Meticulously planned parenthood

From an article in Books and Culture by Dr. Amy Laura Hall:

"Indeed, maternal expectations in the United States have been shaped by a subtle, working distinction between families whose children are marching forward and those whose children are marching backward.  Legal, efficient forms of controlling birth changed parenthood from a probable given in marriage to a task that must be chosen responsibly and performed well.  Aspiring young couples today often speak about parenthood as if each potential child, each possible life, must be justified - each conception brought about only under the best timing and after obviously adequate preparation.  This is not surprising; they know that they are being watched, and judged.  The cumulative message emerging from the mainstream conduits of better homes and households in the last century has been that a prospective mother should choose well in order to set her household on the right side of the divide between lives that are atavistic and lives that are evolving...

[Dr. Hall then quotes from a book on the social impact of amniocentesis - go ahead and click on the link above to find the quote from "Emily Lockhardt."

Hall continues: "This human striving to justify oneself and one's children and one's household seems today a particularly Protestant heresy, but it is also a heresy that Protestantism should know how to name.  To all presumptions of human striving, the Protestant tradition has posed one word, a Word through which we are created, a Word that justifies us in spite of us.  It is also a Word that may send each middle-class, aspiring household out into the world with gratitude and a new sense of abundance - ready to risk association with the very children and households for whom Christ showed preference...

...to resist the norms of meticulousy planned parenthood requires tackling head-on two facets of mainline Protestant life in the United States.  First, resistance involves faith in a future secured neither through scientific progress nor by the march of children to advance the race but through the inscrutable birth of one child, the Word made flesh in an inauspicious manager surrounded by donkeys.  Second - and this is for most parents the trickiest part - resistance involves refusing to justify my children according to the measures of ostensibly good housekeeping.  Resistance involves eschewing the means by which I am to distinguish my own daughters from children who seem vaguely 'backward,' from those who are considered 'at risk,' from neighborhoods that seem godforsaken and from schools that are deemed by quantifiable results to be 'subpar.'  Resistance means not only following the Word born in Bethlehem but bringing one's own children along, to identify with and live among those who are considered today to be the least of these."