October has been for a long time the month of pro-life awareness and of the Blessed Virgin Mary, with a particular focus on praying the Rosary to protect unborn children.
It’s interesting timing, then, that recent headlines are telling us that Canada’s birth rate has fallen – again. According to Statistics Canada, women in this country are, on average, having 1.26 children in their lifetime. That’s well below the internationally accepted “replacement” number of 2.1, a level which Canada hasn’t known in more than 50 years. British Columbia is the leader of the trend with a birth rate of only one child per woman.
It now seems that pro-life month should also include praying for those who are choosing not to have children at all.
It used to be that Catholic families were synonymous with large families. That’s still true in some parts of the world where Catholicism is thriving, and for some Protestant sects and many Muslims. There seems to be a correlation between deep faith and having multiple children. Indeed, all throughout the Old Testament, we hear the repeated theme that faith is a treasure to be passed on through children, which, obviously, requires children to actually be born. How can our faith survive if there are no children to receive the teachings?
It seems like we’ve reached a particularly sad point in our modern world when we have to make a case for having children. To have to convince people that having children is a good thing is a rather scary, and telling, fact about the world in which we live. We’ve known for a long time that the very concept of life must do battle with the all-consuming culture of death, a term so aptly coined by Pope St. John Paul II.
How do we convince our society that having children is good and necessary? What may seem obvious to some of us – that children are gifts from God, that they grow to be contributing members of society, that they are necessary to uphold the economy, that raising them is the most challenging but also the most beautiful task a person can undertake – is not at all obvious to many. Too many people see children as mental, physical, and, probably the most common, financial burdens.
It’s likely that most people know couples who have declared their desire to remain childless. Scan some recent obituaries and it’s easy to see that more and more people are dying with very few grandchildren and sometimes, in the saddest cases, none at all. When I see obituaries like this, I always recall my own father’s death at age 80. His last days were filled with constant visits from his eight living children, their spouses and his 16 (at the time) grandchildren. He was never alone in his final journey on this earth. He was surrounded by joy in the treasures he had been opened to receiving from God. As many of us prayed the Rosary around his bed just shortly before he died, I remember thinking that this was what death should be like – full of family and the love that family members share.
So many valuable lessons are learned within family life. The dynamics of parenthood, what happens to most people when they become parents, cannot be replaced by anything else. There is a necessary maturity and selflessness that is required of parents that helps them grow to not only serve their children but be better contributors to society. The lessons learned within a family, specifically between siblings, are invaluable to people learning that we are put on this earth to love and to consider the needs of others.
Until recently, even television commercials depicted women and couples joyful at the positive results of a pregnancy test. For the first time this fall, my husband was particularly bothered by one of these commercials featuring a woman reacting jubilantly to a negative test, feeding into the anti-baby mentality. In this age of denial of reality, pretending that procreation is not an integral part of being human will only lead to many people never reaching the potential for which God made them.
In this month of prayer for life and honouring our Blessed Mother, let us pray our Hail Marys fervently, that more couples will be open to the lives God wants to send them.
Lazzuri writes from her home in Nova Scotia, where she lives with her husband, four of her six children, and her mom. She can be reached at [email protected].