to prove they are worthy of life before receiving it.
“For my generation of late baby-boomers,… we were unable to endure conflict and were crushed under criticism, a disease that ruined collegial cooperation and stifled academic discourse. Our assumptions could not be criticized, and any challenge had to be met with total resistance.”
If that doesn’t describe the Left today, then nothing else does.
UNFORTUNATELY, THIS MINDSET HAS MUSHROOMED IN THE CHURCH TODAY
This insidious mindset has prevailed within the Catholic Church, regrettably. The expectation of nearly every engaged couple, who wishes to be married in the Catholic Church, is that they will practice Natural Family Planning (NFP). As if this was the eighth sacrament from on high. As presently taught in a majority of cases, NFP is a sanitized, “Church-approved” method of family planning, as its name plainly states.
Thus, we have lay-run organizations teaching fellow couples how to practice the mindset of limiting one’s family size. This teaching is clergy-endorsed and, worse, required by the pastors in order to get married. In other words, this worldly—no, this diabolical—mindset pervades in the Church.
Catholic couples are taught to discern month to month whether they ought to be generous and open to the transmission of new human life into their family. As if they get to control who gets to come into existence. It’s as if they are playing god.
As Susan puts it so well, “The decision to have children ceases to be something that people plan for by becoming married. Instead, it is viewed as extraneous to marriage as an institution.”
If that’s not insidious, then nothing else is.
Every child, a wanted child? Sadly, this mentality suffuses in the Church to this day.
(I plan to do a follow-up post to this one, sharing more from Susan Martin’s article. In the next post I will highlight how an entire generation bought the false promise that limiting family size would lead to greater happiness for the parents and the children. I will also discuss Susan’s observations on how this all stems from the practice of eugenics. Stay tuned.
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