Sterilizing the Poor with Despair

This essay was written for Crisis Magazine and may be read in full (freely) there. The introduction follows:

Some of the erroneous ways of viewing children and familial relationships within the secular world are beginning to seep into the Catholic colloquial understanding, causing a fracturing of what it means to be part of a family and fostering a materialistic understanding of bearing children.

Emblematically, a priest was speaking to women about motherhood when he opined that those who cannot afford to homeschool or send their children to Catholic school should use Natural Family Planning to prevent children.

It’s a surreal expansion of the definition of poverty to include at least the lower 70 percent of the American socioeconomic strata—significantly more, by some accounts. We might legitimately ask when it is prudent to have children in times of economic hardship, but if we are drawing the line in a place above the standards of every parent throughout most of history, then we might consider that something is amiss.

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