Is It Ok To Still Have Children?

I tried really really hard not to get sucked in, but there is something deeply mesmerizing about Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez cooking in her tiny kitchen, pontificating about politics and the end of the world. This is the best kind of social media experience. There she is—and how does she look so relaxed and amazing, because when I’m chopping sweet potatoes I look Nothing like that—appealing and yet commanding, and you can just click on and watch her, no matter what else you happen to be doing. If Congress wanted to be more accessible (which it didn’t, and I, frankly, didn’t want it to be) she is the best and most agreeable way to make it so.

And yet, a lot of what she says is ruinous. That she says it with such blithe innocence makes it no less tragic. She knows not whereof she speaks, and yet millions are listening to her with joy—witness the encouraging and positive comments scrolling up as her knife cuts down. What she preaches is, at its very core, hopeless—urgent action masquerading as hope for a hopeless and perishing world.

So watch the clip, for sure, all the way to the end, but it is this single line that strikes me. She says, “It does lead young people to have a legitimate question, is it ok to still have children?”

She gestures, and then moves on to the problem of millennial debt and how can anyone even afford to live, let alone support another person, and then on to the matter of the planet definitely ending very soon, like in the next ten years. Her sweet potatoes go into the pan and the video cuts out because her phone is at 0% battery.

And the internet passes by in the swiftly flowing stream of likes and retweets, registering horror and delight, depending on who’s finger is scrolling, before finding some other tidbit of outrage. I know I did—that man in that black dress at the Oscars, my goodness. My spine tingled with delicious shock and fascination.

Meanwhile, maybe you are carrying on with your daily Bible reading and hopelessness is the name of your game. The church is addled with sex abuse, scandal, mismanagement, heresy, and a deep abiding deficit of courage. To cheer ourselves we click on John Crist videos and remember better times.

Is it ok to still have children? Or should the human project die with us? Or should it only be a select elite, properly educated, right thinking few who are allowed to bring another person into the world? It’s a question haphazardly asked, unconsidered, with none of the depths of wisdom carrying one generation into the next even in its breath. Here I am, it invites, standing here with my expensive knife and cutting board, my modern education and my wandering thoughts offered to a whole untethered, anxious, hopeless generation—I exist, but should another? Or should we give up? Has the point of us ceased to be?

Certainly millions of people feel that way. Abortion would not be at the numbers it is if there wasn’t a desire for it. It is easier to rid one’s present, complicated, unbearable life of someone else’s before the light can dawn on that someone else’s unseeing eyes. Abortion is doing us to death by the millions—spiritually at the very least. And at the other end, if you are old and your nursing home and doctor just can’t be bothered, you might be held down and done away with, against your will.

It seems, truly, that we have given up. That there is no reason, no purpose for human kind. Let nature have her own back and we will go back down into the dust whence we came.

But that is not the view of God. That is not the Christian view. That is not biblical. Christians should be able quickly to stand up and say No. As long as human people are on this earth, and there is evening and there is morning, day by day, season by changing season, degree by warming degree, children are a gift, humanity itself is something that God made, God designed, and God alone will bring to an end.

Have children. They are a blessing from the Lord. He says so himself.

“Behold, children are a heritage from the LORD, the fruit of the womb a reward.” – Psalm 127:3

A reward? Not rather a curse? Even in the devastating moment that you stand there, unhappily contemplating a future wherein you have to lug along someone behind you? A heritage? We have no heritage, we cry, we have already destroyed it. The only way to save what we have already destroyed is to spare someone else the grief of having to even come into life at all. Death is preferable, the reward, the heritage we know best.

In some perverse way, this, of course, is true. Death is our reward, for rebelling against God, for sin, for distrusting the one who is, in himself, Life. When you run away from life, of course what you end up with is…death.

But God did not accept this choice from us. When we chose death, he took that death into himself, and gave us life again. And one of the best pictures of that life is, well…life—other people coming, one by one by one, out of the womb, as we go down to the grave. God gives hope by letting us go on, by giving babies, by letting one generation follow upon another.

It is not only hopeless, but cruel to say to the generation that might come upon our heels, don’t bother. Life isn’t worth it. There is no hope. We have none and neither shall you.

No, as long as there is life, there is hope. As long as God makes the earth to keep going around the sun, we have no right to say, you had better not be.