Sexvangelicals Newsletter 5/14/24: Making Intentional Decisions About Family Planning
With Lindsay, Meg, and Sarai, co-hosts of the amazing Holy Ghosting Podcast
Like all of our weekly newsletters, this article is free for everyone! Please subscribe and donate to Relationship 101 so Julia and I can continue to write about sex and relationship education that the church, and so many other systems, didn’t want you to have.
Happy Tuesday! I wanted to put a quick plug for a conference that I’m co-hosting on Friday June 7 from 8:30-4:30 ET called Combating Anti-Trans Systems. Lucie Fielding, author of the 2021 masterpiece Trans Sex, is the keynote speaker, and there will be various breakout sessions throughout the day on working with trans and gender diverse folks in relationship therapy.
It’s $150 to attend, and all proceeds go to Trans Emergency Fund in Boston. Sign up on the NEAFAST (the non-profit I co-founded) website.
Podcast Episode
Mother’s Day is complicated for me and Julia, between two pregnancy losses (Julia), an infertility diagnosis (me), and not knowing my birthparents as the result of a closed adoption (also me).
The road to parenthood is grief-ridden, complicated, and quite expensive.
Julia and I study the impact of Evangelical, Mormon, and Pentecostal (EMPish) communities on long-term relationships and family development. In these communities, parenthood is a non-negotiable, a badge of honor. Between the expectation of parenthood and the lack of sex education and comfort level with contraception, many couples don’t give themselves permission to consider if they want to have kids, let alone have effective conversations about the logistics of pregnancy, childbirth, and child rearing.
This, of course, reinforces the idea that (in opposite sex relationships) women are expected to take the lead in the childrearing process, and all of the administrative work that centers around that.
This week, we talk Lindsay, Meg, and Sarai, co-hosts of the podcast Holy Ghosting, about how couples can have more effective, direct conversations about family planning.
Lindsay talked about the contrast between her experience as a pastor’s daughter and her husband’s experience as a non-church attender:
“He was just so supportive. And I swear, he knew more about women's bodies than I did. Because I didn't know anything. Because I wasn't taught anything.
And so, when it came to birth control and stuff, he was like, yeah, you should just do that. We don't want to have a baby. He had no hangups.
I’m really grateful for a partner who doesn't have the religious baggage who was just like, “Yeah, dude, we don't want to have a baby right now, so let's go Planned Parenthood for support. I was like, “Okay, let's do it.”
We also talk about how the expectation of parenthood doesn’t leave room for grief when pregnancies go awry, as they do for the 30% of pregnancies that end up in miscarriage. Meg shares a particularly haunting experience:
“When I did end up getting pregnant within a few months after getting married, it was a big shock. It was not something we were planning. I had a lot of anxiety around it, but that's what we were supposed to do.
So of course it was a joy and there was no option for me other than carry this baby to term and become a mother at 21 and start my journey. I was planning on having a bunch more kids because that was just also the thing you would do. And so I'm thinking, okay, by the time I'm 25, like I'll be done having babies.
But when we were at the doctor, we were told that his heart had stopped. And I didn't believe it because, on the sonogram, I saw a heartbeat. The doctor explained to me that that was just my blood, my body, my life continuing to try to support this fetus, but that he was not viable.
And the options were, you can go home and see. You know, be with your people and kind of be calm, but then you're gonna need to go in eventually, or we can have a DNC, we can schedule that and handle it. I did not want an abortion on my medical record. That was a big deal. Also, I believed. I had faith.
Meg carried the baby full term and delivered a stillborn; her life was saved by emergency care providers. She reflects:
“There was so much fear, but there was also so much faith and trust in this entity that was going to come in.
And it was like, my life didn't matter. My life was not the thing that we needed to worry about. This fetus, this baby's life that we just had to make sure survived.”
Fortunately, Meg and her partner connected around the grief, both the stillbirth itself and the pressures from the church to not listen to doctor’s recommendations to have a DNC. Many partnerships do not have the tools to survive such a massive loss; tune into our episode to learn more about these and other stories about parenthood and family planning from these three amazing women!
Relationship 101 Articles This Week
But this begs the question: How do couples make effective, intentional decisions about family planning and pregnancy? If you are in the process of determining how you want to have children and expand your family, these two articles may be timely.
On Thursday, we’ll review the Pregnancy Decision Making Model from Elyssa Klann and Joel Wong.
And on Friday, we’ll talk more about how couples can make more intentional decisions about contraception use.
Picture of the Week
In honor of Mother’s Day, here’s one of 150 pictures (that is an accurate estimate) of flowers that I took a few weeks ago at the Keukenhof Gardens.
Books That We’re Reading
Jeremiah’s Recommendations:
What the Dead Know: Learning About Life as a New York City Death Investigator by Barbara Butcher. This is one of my favorite books of the year so far. Butcher, the former Director of the Forensic Sciences Training Program at NYC’s Office of Chief Medical Examiner, brilliantly weaves her own story as a coroner, engaging with themes of death and existentialism while communicating to families and the NYC authorities about how people die. Butcher also provides a lot of excellent information about the specific strategies that coroners use to determine time of death and cause of death. I especially appreciate her attention to the almost impossible efforts to develop self-care in positions like these. 5 stars!
State of Terror by Louise Penny and Hillary Rodham Clinton. This was a fun read--great story idea that hits a little too close to home with political leaders (i.e. Trump) colluding with international enemies. I thought the way that information got discovered was a bit too convenient, but the plot moved along really well. I'm really curious what parts of the story were moderately autobiographical, with the link between Secretary of State Clinton and Adams. It gave the story a unique insight into what it might be like to be Secretary of State, as well as how political leaders navigate the tensions between parent and public servant.
Let’s heal together!
Jeremiah and Julia