Nurse Claire has written another excellent piece over at her blog, Nurse Claire Says. Do check it out.
https://nurseclairesays.com/2024/09/10/already-said-but-worth-repeating/
You will not hear any objections or arguments from me on her words of wisdom. First of all (and I mean this sincerely), I’ve been a big fan of the good Nurse for some time. She first came to my attention a few years ago as a guest on the Barnhardt Podcast. This was back in the coof days when the ladies were dropping nuggets of knowledge on us left and right. From these two I learned about Ivermectin, a drug that has literally saved the lives of people in my family. In fact, I just took a dose of the 1% injectible livestock form this morning to knock out a cold. I felt like a million bucks within a couple of hours. I can’t see anything in my periphery but there wasn’t much worth seeing today anyway on this overcast Texas afternoon. No, to Nurse Claire I say thank you. I have several sisters and a brother-in-law who are RN’s. They taught me from an early age. Treat your nurses well and they will return the favor. From a personal standpoint, as the victim recipient of multiple spinal fusion surgeries, I can tell you that is absolutely true. Nurses rock.
I think what I really wanted to say in this post is a big thank you to Nurse Claire for clamping onto this bone like a rabid dog.
I remember as a child of about 10 years-old in New Jersey. My parents were discussing a sensitive but timely topic at the dinner table. This was 1987 and it was not at all out of the ordinary. Mom and Dad were not afraid to broach sensitive topics and in the 80’s there was no shortage of those in our daily lives. As I recall, an old family friend had a daughter who had gotten married recently and was ecstatic to have just gotten pregnant. She was just as open with her method of achieving pregnancy as she was in her joy at being pregnant. The young woman and her husband had used in vitro. I remember my parents being shocked. I remember questions being raised such as, “Didn’t a priest tell them that this is horrifically wrong?” and “How did they not know?” I remember that someone brought up the fact that the young mom-to-be proudly proclaimed that her priest had counseled her that this was all A-OK. I think the conversation was resolved by one of them shrugging their shoulders and saying, “Shame on that priest.”
Want to have a discussion of what’s wrong with the post-Vatican II Church? We can do that some other time (or you can do a deep dive of my posts). In short, we all know that priests were only too happy to counsel women that contraception was totes cool (with the understanding that those same women would look the other way when they saw the priest acting like a complete fruit basket in public all the while knowing that he and his BF were even fruitier when no one was around). We’ll get into the moral collapse another day. But to be sure, did you click that link above? Nurse Claire is right so, in her words, “Take your red pill now or you’ll get it by suppository.”
In short, let’s run through the basics.
In vitro (Latin for in glass, that it, the laboratory) fetilization involves (in no particular order): masturbation (typically aided by pornography), cryogenics, abortion, and divorce of the marital embrace from procreation.
Yeah, it’s a big no-go for anyone who’s moral compass still reads north.
The reason I wanted to write about this topic tonight is not because I think most of you lovely readers didn’t already know this. For heaven’s sake, if you started reading one post of mine and continued on to another you’re either a like-minded trad, really committed, or Cardinal Tobin. By the way, “Brother Joe”, I will take my Cathedral back one day. ‘Nuff said.
No, I wanted to write about this because of a personal connection.
I won’t bore you with the details but; here’s the story in a nutshell. My wife and I were both a little bit older when we married. I was 29, she was 30. Yes, she’s a total cougar. We were then as we are now completely and madly in love with each other. We stood before the altar of God and vowed with true conviction to lovingly accept any and all children the God would send us. We were over the moon when, six weeks into our young marriage, we found out that we were expecting. A honeymoon baby! How ’bout that?! Well, we had that young man and kept living our lives. And we were over the moon again when we found out 9 months after he was born that we were expecting again. She actually took me out to dinner on the feast of Our Lady’s Annunciation to tell me the news. And our daughter was born on my birthday, to the exact minute. God is marvelous and I am a miserable sinner whom He feeds too much.
And then…
Nothing.
Folks, it took us a long time to realize that something was amiss but we were never able to conceive again. I had to realize that what I had vowed to God was not a vow I had broken but one which He fulfilled in His own way. You see, there’s the good Catholic boy and girl who stand at the altar and promise to do whatever God wants of them and then there’s the personal ambition of the good Catholic boy and girl who both love babies, love raising children, and wanted nothing more in life than to raise an army of genetically cloned minions. I complained once about how “unfair it was” that we didn’t have more children and my wife gave me a copy of the Litany of Humility. I love that woman more than I can say.
That’s just it. Let’s talk humility for a bit. We all know that giving into human respect is a grave sin. But do you know what it’s like to walk into that trad parish Sunday after Sunday and feel like all eyes are on you because you’re the only one not taking up an entire pew? Talk about feeling insignificant and judged at the same time. In truth, there are only a few that I’ve encountered over the years who legitimately think (wrongly) that my wife and I did something to achieve that two child goal. But it doesn’t make me feel any better knowing that I wanted to be just like all the other men in the parish. I wanted to be the guy (like my dad, a father of 16) parading his children into Mass, showing off my procreatorial prowess (and loving each and every one of my offspring). Bottom line: we lovingly accepted. He gave us two. End of story.
Now where does IVF come into this? Oh yes… A few years ago I had occasion to catch up with my childhood best friend. We got to talking about having kids and he said something like, “Ah, a boy and a girl. Guess you’re done, right?” He seemed genuinely shocked when I recoiled at his remark. “No,” I said, ” We certainly hope to have more.” He scratched his head as though more than two kids was something only a psychopath would wish for. “Well,” he said, “Just do what we did.” And this is where it gets all gross for various reasons. “And what was that?” I said, as though I didn’t already know. That’s when he walked me through his journey with IVF. The mental image of him in a “sterile” room with a plastic cup and a magazine almost made me vomit.
But that’s just it. Friends, we could have gone that route. Any number of factors could have lead us there – poor formation being just one. I understand the desire to have a baby. Believe me, I get it. I’m almost fifty years-old and I still ask God every single day to give us a miracle. I say that prayer mindful that both Sarah in the Old Testament and Elizabeth in the New were old women (and their husbands weren’t spring chickens either) when they conceived. And folks, they didn’t do it through in vitro and these weren’t “miraculous” conceptions in a certain sense. Both of these couples were still doing what married couples do even at their ages and God used them to bring forth great saints – Isaac and John the Baptist. So yes, I’ll keep trying ’til the day I die. And that’s the only sex joke you’ll hear in this post. It’s not like it’s an unenjoyable endeavor at that. I guess that’s the other joke. Sorry, I couldn’t help myself.
So no, we were never going to go the IVF route and I hope after reading this and Nurse Claire’s post that no one else will either.
But here’s one more piece of this story I’d like you to hear if it provides any edification to you at all.
A dear friends of ours once told me, “I hope you and your wife offer up the pain of not being able to conceive in reparation for all the Catholic couples who contracept.”
Wow. Read that line again.
What a beautiful notion (and easy to say from a woman with twelve kids including two sets of twins who doesn’t look a day over 30). But truly, is that not magnificent?
And THAT is what I hoped to share tonight when I started writing this post. Perhaps those of us who suffer from the terrible pain of infertility – even those of us who are long in the tooth and past supposed child-bearing years or who have kids but just wanted more so we’re not the odd men out in the parish – should be doing. Wake up every morning and drop to your knees. Thank God for your own life and your Catholic faith. Then thank Him for your spouse and their openness to His Will (you being part of it). Then tell Him of your willingness to suffer with His Son and to offer it for your fellow Catholics who thwart His plans and now also for those who cut Him out of their plans entirely by making themselves the “authors” of life. Then continue to live your vows to love, honor, cherish, and obey. And trust in His Will, humbly submitting yourself to be absorbed in His Divine Life.
In this way, in this state of life, we will become saints.
Our Lady, Seat of Wisdom pray for us!
Harvey Millican's Blog: Musings of a Trad Dad 