The Family Size Question (S1 - E10) - Alternatively - Formerly Conspiracy Pilled

Episode Transcript
Available transcripts are automatically generated. Complete accuracy is not guaranteed.
Speaker 1 (00:51):
Hello, and welcome to a pre recorded episode of Alternatively
is a season one. I don't know what episode number
it's going to be, nine thousand. You are probably going
to be seeing more and more prerecorded episodes. We love
being Live with you. We are we will almost always,
nearly always, barring secondess or whatever, be Live with You

(01:12):
Thursday Nights behind the paywall on locals. But the stage
of life I'm in right now, with two little boys
and trying to find sleep and ordering the chaos, I'm
finding more and more that the trying to go live
in front of all the audience after a long day
of tiny people needing me is really really hard, and

(01:34):
I'm not at my best, and I don't want that.
I don't want to be kind of like tired of
not wanting to be there for the shows. So for
a little while, we're probably going to do significantly more
pre recorded stuff. But again, if you want to be
Live with Us, Thursday Nights is still going to be
always live. Also, it's partially because you all have a

(01:57):
really bad, stinky brother. Yeah, that's actually what it. And
I was trying not to I was trying to be nice.
Oh you can cut that part. We are also working
on a few things to kind of cut back on
some of our bills around the show. I don't think
we actually have shut down the merch shop. Yeah, we're
going to be, and then I think probably what we're
going to be doing is this is news for listen,

(02:20):
moving Lizz's stories over to locals, and maybe also a
page on discord. We'll talk to her about what she's
comfortable doing as far as they are her books. But
we're probably going to be shutting down the website because
that is an expense, that is for us to be
paying for conspiracy pill dot com when the show isn't
even conspiracy pilled anymore. Makes perfect, Yeah, and really we've

(02:41):
kept it because of Lizz's stories. So if we can
find a good substitute for the publication of her of
her novels, then we will be doing that instead. But
that's something we're going to be working on her with Liz.
What part of Planet Eyes for now, it is still
it is still going to conspiracy pill dot com and
we'll probably finish out Planet before we do anything to

(03:01):
the website. I believe the one that's up now is
part seven, Yes, so we've got five more to go.
You can see my head. Yeah, five more, we might
not finish up. I mean five weeks is you'd be
paying for another month extra? Yeah, yeah, we'll burn that
bridges were crossing it. We will burn that bridge crossing it. Yes.
I don't want you guys to be worried. There is
just there are conversations that are being had behind the

(03:24):
scenes in our house with Liz, with just me and
John about like, there are still things that are causing
me a lot of stress and pain around the show
and they aren't necessary. And so we're trying to figure
out what what is going to work for the season
of life that we're in, so that I can show
up and be my best for you guys, and that

(03:46):
we do what works yes for everyone, for the community,
for our family all that. So nothing bad, just possibly
some changes kind of coming down the line. And some
of you are in trouble for Synky Breath. Yeah, some
of you are in a really big, really big Sator.
I was actually thinking of calling him out and then
I was like no, but then Abby did it, so
we're on the same page, Sator. Brush your teeth please please.

(04:10):
Speaking of let's just before each show, let's pick someone
to be really abusive toward you know what, Monkey's breath
isn't as bad as say there's, but I feel like
we actually ready to call out Monkey as well. Probably
smelsing mustard and sweet Bunny has really been rushing on

(04:30):
you can tell. Yeah, it's really sweet. Yeah, so shout
out to Funny for having good breath. Petunia Pit pitched
me in an episode idea that we're calling her out next,
and I was like, yeah, that was my like speaking of.
So I don't know if I'm actually going to do
it the way that she was hoping that I would

(04:52):
do it, or cover exactly what she needed to complain.
I would cover, but it was because of her message
in this scord. I think it was in episode ideas.
So I'm sorry that I decided to do this show.
And this is going to be this is a no
notes show. This is going to be just a flat discussion. Yeah,

(05:13):
and there are a couple of things I'm going to
show you that I have pulled up, but mostly this
is just a discussion of I think, what a complex,
nuanced topic. Then I'm kind of going to take both
sides up because I think you have to. I think
that there are you get into error when you take
a firm stance on either side of this issue, So

(05:34):
what what between you? Maybe I should have actually hold
amateur hour. Now that I'm like thinking about it, I
kind of want to pull up the exact thing that
she wrote so that you kind of know what I
went off. I know how it was supposed to be. Yeah,
and then you're going like, Wow, you really mess that up. Abby,

(05:55):
What is it? Episode? Yes, episode I share this? Wow, Abby,
that's not that's not it. Okay, nailed it, but ting
you pip episode idea discussion of the growing movement among
Protestants to entrust their fertility entirely to God, the quiver
full movement, even sometimes in the presence of health issues,

(06:17):
versus what is whise stewardship of our health? If more
pregnancies could endanger the life of the mother, I think
I'm wording it badly, but you're not. And it doesn't
have to be an either or I don't have a
set position on either side, but I probably leaned toward
the preserve of the mother's health side in a prayerful,
godly way. Maybe for Abby Lebby this kind of episode
would understandably be too sooner too. Personally, yeah, I did

(06:38):
wait a while. She pitched this earlier, like very early
this month, so I gave myself a little bit more time.
She said, I had four kids, and after the fourth
my ex got assected me, and my first reaction was
surprisingly grief, even though I wanted him to get it. However,
I am glad I didn't have any more children because
that fourth pregnancy was so hard on me. Sometimes I
wonder if I were to go back in time with

(06:59):
a different perspective and trust in God entirely, would I
have made a different decision or was it wise? I
still wonder. There was also so much Bible to bring
into the discussion, because so many of the matriarchs in
the line of Jesus were barren because God had closed
their wombs. Find that fascinating too. I do find it fascinating,
particularly how much fertility infertility is in the line of Christ,

(07:21):
where it seems like what happened was that Satan was
trying to stop something and God allowed him to stop
something for a period of time until a sufficient amount
of prayer had happened, and not like I'm going to
deny you this thing you want until you pray enough,
but like, I'm going to allow your womb to be

(07:44):
stopped for so long that you think it's impossible, and
then when it happens, it's going to be so obvious
that I did it, and that this happens several times.
Let's see, it's well, Sarah Abraham's wife, very strong example Hannah,
But no, Hannah's Sutton. Hannah is uh sam so not

(08:08):
quite the line of Christ, but very close because Samuel
is the one who anointed David. Okay, so, but yes, Samuel,
Hannah was baron, prayed for a child, but promised that
if God gave her the child, she would give him
to the House of the Lord. And so she raised
him and then when he was a teenager she gave
him to or maybe middle school. I thought she gave

(08:29):
him when he was three, when he was you know what,
You're right, Yeah, gave him to the temple. And he
was raised in the temple and became the high priest.
And he was the one who anointed and Shepherd had David.
So are really really significant. But Rachel Isaac's wife, Rachel
was was baron until she had the twins Jacob and

(08:53):
he saw oh and those were the only children that
she had. She just had the one pregnancy. Why am
I thinking that's you seem doubtful, Well, it wasn't Rachel
Joseph's mom, or am I stupid? Rachel and Leah oh
Isaac's wife Rebecca, Rebecca, you're you're right? I mix I

(09:15):
mixed those exact two up during that game, during my
Frigideon and now I'm like making the same mistake You're right,
Rebecca or dyslexic with Na. Yeah, And it was just
a quick verse where it talked about that she struggled
with that she was baron until she conceived. Yeah, but
also Rachel Joseph's Joseph and Benjamin's mom struggled with infertility

(09:40):
for a long time before she finally gave birth Joseph,
and then she died in childbirth with Benjamin. So there's
uh oh, and then and then John the Baptist's mom
baron a long time. Yeah. How how does it say
how old she was or just that she was. I
think she was in a similar position to Sarah where
she thought she was past child bearing age. Yeah. So anyway,

(10:05):
there's a lot of there's a lot of infertility in
the Bible where God resolves it in a really big way.
And then there is the one story of you have
to have context for this story. But Judah had three sons.
One of his sons was married to Tamar. They hadn't

(10:27):
had any children, and then that son died, and then
the custom was that the brother would take as wife
the widow of his brother, and he would have he
would at least attempt to give her a son to

(10:48):
carry on his brother's name. Yes, so if there had
not been children, that he would that he would do that.
And it was to care for her at you know,
make sure she was provided for, and to give his
brother a legacy. And what both of Judas's sons did
because one of them took her, took Tamar and was

(11:08):
having sex with her but spilling his seat. What the
Bible says, two brothers wrote they yeah, and God killed
the first one. And then the other one married her
and then he did the same thing and God killed
him too. And so there are people who bring this
story up and they go, see, this is proof that
you that is very evil to pull out or to

(11:31):
do anything that would not be open to life. And
to me, you're missing a lot of context to take
that position on that scripture, because the context is he
didn't have to be having sex with her. He was
having sex with her while denying her the one thing
that he was supposed to be the whole point of

(11:51):
him having He was using her for sex and failing
to honor the duty. So it has nothing to do
with using contraception. It's just that he was abusing her, yes,
and it was because he did not want to give
his brother an heir. He didn't he didn't want to
have to. He's being a selfish f boy. Yeah, he
didn't want to have someone with his DNA in the
world without his last name. Essentially, that's that's that was

(12:14):
the crime punishable by death, was right that action right?
Of course, last name is not how it worked back then,
but that's like the so and also throughout the Bible,
it's it's quite clear, there's many verses on it that
children are a blessing from God, that that culturally, at

(12:36):
least many women were like, like, take my curse away,
please let me have a child. Like to be infertile
was considered a curse, and it was made very clear
that that when God allowed infertility, when there wasn't just
an issue. It wasn't a curse. These people were faithful
to God, they were praying. It was for a reason

(12:58):
that he was accomplishing thing very very huge out of it.
So the the overall thing in scripture is one like
we're not gonna we're not gonna be evil about it.
Like obviously there are ways to be evil about denying

(13:20):
your wife a child or whatever. Yeah, to be to
be using her for sex and and denying her a child,
that's that is wrong. And and just the concept that
like children are a blessing and we should want them.
We should want them. But there's a lot I really

(13:45):
appreciated the nuance of betweena pips kind of prompt because
there's a lot of really important points made around this
whole Quiver Fule movement. So let's get into it and
like get into them little by little because I want
to cover each aspect and facet well with nuanced Well,
I mean, if you want to cover it well, then
you've already failed because you're abby. I'm just kidding for

(14:09):
context for anyone who doesn't know, because I feel like
this is actually important context. I feel like most of
you know, But just in case, I have a three
month old and a sixteen month old. There are Irish turning.
They weren't, so the technical definition of Irish twins is
you know, in the same year, and they weren't supposed

(14:32):
to be. But the second one was born very early
because I had pre acclamsy with both of them, I
had to deliver both of them early. My first I
had to deliver a month early, but he didn't have
to be in the niquu and it wasn't a super
severe like it was severe enough on my health that I,
you know, was really feeling it. And yeah, and we

(14:54):
it was appropriate to deliver him a month early. Yeah,
let's put it that way. But the second one was
really really bad and and we I delivered him at
thirty three weeks. They were both inductions, and I never
had an MRI to confirm, but it seemed that the
second time I had inflammation in my brain, there was

(15:15):
just a that was it was very, very bad. And
so I'm coming from a position of like I it
wasn't an accident that we I had babies back to back,
that we had a conversation where this like this is
so wonderful. Let's not put a barrier up. Let's accept
whatever God gives us. It's kind of like radical Yea

(15:39):
mentioned like that radical trusting your fertility to God. And
I because I wasn't able to breastfeed, breastfeeding doesn't one
hundred percent it's it's not, it's not it's not birth control,
but it often is it. Oftentimes women will not get
pregnant until they are done breastfeeding, but you still can.

(16:03):
And my understanding is you cannot rely on this. If
you are pumping, you have to be constantly Yeah, there
are a couple of ways that you can do it
wrong and assume it's going to work and it will
buy hire. Yes. So in many, many, many many cases,
like the majority, I think the vast majority of cases,
if you are directly breastfeeding, you will probably not have

(16:23):
another kid until you were done breastfeeding. But I wasn't
wasn't able to and so that was part of why
I had another one so quickly, and I don't regret it.

(16:43):
I am very happy that I have two little boys,
that they have each other, that they're very close in age.
But it might not have been so life threatening if
I had John and I hadn't made that decision to
be so open to life and not so the fact
I think within that context, I know I have felt

(17:09):
a little bit of I think it's possible to get
addicted hormonally to being pregnant, which is really funny to say,
because I hate being pregnant, but I am struggling even
now with like I really want to be pregnant again.
There's there's something hormonal about not liking how you feel

(17:30):
when you don't have the pregnancy hormones anymore and being
very like I want them back. That is not a
good reason to have children. Yeah, that's not, but I
think that you have to be really careful to recognize
how much of your wanting another baby is hormonal. There
can also be the psychological addiction if you only feel
like you're fulfilling your purpose when you're pregnant. That was

(17:50):
the case with Ruby Frankie. Yeah. I have a friend
who said, yeah, you're reading that book right now, aren't you?
In house with my mother? I'm definitely curious to hear
more about that. It's narrat about the daughter daddy a book.
Oh okay, now now I have to go read it.

(18:11):
I definitely if if left unchecked, I could just pop
out babies every year out of sheer addiction to the
like chemical addiction, and it's less, it's less. It's kind
of like you know the rush you get after eating
spicy food when the spices were not, like why did

(18:33):
I do this? And then never you're like, I need
to do that again, And it's just that little of
the drop off that trace you to do it again.
I think that you can. So I think there's two
ways to be addicted to it. I think I felt
both addicted to labor because the it's I think it's
the same way that people get addicted to tattoos, like
it hurts, oh, and then the rush afterward is strong,

(18:57):
and so like they get addicted to the rush afterwards,
and birth is like exponentially more than tattoos, right, and
I've had both. My tattoo is really small, but I
can say that that was pretty hard for you to
go through. Yeah, but I understand it, like the rush
of like ooh, the pain's over and I did it
and that's why I'm getting a neck tattoo. And and

(19:19):
then like that coupled with the joy of the baby
and then like the whole pregnancy being hard and then
the rush of like it is A. I think it's addicting.
I think that there are women who are like I
just want to give birth again, because that is the
the addiction. And then there's the postpartum depression. One of

(19:41):
I joked about it and women have joked about it
that like, one of the easiest cures for postponder depression
is just to get pregnant again. Does the birth control
that tricks into thinking you're pregnant does that help with
postpartum I do do that different that's a good question.
I I do know that hormone replacement therapy can help. Okay,

(20:06):
I was talking to my doctor about doing homer and
replacement theory therapy this time, and then I got my
period back and things got a lot better, and I
was like, oh, okay, well I don't need it, but
because my hormones just restarted on their own. But if
I hadn't then, but yes, so I think that those
are all An addiction to chemicals is not a good

(20:29):
reason to have more babies, and having more babies is
not a good solution to postpartum depression. Even if it
is a solution, I don't think it's a particularly good
one because then in nine months you're just gonna have
to deal with it again and you're gonna have more babies.
So you need to find a better way. A doctor
to me talking to me right now, find a better way. Yeah,

(20:50):
if you if you text me about when you say
I am pregnant, I will poke you in the eye repeatedly. Son,
And for further context, I did not want to go
back on hormonal birth control. I have medical issues with it.
I turns everyone into a cow. Yeah, I like, I don't.

(21:11):
I don't think it's sinful to be on hormonal birth
but I I was. When I went off of it
a couple of years ago. I was surprised how much
I felt like a woman again. I was like, I
didn't realize I was missing this. Well, I've heard of
changes who women are attracted to. It can Yeah, I
think that there's some significant things where I don't think
it's necessarily sinful to be on it, but I think

(21:31):
that you should know what is going to happen. I
think you should and I know of a lady who
went blind from it because it can cause blood cloths.
Oh yeah, no, I think you should definitely be counting
the cost. And there are other ways. So I have
the Aura ring, which takes your temperature basil body temperature
in the night and tests your aura. Yeah, test your aura.

(21:54):
And it works with an app called Natural Cycles, which
is I have to approved for birth control, and basically,
through algorithm, it is able to tell when you've obulated
and tell you when you need to either abstain sexually
or use protection sexually, and then what days you're like
perfectly fine because you're not fertile. And this was this

(22:19):
was There was a clip a couple of weeks ago
from Lela Rose's podcast about natural family Planning. Oh yeah, yeah,
that where they were talking about kind of that abstaining
during those those fertile days, and people were freaked out
about it. And I didn't think that there was anything

(22:39):
wrong with a clip, except that I think that when
when your theology about birth control is so rigid, you
can back yourself into a really bad corner. And I
think that that's where a lot of the anger in
that conversation came from from people who had backed themselves
into various corners. So if you so, there are people

(23:03):
who believe, and I think this is a really fair belief,
that that hormonal birth control has an aboard of fashion
on the back end, and therefore it is sinful because
of that. Yeah, I understand that position. I don't agree
because I don't think that that's like exactly the honest

(23:25):
way to put it. I don't think it's dishonest, but
I don't think it's correct. So what a hormonal birth
control does is tells your body it's pregnant. So because
it believes it's pregnant, it's not building up the lining
of your uterus. So one, it's keeping you from ovulating,

(23:48):
but it also means that you haven't built up the
lining of your uterus, so you're not like shedding a
full period of a month. You might spot, You will
spot every month, usually on it, but you don't have
all that lining, so that if accidentally your body ovulates
and it just won't it gets fertilized, it won't implant
because you don't have the lining. And people say, oh,

(24:09):
that's abortive, and I don't think so. Like, yes, I
believe life begins at conception, but I don't think failing
to have a uterus lining that's super conducive to implantation
is the same as purposely killing a child, especially because
the intention is that you don't ovulate, and it's a

(24:30):
rare case that it would right mess up like that,
and it is a morally gray area. And so if
you disagree with me, I have no issue with you
disagreeing with me, and if you're even mad at me
for I have a really good friend where we went
back and forth pretty like heatedly on this topic because
she felt like absolutely I was doing the wrong thing
to be on hormonal growth control because of this issue,

(24:52):
and I respected her position. Well, didn't you kind of
get like bullied into taking the copper IUD instead of sorry,
the hormonal instead of the copper. Yeah, I let mysel
I let myself get medically vullied. I went into that
appointment intending to get the copper ID, and I was
basically told that because I had never given birth, I

(25:12):
should not that it would be way way too hard
on my body to put in something that large, and
I knew virgin, like I was planning to get it
because I knew I had virgin friends who had recommended
it to me, who had gotten it before they got married,
and so I should have just stucked my guns. And
I don't know why, but I let she was the
doctor was very like, of course, not, of course, you

(25:34):
shouldn't have it, And it was just so like as
if there wasn't a discussion about it. That was like, oh, okay,
I'll okay, so I regret. I didn't regret that because
I had not intended to get a hormonal ID. The
copper id is just a spermicide. But there's more danger
to your uterus with the copper id corrode or something.

(25:54):
I guess. It tends to shift. It can shift position,
I think, more easily than the other ones, and it
can cause more significant damage because it's metal instead of
the plastic one. That there's alassly more horror stories I
think about the coppyra iety than about like it completely
ruining people's fertility making them so they can children then

(26:18):
than the hormone. So it's like six and one a
half dozen of another. It's these are just decisions you
and God need to make. When John and I prayed
about what we were going to do after after getting
because it was like really obvious that medically I needed
we needed to do something to prevent another pregnancy from
happening right away so that I would have time to
get healthy again. I kept like wanting I wanted to

(26:43):
get the copper iet and it seemed like just we
just did not have peace about it. So we didn't
do it, and so and so we did the ring
instead and we'll report about its. Mhm. It's worked so far.
I'm not preggiant AMP. I do find it interesting because,
like related to that clip, there are I think it

(27:07):
depends on the teaching of the Catholic Church, because I
think some of these people are legalistic, even for Catholic right,
But some people were saying, like, if you know that
there's no chance of getting pregnant, it's illegal, it's sinful
to have sex with your husband. And it's like, that's
that's absolutely legalism, right, well, because that the result of

(27:29):
that is that you only because you're only fertile about
five days to a week out of every month. If
if legalistically you're not allowed to have sex except on
those five days, that's insane. That's that's wildly like that's
unbiblically denying. And then you know, if you're pregnant, you're
pregnant for nine months and then if you go through menopause, right, yeah, no,

(27:53):
that any theology that's telling you that sex is evil
and you you're only allowed to do it. To have
children is wrong, is evil, and I would I would
go further in terms of this. This happens across the
board where it's like God has given parameters for something,
so don't have sex outside of marriage, have sex with
your husband. And then I remember, I don't even think

(28:16):
they were Catholic. I think they were just like modern
purity movement right victims. But there was a couple maybe
ten years ago they were going kind of viral because
they were like, if it's if it's good to wait
tell marriage to have sex, then it's even better to
wait after it's possible. They were sad, how it didn't
seem like they were, and they were talking about like, yeah,
if we're kissing and we feel like we're getting the mood,
Johnny takes a cold shower and Naida raw potato. Yeah,

(28:42):
no Earth, there's definitely And this is a separate conversation,
but there's certainly a problem with how sometimes I think,
particularly Christian prize of our generation often tell the kids
about sex. Were like just stressed much how dirty it
was and made a big deal about how dirty it was.

(29:03):
And so when particularly women got married, they had a
really hard time being sexually active in the way that
God intended for marriages because of that, like, oh, this
is like, this is gross, this is wrong. And instead
of teaching like, it is good within these boundaries and
the restriction on it no longer applies in the boundaries,

(29:26):
they just made it to this is bad independent of context. Yeah,
and a lot of times, like they said the right
things about it, but the stress was so much on
how dirty it was that like, even though they said, oh,
it's good within these boundaries, I think a lot of
people were like, I don't believe you, because you've convinced
me that it's really dirty. Yeah. Anyway, that's a whole

(29:46):
other conversation. But I think that there's a lot of
unhealthiness about how how people, how Christian people are going
into marriage viewing sex. That feeds into this whole converse
station that there are There are some people who find

(30:07):
like the idea of refrainings actually for five days is
you know, five days is kind of the minimum, so
that it might not be fair for me to say
only five days because I the fertile windows for it
depends on what method you're using. If you have something
like the ring and the app. It's gonna get a

(30:29):
narrow it down for you. Yeah, it's gonna arrow it
down more than like if you're just taking your temperature
every morning. Okay, some people might wait like two weeks
or something. Yeah, yeah, to be extra sure. Yeah it's so.
But I think for some some of the anger I
saw around this conversation was like, how dare you deny

(30:52):
your husband for a week? And it's like okay, hol Similarly,
I don't know if it was the same conversation where
people were getting upset about the idea of a woman
not being open available for sex after giving birth right,
and it was like the one of the ladies made
a great point of like, she has just given like
nine months of her body to grow this child and

(31:13):
sacrificed her you know self for this, and you can't
wait like until she's better right as a man, and
then sacrifice your body and then are like you hate
your husband if like clearly she doesn't hate you because
she just did this for you, So maybe let's consider
other I okay, I need a pause, real quick resume resumes, Okay.

(31:36):
I think a lot of what's going on in these
conversations is really bad, bad, badly informed people. Most of
us in our generation, uh are our parents had two children,
A small number of children had them all before we

(31:58):
were old enough to remember. Like, I'm not old enough
to remember when you were born because it was only
worldly two years apart. Vast I'm old enough to remember
when you were born. Sorry, false, it's like completely false, impossible,
in fact impossible. In fact, the vast majority of our

(32:18):
generation did not go grow up in close proximity to pregnancy, babies, postpartum,
any of that, All of it that happened in our
families happened long before we were, you know, old enough
to remember and engage. Some of us, maybe we were
five seven, Maybe we have some memories of a new

(32:38):
baby in the house, but not like enough to be
in middle school or high school and like that age
to know to really understand how sick your mom was
in the pregnancy, how difficult postpartum was, like how difficult
having a newborn in the house is. Like there are
things that like I thought I was pretty pretty aware

(33:01):
of babies because I had, you know, been in church
nurseries and held babies sometimes, and I knew nothing about
babies My husband, on the other hand, grew up in
a big family. He was the second oldest, and he
knew a lot about babies because he was old enough
when his youngest sister was born to be helping. And

(33:21):
so I think that there's there's things that have shifted
in our culture where there are people who who say
who think that they want big families, and they think
that they want their wives to give them seven children,
and they think it's easy. They but they have no
concept of what that cost, is what that looks like

(33:43):
in reality. And so there was there was a thread
on Twitter in this whole conversation that stemmed out of
this podcast, where this guy man was like, I think
a lot of young men don't realize that, you know,
if your wife has a lot of children, she's pregnant
for nine months for every single child, and like, yes,

(34:03):
pregnancy is harder on the woman, of course, but like,
I don't think the men realize how much weight you
have to pull while your wife is pregnant. And it's
not necessarily the whole. It really depends on the pregnancy.
It really depends on the woman, and it depends on
the pregnancy. Every pregnancy is different and every woman is different.
Some women will always have really hard pregnancy. Some women,

(34:23):
they might have an easy pregnancy and then have a
hard pregnancy and then have an easy one. Again, it's
all over the place. It really depends on the genetics
of the pregnancy itself. You can't really predict it either. Yeah,
it's very difficult to predict. A good friend of mine
is on her fourth and this has been her hardest
one yet that she's been so sick, and she lost
a lot of weight in her first like four months

(34:44):
because she was throwing up every day, like horrible, and
she has three other little kids to take care of. Like,
if you're not the kind of man who is willing
to step up and help out as much as possible,
that's going to be really awful for the wife, right right,
she needs support if she doesn't have any, Like if

(35:04):
it's her first baby, she needs support for at least
the If she's sick during the first trimester, she's going
to need support then, and in the last month or
so of the pregnancy, she's going to need support them
just because she's so big and a lot but don't
call her that, Yeah, a lot weaker, Like there's just
physical realities about pregnancy that like and be way more hormonal.

(35:29):
She's gonna be Yes, she's gonna be way more hormonal.
Like just just the relational aspect of living where a
pregnant woman is going to be a lot different, especially
if you have children, She's going to be a lot
more tired. There's just going to be an amount of
like that the husband is going to have to pull
during a pregnancy because she just needs sleep. She needs
the sleep. So to put things in a really dark perspective,

(35:55):
homicide is a leading cause of death for pregnant postpartum women. Yep, yep. Yeah.
There are a lot of men who cannot cut it
with the extra Yeah, they can't see that they have.
So the type of men who are getting in this
this episode is not meant to be a man bashing episode.
I think that there's there's a lot in especially the
book Book of Luke, about like counting the cost of

(36:17):
following Jesus. But there's a lot of examples in it
of like any project you undertake, you should be counting
the cost, and you're kind of worthy of being laughed
at if you undertake a project without cunning the cost
of a lot of people think that they want big
families without having any concept of the cost of pregnancy

(36:39):
to either to either individual, to the to the unit
as a whole. And it's another thing too when you're
like I, who have a little bit less stake in
this in terms of the cost counting and very confident
with with this cost. Like, I had no idea going
into my purse. I was shocked. I was so shocked
about how difficult it was, so sick and and I remember,

(37:03):
after going through my first pregnancy and postpartum, going to
a couple of my close friends and going I would
have been there for you so much more if I
had an ada. I'm so sorry that I just like,
I had no idea that maybe I should be checking
in on this person. It's like way more than I did.
No one is allowed to leave their shopping cart outside

(37:25):
of the crowd, except for pregnant women. They're allowed to
just live in the parking lot. I's yeah, there's a
level t which I'm like, I think that our society
should defer to pregnant women way more and women with
like small children, and it used to Yeah, yeah, so
I think that there's an information in the age of

(37:46):
like massive sex ed, the lack of education about pregnancy
and about postpartum From a physical standpoint, I think a
lot of men don't understand that, like women really often
tear significantly. You can tear up to your belly button
count less, like usually it's that's not usually happening. It's

(38:09):
like one to three stitches worth of tearing. It's like
a you know, first degree secondary third degree, but you
can you can tear a lot more. Also, your babies
will sometimes try to steal your bones. If you don't
have enough calcium, they'll take your teeth. Yes, yeah, you
there's I think that that it is true that we

(38:29):
have a population collapse crisis, and there are a lot
of people who aren't having kids because they're afraid to
have kids because of the sheer fear mongering about like
your life is going to be over pregnancy is so awful,
blah blah blah. And so I think that they are
Conservatives have become frightened to talk about like the true
costs of some of these things. And we need to

(38:50):
find a balance between this is a really good thing
and you should want children are blessing from God and
recognizing this is really hard in many different ways. You
should count the cost before going in, and we should
be organizing our societies in such a way to make
it easier as easy as possible for people to have

(39:11):
more children, because there's a lot of like incentive structures
and things, and not everyone is cut out to raise
Like I know that you can be surprised by how
well someone does. But I know some people who I'm like,
should you be trying for a baby? Are you capable
of keeping yourself alive? I was the point I go

(39:33):
back and forth. There's a couple in my mind that
I'm thinking of. I hope that nobody recognizes them from
this description because it is not mine. I think I
know what you're talking about them blast they have not
had children yet. I hope that they don't. I know
that they are open to life, and I don't think
it's necessarily wrong for them to be open to life.

(39:54):
But I hope that God because she is to lee,
in my opinion, too young, and she will never get older,
and she's very unstable with her emotions. Yeah, to the
point where you can see, like I know enough of
people who have had horrible mothers horrible fathers to know,
like what that looks like before their parents. And that's like, yeah,

(40:17):
you could have a kid and you'd probably inflict a
lot of emotional harm on them. So maybe fix your
emotional stuff before you do the baby thing, right, And
there's an extent to which if you are there's an
extent to which having a kid can make you grow up,
can be that catalyst to make you a better person,

(40:37):
or you can harden yourself and continue to be an
awful person and become worse. And that's often up to
you and your relationship with God. And so I don't
think that this particular woman is incapable of growth. But
I have known her for years and she has not grown. Yes,
so I hope she doesn't have kids. And that's awful.
That's awful. And there are women I know who who

(40:58):
I think would be wonderful mothers who have been infertile
for years and years and years. And I'm like, God,
I'm going to be so mad if this woman who
I don't think she'd have children has children. And you
never give children to this other one. And that's often
the way it is, right and but and also to
be clearly, it's not like you're saying I don't want
to have kids because I don't like her. It's like
you're righting about the well being of the child. Yeah,

(41:21):
and her like, I don't think she would do well
with the realities of having kids, but she could bees
Like it could be that she has the most serene pregnancy,
never get sick. Ever, her baby sleeps to the night perfectly,
and God uses it to ever, Like God can do
whatever he wants. He can do whatever he wants, and

(41:42):
I should stay out of it. But not to talk
about her, but just broadening the discussion. There. You hear
of like horror stories of mothers who were not fit
to eat, mothers and who kill their child and stuff,
and you sometimes you meet a person and you're like, yeah,
I can see you going down that road without you know, prevention, right, Yeah,
there's evil. There's evil in the world. And yeah, and

(42:03):
some of some of the like mothers killing their child things,
not to excuse it because obviously not, but like postpartum
psychosis is real, and some of that is like I
I have I have found that the medical community, at
least around me, has asked all the right questions and
been like, in some ways invasively careful. Where there was

(42:29):
this this particular time. They asked certain questions and determined
that I was probably, you know, gonna have postpartum depression
this time around, and they like really pushed me to
go see to get signed up with a therapist, and
I had, I had told them that I already had one.
I was like, I have, I'm already, I'm already seeing somebody,

(42:52):
Like I don't need your second like staff, Yeah, it's yes,
but I can understand why, because they're trying to potentially
save the child's life or the mother's life or whatever.
But the man being present and supportive and taking care
of the wife's needs, especially in that postpartum period with

(43:13):
the newborn, the woman is dumping everything she has into
the well being of the of the baby, and so
somebody needs to be caring for her. And if nobody
is caring for her, that's a really bad situation. And
also because it's important I think I've this is me
regurgitating what I've been told is that men can be

(43:34):
well meaning and think they're being supportive by being what
would you have me to do? What can I do
to help? That is not the help that she needs.
What she needs is for you to know what you're
supposed to do, so that she doesn't have to have
the mental energy to direct you, because if she's directing you,
she's doing the work. So it advice to the man
is figure out ahead of time what the expectations are
going to be. Try to catch up so that you
don't have to go to her as your manager right

(43:56):
help her. So, if I could put that in a
different way, I think this is being called out and
addressed and corrected a lot in our generation. But the
man is just as much the baby's parent as the
woman is, so there shouldn't be any of this. The
baby's crying, what do I do? You are the father,

(44:19):
you should know what to do. It's your baby, and
I with a caveat that the woman has nine months
or eight months in my case, to bond with the
baby and has a lot of hormonal and instinctive direction.
So it is very normal, especially for the first baby,
for the father to take longer to figure it out.

(44:39):
But he does need to figure it out, and the
woman needs to give him the space to figure it
out because I think that there are a lot of
a lot of cases where the father never develops the
skills because the woman is the mother in the situation
is like, oh, just give me the baby. Oh, you
can never do anything right, and doesn't like give him
the space with Esa. Fortunately, I was working part time.

(45:04):
I had to go back to work part time, and
I was working from home, so I could hear Esa crying,
and I could hear John really struggling with him in
those first few months. And then John figured it out
and so but like, and there were times where I
would go in and help him if I could tell,
like it had reached a point where he really, you know,
needed relief, because there are times where I was like

(45:26):
raging out in the middle of the night and I
needed relief. So like, yes, you're a team. You're not
gonna be perfectly capable at every moment. If you feel
like you're to the point of anger where you want
to hurt the baby, it's okay if the baby cries
in the other room for a bit. Yes, yes, there's
a lot of things like this. But so it is
normal for the father to take longer to figure it out.
It's normal for it to be harder. But I have

(45:49):
I've heard men who I otherwise thought well of say
things to the effect of, oh, the baby doesn't want
her need the father for the first you know, two
or three years, And I'm like that said, that's so bad,
And honestly, who cares what the baby wants. The wife
wants the father to be around the baby, taking care
of it. The baby, the baby will want what it's training. Like, like,

(46:13):
if the mother only holds the baby, then the baby
is going to reach a point where he's not okay
with anybody else. But if from a fairly young age,
you are letting trusted adults holds your baby and let
your baby acclimate to other people and let your baby
bond with your Like if in the first few years

(46:35):
of life your baby is refusing to be held by
its own father, there's a problem that needs to be
fixed there. And different babies have different temperaments. I've had
some really good temperament to babies, so I wanted to
be careful there some things, though, it's okay if your
baby cries, Like, there are some things where your baby

(46:56):
is gonna have to cry a little bit and struggle
a little bit to learn whatever the thing is that
they need to learn. And that doesn't mean you should
leave them crying for hours or even ten minutes necessarily,
but the dad needs to learn how to calm the
baby and learn how to be confident with it. Any
number of children that a family has, the dad needs

(47:18):
to be able to take care of the children on
his own for a day, well, god forbid the mom dies, right, yeah,
you should so. So the question of big families, you
should not have a family bigger then either one can
handle alone. It doesn't mean it's easy. But if your

(47:41):
family is so big that the mom can never even
leave the house to go grocery shopping because the dad's
incapable of taking care of like that, that's not good.
So I wanted to get into more of than There's
a couple of different simultaneous conversations. One of them is

(48:03):
family size, Yes, how many children should you have? And
then one of them is what birth control is appropriate?
So let's you can, like I said, possibly half an
hour ago, you can back yourself into a theological corner.
If you are saying it is sinful for me to

(48:25):
be on hormonal birth control, and it's sinful for me
to ever deny my husband for even five days, So
it's sinful to like do that natural and it's sinful
for me to use a barrier method. It's sinful for
me to do anything that could possibly not allow a
children a child to be born. I think sometimes the

(48:46):
people who institute these rules are the people for whom,
oh I breastfit for four years and there was a
four year gap between my children. Why are you guys struggling? Yeah,
if it's if it's sinful to use to stay during
the fertile window, is it not sinful to breastfeed? I
think that you could make like, because I can take
this a steff froll on the logic that some people use,

(49:08):
I think you really could go furthermore. If it's sin
full to breastfeed, is it sinful to be pregnant because
you can't get pregnantgnant rare exceptions, it's sinful just to
be so all that fixed it? Sorry. I I think

(49:30):
that there are there are people who understand the weight
of the rule that's being added to scripture, and there
are people who don't. And I think a lot of
times in these conversations, the people who don't understand the
weight of it are like, what's the big deal? Just
stay open to life, like children are blessing? What Like?
Why why do you hate kids. Why don't you want
to have more kids? Like why why do you wish

(49:51):
your children weren't born? And it's like, hold on, no,
there are people. There's a there's a woman I follow
on Twitter who I feel very very bad for her
because she's she's Protestant, but she's in a Protestant denomination
that has this viewpoint and she has had because she
had a paratoid. She has had five babies in four years.
And she's like, God hates women. And my body's been

(50:16):
wrecked by this. My mind has been wrecked by this.
I can't be a good mother. My husband hasn't you know,
he's just now with the twins, learning to be some
level of supportive to beat him. And some of it,
I think the way that she's presented it is not
that her husband is evil, but that he's just unaware,

(50:37):
like doesn't know that it took her kind of crashing
out over the twins and having like nearly a mental
break for him to even realize that he needed to
be helping, just like complete disconnect. I think I love
that for her, and I'm like this and I've told her,
I've told her explicitly, like your theology is hurting you,

(50:58):
like it's your theolty. God doesn't hate women. God does
not want this for you. This is so awful. But
she's just gotten pregnant God, and she's breastfed too, So
like there are women for whom having this radically, you know,
radical acceptance to just just trust God with your fertility
has had horrible consequences to a degree that it's like

(51:22):
God did not to reframe a little bit, because I
don't think it falls into putting God to the test,
but it is a similar logic of just trust God
while I'm doing something that involves my choices and the
consequences that come from it, Like I'm gonna walk across
the road without looking at I'm just gonna trust God.
God never said to trust him like that. Yeah, he

(51:43):
might let you learn from your from your choices. But
also if your theology is leading to a fruit that
makes you believe that God hates you, your theology is
broken because God doesn't hate you, So figure out your
theology is hateful. Jesus was so severe. I mean, if
you guys watch through the Luke study with us, you
saw it over and over. Jesus was so severe with

(52:06):
the teachers of the law who were adding burdens to people.
He's like, my law is already like, the law's already hard. Yeah,
Like if you were adding burdens to people that are
that are like he's so severe on the get cave
bear right right. I think that there are I saw

(52:30):
in the cold conversation around this, there were men who
understood the weight of that much baby making and had
reached the point where they're like, no, we need to
do some we need to do some natural flaming plane,
we need to do something. We need to adjust our
expectations around this. There was one in particular, guy who
who was like, if we didn't, my wife would be

(52:50):
pregnant every every year, and this was this was not
healthy for her, this was not healthy for us. It's
not good for our family. And I could see that
he understood the full weight of it. But I've seen
on the flip side, I think even some tweets from
I'm not gonna name anybody, yeah, but there are like
some famous pastors on on Twitter in the like reformed

(53:12):
Baptist world who are kind of pretty toxic guys, and
I've seen some tweets from their wives where it really
looks like they are. At least one of them is
pretty open about how like deeply she's struggling with like
how many children she has that are so little? And
some of that is really normal, Like you could have
them all well spaced and still be like have days
where you're really struggling, and like, that's that's motherhood. That's

(53:35):
that's that's the thing. That's the Yeah, they're a bit
harder than guinea pigs. Yeah, just a little bit harder
than guinea pigs. But there are certainly situations in which
if you have this like radical fertility, and the husband

(53:55):
isn't the type, like, isn't there isn't being the support
does and understand the way is refusing in some level
to understand the way he's right there witnessing it and
and isn't you know, is refusing to see it, is
refusing to help, is refusing to slow down putting the
babies in her by whatever means. That can be really

(54:16):
really wicked, And I've I've seen that. That's that's when
you have women who begin to believe that God hates them,
and that Conservatism hates women, and that Christianity hates women.
And those are the women who who crash out their
families and become radical feminists. And that's evil. That is
evil to do that. But you can understand how someone
would get there if they've been kept pregnant for five

(54:38):
years straight. And the real truth is that on some
level their husband hates them, right, you have to you
have to hate your wife to not see how like
even just the cumulative strain, because there's like a there's
a level of this was really hard and then you recovered,
and then we got to the place where we could
manage another one, and we had another one. It was

(54:59):
really hard and you recovered. There's that, but then there's
it's happening so fast, that's she's not getting the chance
to heal physically and mentally, and so each one is
taking a greater and greater toll. And I've seen some stories.
I mean, that was the case with my two, and
that was that was me like that my husband didn't
force me. I was very excited to get pregnant again,

(55:23):
and I was very hopeful about it being a healthy pregnancy,
and it just wasn't. And that's fine. I think that
two things can happen. Children are a blessing. Absolutely, people
can get greedy for blessings, and greediness is wrong. You
can be a glutton for blessings. Yeah, and people can

(55:43):
assume I forget my second point, But basically, people can
turn something that's a blessing into something that's not that
God didn't intend. It's not the best comparison, but like
the Sabbath was supposed to be a blessing for man,
and the Pharisees turned it into something that was like
the worst hardest chore where you have to work so
hard to not work on the s Yeah, yeah, I

(56:04):
think that works, which brings me to another point that
I have. I think that this is when I can
I've caught myself. A lot of this is like self confession,
you guys, I want a big family, and there's part
of me that's like and I want it all right now,
and like, oh, I want four children and I want
them all back to back, And there's like these warring

(56:25):
parts of my brain where one part of my brain
is like I don't like being pregnant and I don't
like the newborn phase. Like of course I love my children.
Of course I love my babies, but they're more fun
when they're interactive. But I don't really start to enjoy
the process of it until like three four months, and
when you kind of get past that four months three
four months sleep regression, yeah, and things are just going

(56:47):
like that's when I really start to like lock in
and really enjoy it, which is when I got pregnant
last time, because I was like, I feel this, it's fun.
I think for me, the the distance between pre aclamsya
giving birth to Esau to Esau being five months in
sleep trained, I felt so insanely good. It was deceptive. Yeah,

(57:12):
there's a level of like I am so healthy. That's
when you have this different Russia foremones that makes you
feel it's like cocaine but your body's producing it. Like
you need to be living in truth and reality, truth
land nothing. And again, I want to be so clear,
I do not regret having my boys back to back. Yeah,
there was a cost that I did not fully count,

(57:35):
and part of it I had no way of knowing.
Because now you do. Statistically, getting pregnant back to back
can help you avoid getting pre clamsy again because it
depends on what's cost your issue. If you do get
pre aclamcy again, it can be worse. So like, there's
that like a gambling it's a gamble and it didn't
go my way. So can I say something horrible? You know?

(57:58):
The trend of like the la booboos and part of
the thing is like, oh my gosh, what kind am
I going to get when I open this blind box.
It's kind of like with babies, were like, what am
I gonna get? It's gonna be a boy or girl.
I'm addicted to this. Yeah, no, no, no, okay. So
getting off of the topic of, you know, the theology

(58:20):
around birth control, because that's between you and God. Let's
assume that you believe some form of control is permissible,
whether that's natural family planning or a barrier or et cetera.
There's a book that I I read that I really

(58:45):
really loved. This is, I think a somewhat recent book
in the last couple of years. It's called Hannah's Children,
The Women Quietly Defying the Birth Dearth by Catherine Ruth
pack Luck. And Catherine has done uh several podcast appearances.
I think she went if you look her up, you'll

(59:05):
find several different interviews, and it was through her interviews
that I went and run her book. I liked her
book better than her interviews. I ate it up. I
thought it was so good. She is an economist. She
had quite a lot of children. I can't remember how
many of but it was like maybe ten. It was
a lot. They have eight to tenish range. And she
was interested in studying women who had had a lot

(59:27):
of children. But she wasn't interested in studying women who
had had a lot of children by accident or like, yeah.
She wanted to study women who had very intentionally had
a lot of children and not just kind of fallen
into it by believing that they weren't allowed to or

(59:47):
just like kind of carelessly. So her parameters for her
study were, you had to have more than five children
or five five or more children. You had to be
college educated, you had to be somebody who had another
had another option and chose to be a mother of
a lot of children. And then she she like put

(01:00:13):
out ads in a you know, all across America, and
and different people signed up, Like she got a lot
of applicants that were, you know, willing to talk to
her about their experiences. And then she selected, She and
her team selected across section of across America, across religions,
across races across you different culture, socioeconomic Some families were

(01:00:40):
like wealthier, some families were you know, she just she
she studied a lot and then she she distilled everything
down into this one book, and she talks about a
lot of things that are so good about having big
families and makes this really strong argument from these families
that she interviewed, kind of countering a lot of the

(01:01:02):
concerns about having big families and just talking about how
beautiful it is. But within the parameters that she set right,
I think there are people who will read this book
and go, yes, I should have twelve children, because that
is always going to be good and it is never
going to be bad to have twelve ye and yeah,
And I think that there is there are right and

(01:01:23):
wrong ways to do things. Having big families can be
really good with the level of intentionality that comes with
this book, with parents who are properly taking care of
each of those children, and some of the issues she
addressed I thought were really good because one of the
I think the thing that people bring up the most
often is oh, you're not going to be able to

(01:01:45):
like properly take care of all the children, and the
older children will be parentified and and this this is
not you know, healthy, this is abusive. And she was saying, no,
there's a lot that's been lost where that the age

(01:02:06):
she made. She talks a lot about the age range
where kids are falling into anxiety and depression and like
really intense self esteem issues. She said, one of the
most wonderful things for that problem is your your middle

(01:02:26):
school early high school kid goes to school struggling with
their self esteem, comes comes home to a toddler who
thinks that they are a superhero. And and with that
confidence of I I am somebody to somebody I might not. Yeah,

(01:02:46):
So that the self esteem of that, the life skills
of that of of being and this is where you
have to be so careful. As a big family, I
saw real which I had marked it, but I saw
real of a mom of a big family who I
could tell she was so intentional. She was like, do
not always assign the task to your oldest child. Assign

(01:03:09):
the task to the oldest child who's capable of doing it.
So she used as an example that they wanted to
do a little fire pit fire for the family, and
she picked one of her kids in the middle who
was just old enough to like not have had a
lot of practice with fires yet. And she was like,
it's going to take him longer the fire. It's going
to take the fire longer to get built. But if

(01:03:31):
I pick my oldest, he's like he's over making fires, Like, yeah,
to him, that's a chore. I'm going to pick the
son who it's going to be so much fun for
him to make the fire. It's an opportunity for growth.
But I think that there's she's she's she was warning of, like,
it's you need to be careful, you don't fall into
this habit of old child. Yeah, I just I can

(01:03:54):
just constantly reached for my oldest child for to do
any and all the tasks, because there is a way
to parentify the oldest. The oldest too in a way
that is not fair to them. And and I think
that it's correct that you should always be as often
as possible, asking the oldest who is able to, like

(01:04:17):
I'm sorry, the youngest who is able to it, the
youngest who is able to, and spreading it out because
it can be Catherine makes the argument in this book,
and she makes it from many, many, many case studies.
She had hundreds of case studies that families where everyone
is pitching in, everyone is helping, everyone is caring for

(01:04:39):
like people are learning how to care for babies, people
are learning how to love on babies. And they are
they're getting the benefits of cuddling babies, they're getting the
benefits of toddlers who love them to death. They're they're
they're not being parentified, but they are learning those like
life skills of taking care of somebody who's completely vulnerable

(01:05:01):
and getting the confidence that comes with that. So there's
good and bad sides of this. Because on the other hand,
I saw there was a real that was going around
recently a couple months ago, i want to say, on Twitter,
where a mom of very very many had found out
she was pregnant again. And in the video, she was
going around to her older daughters telling, you know, showing

(01:05:25):
them the pregnancy test, and you could see on the
faces of the older daughters that they were not happy
that they felt like another baby that I'm going to
have And so the mom is so super excited that
she's having another baby, but you can see in the
spirit of the family that she shouldn't have. Yeah, So

(01:05:48):
I think it's and there were people who said that
like any family above X amount is always abusive to
the older I don't think that that's true. I've seen, like,
our cousins are are a big We have a big
family of cousins, and they seem really happy, and they're
all there's seven kids. Yeah, there's seven kids, and most

(01:06:13):
of them are having families of their own. Dorothy just
had her yep, and like that. You could tell that
they had a healthy childhood and now, to the best
of their ability, they are beginning to build big families
of their own. And replicate that, I don't know if

(01:06:34):
each of them will have as many as their mother
did or not. One of the reasons for that, yeah, Yeah,
my friend that I referenced earlier, who's on her fourth
who is really really sick. She came from a really
big family, and but I think she wants to be
done with four. And I don't think that that was

(01:06:55):
because she had a bad experience with her big family,
but just that, and I think she probably is going
to change her mind a couple of years out from
her fourth baby. But like I think that you can
it is completely correct to look at how good it
can be when it is done right. And go, this

(01:07:15):
is so good. This is the way when God gives
you a quiver full. This is so good. This is
all the reasons why it's good. This is all the
things that would be fixed in our society. If we
went back to having big families. We wouldn't have so
much teenage inks, we wouldn't have so much teenage depression.
We would have there's so much more purpose. And also
people learn to be less selfish, like only children have
that syndrome of like oh yes, yeah, yeah, Like I've

(01:07:39):
seen this play out in my my inlass family where
the older kids got the baby experience from their younger
siblings and the younger siblings are getting the baby experience
from my kids, and so like there's that generational family ties.
And one of the aunts in particular is just in

(01:08:02):
love with my two little with my two boys, and
so she just especially my toddler, Sheet usually takes care
of him when he's over there. And then if she
wasn't so sweet, I would have to fight her for aunt.
But she is the sweetest and Nisa loves her. And
for now, my mother in law is a primary one
who takes care of Gideon when when they're over there.

(01:08:24):
But it's it's things like that. But it's the support
of families that makes big families possible. Yeah, it's not
just one mom doing it. I there are people who
see children as status symbols, and I think that that
is fair to an extent. When you see a healthy
family and a wife who has very happily given her

(01:08:47):
husband five plus children, I look at that and I go,
that's a good man. I think that that man deserves
the highest amount of respect and status because I think
that a family that big requires. When you see a
healthy family that big, you you know that that man

(01:09:09):
is something special. He was doing he was doing stuff.
Yeah that you know, and I've seen it and I've
I've been like yep, m m, yep. And that is
a status thing. Yeah, it is a satisfy. But if
you're if you're having kids to try to cheat the status,
it's like if you get a cheap rolex, a fake
rolex instead of the real thing and try to like
fop it off as the real thing, you haven't done

(01:09:29):
what it took to get the real thing of having
that amount of money. If you have kid, if you
have five kids, but your wife's life is drained out
of her and she's at the edge of cracking. Then
you don't deserve that status. But like Joel Berry from
the Babylon Beat, Uh, they just had their six kids
this year, and like he's an example of someone. I
look at that family and I'm like that man, Like

(01:09:50):
that man has status, Like he has six children, six
child status, and you know he deserves it. I would
I would have named somebody else because there was a
different person, but they're a more private family and so
I won't. So I picked a picturel instead of the
happened to be a Catholic family that I was thinking of.
But he was. He was talking to me about how

(01:10:13):
he was trying to figure out what the push present
for his wife was going to be, and he's like,
what do you give a woman who's giving you five children?
And I was just as I would because I've talked
to her as well, and she's you could just tell
that that family is joyful and healthy, and and he

(01:10:34):
was joking about like hell, because he's a lawyer, he'll
talk to all their lawyers and be like, oh, how
many kids do you have? And they'll be like, oh, yeah,
I have too, and he'll be like, I have five
and he knows, like he feels the status of it,
and he deserves too. And so that was the first
person I felt that about. But I think that there's

(01:10:55):
there's so much that has been lost in the last
couple of generations of wisdom around families and gender roles
and all of these things where I think a lot
of times people are trying to find something that they lost,
that has been lost. They're rightfully trying to find something
that's been lost, and they're rightful, like they're rightfully reaching
for something, but what they're ending up producing is an

(01:11:18):
aesthetic as opposed to the actual thing. And you see
this with like the treadwife craze, where people are like
real femininity, like the classic femininity has been lost somewhere
along the way, and we want to get back to it.
But they're trying to get back to it by producing
this like aesthetic of fifties posters, of like lipstick ads,

(01:11:42):
and it's like that's that's not real feminine either. You're
just trying to reproduce an aesthetic. And I see so
many people, particularly in the influencer space, around this where
they're trying to produce the aesthetic of a big, happy family,
and also some of these accounts the way they post,
it's like you're not so much going for the esthetic
as you're going for appealing to men who have a

(01:12:04):
breeding fetish. That's also that's also a thing as well.
But yeah, I think that there's a lot of people
who are like, I want the status of having X
number of children. I want the aesthetic of having X
member of children. I want the aesthetic of being a
fertile woman and everything that comes with that. Or I

(01:12:26):
think there are women who kind of get addicted to
the identity of I have home births and I breastfeed
and that's such a small part of having children. That's
just such a short season. And I think there are
women who really really love babies, and so once their

(01:12:46):
kid gets beyond the baby stage, they want another baby.
And it's like, but you you have, like, don't be
the kind of person who gets a puppy and then
when it starts to grow up returns it. They'll be
that kind of person with babies. I think that there
are there's a lot of ve studied as far as
like types of bad mothers and mothers that are bad

(01:13:11):
in certain ways, and there are there is the type
of mother that like infantilizes all her kids and doesn't
want to let them grow up. And she's like, my babies,
my babies, my babies is like babies is such. Babies
are great. Babies are so. Babies are great. They don't
have a lot of skills, but I prefer them when
they have a little they can at least like hold
their heads up, hold their heads agin play a little

(01:13:33):
bit independently when they know they have hands. Guinea is
just starting to get into that, and I'm like, yes,
but there there there are women who are who love
the stage where they are one hundred percent needed and
one hundred percent loved and not criticized in any way.
And as the child doesn't need them as much pulls

(01:13:57):
away from them, grows up, then their relationship Chip gets
more and more strained because she's addicted to some one
part m h. And that's that's not healthy. I just
want another baby. You should want another child, Like, if
you're gonna have another child, you should want another child,
not another baby. Does that make sense? You should want

(01:14:18):
another teenager? You should know, right, because once once your
child starts having their own personality and their you know
their own thoughts, are you going to stop loving them?
Or right right? I think that there there are certainly
kids and big families who have talked about the abandonment
that they felt when they got older because their mother
was so focused on the little ones, and that I

(01:14:40):
think that that concern is overblown. I think that that
big families are put down, Like I think that there's
an aggressiveness with which even families above two are put down.
That's yeah, that's that's ridiculous, and like, it is entirely
possible to have a big, healthy family. I've seen it done,

(01:15:03):
I love it, I want it. But let me show
you a couple. This is an Instagram post that's like
a like revolving Instagram. So the the caption says, can
we also talk about how sorry this is Emma's for

(01:15:24):
meg account? Can we also talk about how mess up
it is when someone from a large family shares how
they wish their parents would have been more aware of
their capacity to parent will and someone says, oh, so
you wish you wouldn't have been born? Way to miss
the point, girl. So this is a series of slides,
but real quick, Yeah, I feel like that's that comes
from people thinking that abortion is a solution to someone

(01:15:46):
being a bad parent and not learning skills, Like, no,
I want you to just do a better job at
the job you have, not kill a child. Right Well,
there's there's a you should be faithful with what you
have before you ask God for more, before you reading
God for more. That's one thing I've been trying to
think about as far as like I want I want

(01:16:12):
a little bit of a big not necessarily bigger house
as far as square footage, but like more rooms for
more kids and on land, and like I'll say bigger house,
but it's it's stuff. It's it's more with regard to
like space for my boys to run around and more
rooms for the children to be in. And there's like
a but how about you. Your little boys are too

(01:16:34):
little to need a lot of land to run around
on right now, and you don't need more than the
rooms you have right now for the two babies you
have right now. So just be be faithful with the
thing that you have first, and then when God wants
to increase, he'll increase. And I think that there is
a lot of like wanting increased, demanding increase, snatching increase

(01:16:54):
without being faithful to what you already have that I
see in some of these big families. Okay, so yeah,
I was gonna say, if you're not faithful to what
you already have and you're always trying to get the increase,
you're just desiring like the getting, and you're not going
to value once you have it. Yeah, I think I
think that's it's fair. Okay, quiver full, but maybe my

(01:17:16):
quiver smaller than yours. You can still kill four people
with all four errors. It's true. God does not call
us to ignore our mental health, our home, our marriage,
our finances, and the well being of our children in
order to carry on having babies. I mean, God hates divorce.
If you're risking the health of your marriage and pursuit
of babies, you've got it all wrong. Yeah. In quotes,

(01:17:37):
trust God with your fertility, dude, do you really think
any prevention methods I'm employing are greater than the God
of the universe. Every time I have sex with my husband,
I know it could lead to a baby, and I
trust that God would give me strength and grace if
that were to happen. We trust God and use wisdom
taking steps to care for ourselves and our families in
every area except fertility. That doesn't make sense. Babies grow up.

(01:17:58):
The decision on whether or not to have more babies
should go well beyond the next three years of your life.
When you give birth, you were bringing a never dying
soul into this world, and it is your responsibility to
raise that child to be a well functioning adult who
loves Jesus. There is nothing, nothing in scripture that tells
us to keep having baby after baby or sit back
and do nothing in the name of trust in God,
even if we're drowning in our current situation. This is

(01:18:19):
where I wanted to say, like, if a mom is
drowning with three babies too, as far as it depends
on you within the birth control methods that your conscience
allows for, don't have more and tell such time as

(01:18:40):
you are ready. John and I like I was thriving
with Esa by the time we got like it was
a really quick turnover, but it was very much like
I was excited about getting pregnant and ready to get
pregnant because I was managing well the baby that I had,
And John and I plan to not try for more

(01:19:03):
until we're hoping to have both of them Potty trained.
Is it kind of reaching a point where like they're
old enough to help a little bit, like getting to
the point where waiting to have another until we can
manage another. Yeah, so you're not changing every single person's diaper, right,
including your own. Three people in the Hell's wearing diapers

(01:19:25):
is way too many. Yeah, I've got two wearing diapers
right now. I'd like to be able to potty train
my oldest soon. I mean, if three people is too many,
I can leave. I didn't have to be in diapers
very long this time. Adult diapers are amazing, though. I

(01:19:48):
hear they're really comfortable. So I didn't use them instead
of pats. Yeah, yeah, I'm like, I'm tempted to use
them for periods, but it's fine. But yes, I think
that there are far too many women who are getting
pregnant again when they're not. They haven't reached a point
of like, Okay, yeah, we're ready for another one. And

(01:20:09):
and in Catherine Pacaluc's book Hannah's Children, in all of
her case studies that she highlighted in every case like
they had large families, but each time they have been like, Okay, yeah,
we're ready to have another one, Where if God will
give us another one. We would really love to have
another one, like each time they were intentionally making a
choice to have another one, and not like, Oops, i'm

(01:20:30):
pregnant again. I't know. Yeah, if it happens, it happens right, right,
And if you're the type of woman who's like your
fertility is such that like you, if it happens, it
happens results to spacing, that you're okay with that right
right for you. But if you're going to get pregnant
a month after, you just have right. If you're me,

(01:20:53):
maybe do something about your family. Size is a personal decision,
and it canon should look different for every couple. Large
families are not the measure of holiness. You are not
more sanctified if you have six plus kids. I'm thinking
of I'm not going to name this person, but I'm
thinking of somebody who I think very highly of who
He and his wife have two kids, and I think

(01:21:14):
that that was appropriate for them, And I don't think
less of his status as a father because his job
is such that he has to travel a lot, and
I think a smaller in that situation, it is appropriate
that they didn't have more, and not not that they
couldn't have. I don't know the conversations. I don't know
the detail, like that's absolutely between them and God. But

(01:21:36):
I don't I don't look at them like, oh, only
a two child family. They're not participately Like, I don't
think that there's anything wrong with it. I think that
like a military family probably should be smaller until such
time as the husband's no longer like being deployed for
six months. Any time, you can have a baby in
a later season of life too, unless you've gone through menopause,

(01:21:58):
in which case, yeah, miracles, like it can be dangerous
to to wait too long because you can trust that
your fertility is going to be there, and it might
not be there. But no, I think I think that
there are there are different things that if your husband
is called to a certain type of job where he's
not able to be the type of support that's necessary

(01:22:19):
for a six kid family, then don't have a six
kid family. Or if he is called to that job
but God's provided you, you know, both of both sets
of grandparents close by and able to have then then yeah,
like I think that you you look around at your
resources and go, you know, is there is there space here?

(01:22:39):
And then there's obviously a certain amount of trusting God.
There's I don't think that there should be like a
do I feel one hundred percent qualified in my own
flesh to have another child? That's not necessary, yeah, because
you might not know how well equipped you are. Like
I was a little nervous to be an aunt and
then yeah, you're great on Abby handed me this like
weird pink thing, and I was like, oh, this isn't
that hard. But as I also have the better of

(01:23:00):
being like it soiled itself. Here you go. You grow
as a person with with the challenges. You you grow
as a person with the challenges. I think that there
are sometimes when through legalism, you force yourself into challenges
that you Yeah, well, like with braces, when you get braces,

(01:23:22):
they could put them on tight enough to just pull
all your teeth right into the exact spot and yeah,
in one month, but they do it very very slowly,
because otherwise you destroy the roots of the teeth. And
I think that there are some things where it's like, yeah, technically,
if you have one baby a year for five years,
that's you can do it. Technically, Like, yeah, God can

(01:23:44):
get you through it. But in some ways I think
that there's a destruction that can happen that is not
necessarily and and God doesn't necessarily spare you from the
folly of your actions. He's not being vindictive, but like
if you're like, I'm gonna do this thing that has
this cost, and God's just gonna write a check for me. Yeah.

(01:24:05):
Not On the flip side of this, if you get
pregnant naturally with quintuplets and the doctor tells you you
should selectively abort some so that you only have twins,
because this is going to be like way too hard.
That is wrong. If God decided to give you five,
you get to have five. Yeah, But if you did
IVF and implanted five, why did you do that? Why

(01:24:27):
should you do that? Yeah, there's different things going on.
Oh and also I note when pregnancies happened with those
large numbers of babies, it's because they went off of
birth control and got pregnant pretty soon after. Because after
birth control, my understanding is your body releases way more
eggs at a time for a bit until like things

(01:24:48):
get back to level. So I have Yeah, I think
that actually is a myth. Can you cookle that? Yeah?
I'm googling right now. Because I had heard that, and
then I hadn't heard that anymore. Have you still been
hearing it in my head? Yeah, because I my OB
did not warn me about that at all. As as

(01:25:09):
a potential concern with the IUD, it might depend on
the type of birth control. I phrased my search wrong,
because hormonal birth control is stopping you from ovulating at all,
so there shouldn't be a whole bunch of backed up X.
But I could be wrong. I'm going to read the
rest of this post. While you're looking, have as many
children as you can steward well into adulthood. Don't continue

(01:25:31):
getting pregnant out of fear or because you want your
family to look like the one that sits in front
of you at church. If you if you're trying to
keep up with the Joneses, if you're trying to chase
some like image of you know again, chasing an aesthetic,
chasing chasing status. No, you should be making decisions based
on you know. Has God given me the resources for this? Yes,

(01:25:53):
so it says it isn't guaranteed, but it is a
little bit more likely. They're still doing studies on it. Interesting,
and it's just like the first few months. Hmmm, So
I'm kind of shocked that my that Miobi did not
warn me about that. Maybe it's not as common that
people used to make it out to be. But like
my understanding is people who will go off birth control
because they got married, well then maybe get themselves back

(01:26:14):
into a corner. But oh interesting, Yeah, so just know
it's maybe a slight risk. I also know that as
you get older, you start to sometimes your body can
start to release more and more eggs, so like your
chances of twins go up as you get older, and
maybe it's it's uh women who were on birth control
for a long time and then in their thirties. But
also twins gip a generation, so we're in our dad

(01:26:38):
was an identical twin. Yeah, so I've both brit the
season them like is this twins? I had like this
little Hispanic nurse because I was like, I just want
to know if it's twins or not. She was like
because I said, because my dad was a twin, And
she's like, are you the second daughter? And I was like, no,
on my first daughter, and she said no, it's it's yep,

(01:26:58):
only the second. And I'm like, that feels like an
old lives tale. How does my body not a second daughter? Right?
But I just think it would be really funny if
I didn't have twins and you did and she ended
up being right. She wasn't a nurse, sorry, she was
a phlebotomist, so I even she was a vampire extra, Like,
I feel like you're just that's just an old lives tale.
But okay, I'm gonna google it. While you're the baby

(01:27:22):
stage will eventually be done, whether you have two kids
or twelve. We shouldn't fear that you married your husband
because you love him, I hope, and wanted to spend
time with him. Why are we not talking about the
beautiful stage of marriage that comes after your kids are grown.
I do think that there are a women who get
their idea And I'm struggling with this right now, Like
I got my identity bound up and being pregnant over
the last couple of years, just because I've been pregnant
for the last couple years, and now I'm like, Okay,

(01:27:43):
I need to find an identity outside of this for
a while. Yes, I googled it and Google AI really
pulled through. Oh boy. So my question was, is a
second daughter more likely to have twins. No, the sex
of your first or second daughter does not affect your
likely Yes, it does to get a girl. Anyway, I've

(01:28:04):
lost interest in this topic. Continue with what you were saying. No,
I think that there is there are people who are
afraid of change, and I think that there's and so
much of this I've I've felt it in myself, especially
because like so so many people close to me are
either pregnant or just told me about pregnancies. In the

(01:28:26):
last couple weeks, I have seen two pictures of pregnancy tests,
and then there was another friend who told me a
couple of weeks ago that she's pregnant. And I have
two more friends who were delivering in the Decemberish region.
And it's just like so many of my friends are pregnant,
and I just want to be pregnant with them, don't
I know, I know, right, But there's like that's community

(01:28:47):
of like, oh, these are like women I love. I
would just love to be pregnant with them. I haven't
had that opportunity. I was pregnant with one of them
with Esau. Okay, we had we had some crossover a
few months. But I think that it's like don't keep trying, Like, yes,

(01:29:07):
this is a beautiful stage, but you don't have to
like another baby, another baby, I gotta have another baby.
You can also enjoy like the other stages too. It's okay,
there's not just one good stage of motherhood. Yeah, babies
aren't the blessing specifically, it's they continue to be a
blessing as they get older. They don't stop a blessing. Yeah,

(01:29:28):
and like what my mom told me, I'm just kidding.
My mom never said that having babies is such a
short time of life, Yet so many women cling to
it as if it's their only purpose and meaning, very
often to the detriment of their marriage and other children. Yeah,
we've talked about that. You're made for more than just
a short season. Pregnancy and birth is not your only
joy in life. Yes, bringing four children into this world
has been my greatest accomplishment to date. But do you

(01:29:49):
know what my next one will be? Guiding them into
adulthood and giving them the attention and nurturing they need
without being in survival mode. And even in adulthood, you're
still their mom. Yeah, our identity, I did it. He
should not be in our family size, correct, It should
be in the amount of money we have. This shouldn't

(01:30:09):
be a public discussion. Well, I beg to differ. If
the influencers promoting zero family planning and twelve kids get
to share that publicly, I get to share this too.
If you've made the decision to have smaller family for
the sake of your current children, you're not alone. Prayerfully
letting go of your dream family size so you can
steward your home well is one of the most selfless
decisions you could ever make. I do want to share
the like do the flip side of this now, because

(01:30:31):
I think that there are families who, in the name
of I want to give my two kids a good life,
are covering for kind of a selfish like I. There's
a particular couple I'm thinking of. I'm not going to
name any who went so far as to give I

(01:30:54):
was really blessed by it, but give me all of
her pregnancy stuff and baby stuff. The minute she had
her second baby, like literally in the hospital, right, no,
like a few months out, she was like, here's my
pregnant pill, I'm never having any more children, and all
this stuff, and and then like when that that second
kid got a bit older gave me even more stuff

(01:31:14):
and it was again really blessed by it. But I
was like, what, why are you immediately so closed off?
They have a significant amount of money and I and
they were like, well, we want to be able to
like read, we want to really be able to spoil
the two that we have so like and travel. And

(01:31:35):
and I can understand if you want if if what
you like your vision is that you want a lifestyle
where you can like travel a lot and like one
kid for one hand in an airport. I can understand
like the logistical thought of that. But to me there
feels I don't want to just outright judge this family
because again I haven't been within those like poster conversations

(01:31:58):
and and they're at least replacing they're right, you know themselves.
But I do think that there's like a we want
a certain type of lifestyle and having more kids would
get in the way of that. And I think that
sometimes there can be this language we want to take
care of these ones, really, you know well, and it's
like a cover for no, but you you should have

(01:32:20):
more kids though it's the same attitude for child free.
But I feel like part of the issue is like
the more kids is. There's no number at which it
is an appropriate You've had the correct amount of kids, right.
You can always be like, no, you should have more kids,
even if you've got fourteen, right. There were women in
the olden days with like sixteen Yeah, why you can't
be like them. I think that there are families who

(01:32:41):
like it. It's it is between you and God. It
is between you and gods, between you and your husband.
If your husband's like begging you to not have more
and you're you're like, no, I want, I want. I
think that there's a lot of people who air in
either direction of like not having more or having more
for selfish mm hmm, unhealthy reasons, whether it's getting addicted

(01:33:05):
to having babies or societal pressure. I have noticed that
and and people have been I think fairly honest about
this in the influencer world, that you get more views
off videos where you're pregnant, and you get the most
views off of your your birth flogs and and things,
and so there's there's a way that the algorithm is

(01:33:27):
driving some of these influencer families to be bigger and
to stay pregnant. I have a sneaky, bad feeling about
the pregnant videos getting more views. Yeah, maybe I I
think that there is the fetish aspect of it, but
I don't. I don't I know how much I am
still enjoying watching pregnancy reveal videos. Okay that I think

(01:33:49):
that there's a large audience for them. There's something really
special about like watching a woman like see the positive
pregnancy test. And can I just say though, yeah, it
is deeply upset to me when they're like waving around
or putting in a food and like, did you clean
your hands off first? You see?

Speaker 2 (01:34:05):
I'll ever everything. I watched one where she like put
the cup of pea right up in front of the
camera and that didn't and I was I went to
the comments because I'm like, surely somebody else is going
to say this as gross. No one said it was gross,
and I'm like.

Speaker 1 (01:34:17):
Yeah, someone literally baked their pregnancy test into I don't
think they baked the cake, sorry they I think they
shoved it into a NARTI bade cake. But it was
like you peede on that though white, she put the
cover on it. It wasn't secret lives more and why
she put the cover on it. She put it in
the cake, and everyone was like, what did you? Don't

(01:34:37):
stop stop doing that. I'm like, in this economy serious
to be realistic. It was like when anyway, rinse your lungs.
A offshoot of this that I said I was going
to talk about so well, is a homebirth? Mm hmm

(01:34:58):
I think it was before you build up your thought.
Can is it even better if I break into someone
else's home and give birth there instead have been my own? Yes? Okay, continue,
It's even more of an extreme sport I have. I
want to be so careful about how I precious because
Petunia told me she had had a couple home births,
and awesome, amazing, very very cool. I can see. I

(01:35:23):
can see the appeal, I can feel the temptation. Yeah,
they're good arguments for it. Yeah, a lot of good
arguments for it. I've seen it done really really well.
The doula I hired that helped with Esau, she had
all three of the ones that she's had at home.

(01:35:45):
A really good friend of mine. She had her first
one at home by accident. She kept the She kept
calling in and going like this is where where I'm at?
Should I come in? And they were like no, no, no, no,
and then when they did tell her to come in
and she didn't make it. There's also a precipitous birth
or whatever. Yes, yeah, baby's just like I'm gonna launch out.

(01:36:06):
My sister in law had a one hour precipitus birth.
She did make it to the hospital, but she did
not make it to an epidol. She was like, never care,
that might be why she Yeah, but uh. There was
one person I know of who on the way to
the hospital, the husband was like, I'm gonna stop and
vote real quick, and she had the baby in the
car like fifteen minutes from delivered. From contraction starting to delivery,

(01:36:26):
it was literally fifteen minutes. I saw one where the
the couple lived in a in Hawaii on a housing
in a housing that they weren't not allowed to have
home births in the housing set that they were in.
I think it was like a military thing or it was.

(01:36:46):
It was something about their housing situation. They were not
allowed to have home birth, but they were an hour
from the hospital and she had fast births and she
so the one I saw she was it was the
second time she was giving birth in the car and
she was like she knew she was going to give
birth in the car, probably because they live too far
from the from the hospital, and it's just like that
sucks for sure, Like someone like that needs a home birth, yeah,

(01:37:09):
or a really nice car. And I know there are
several listeners of core listeners of the show that have
had homebirth. One who I know, she gave birth right
around when I gave birth, and she had like a
really difficult home birth. It was like several days long,
and she's stuck with it. I think a lot of
people would have given up and gone to the hospital,
but she stuck to her gun. She stuck with it.

(01:37:30):
She had a really you know, healthy baby and it
worked out, and I was really proud of her for it.
It was her first baby too, so I was like, wow,
So I really respect it. At the same time, I
think that there is a way that it has become
an extreme sport. It has become an extreme sport for status,
and I think that is it has become an extreme

(01:37:52):
sport that people are getting addicted to of like I
want another home birth. I want like the thrill of
another home birth specifically, and I think that that's playing
into things or like, oh, I need to have another
baby because I haven't had a home birth yet. I
need to have a home birth. Just I think that
homebirth is playing into this. I think that in some

(01:38:12):
ways it's been a really really good thing, and in
some ways I think it's been a bad thing. Yeah,
I was gonna say, like there's a lot of I've
seen people make the case for you know, you get
a lot more rest after a home birth because you
don't have the doctor the nurse is waking up every
few seconds or whatever. But also like if something tears
in birth, like can you hemorrhage dramatically? Yeah, in the hospital,
you can get pulled into surgery immediately. It help. You're

(01:38:35):
probably just gonna die, Yeah, you can. There is a
there are there are homebirths I've heard of where if
something did go wrong and they were able to be
transferred to the hospital and everything was fine, and like
the transfer time wasn't too long, and like you could
argue that's okay, and and if you you have a

(01:38:57):
professional midwife with you who's able to stick you up
and true knows to look for like, okay, you do
need to trans Like a midwife who is knows when
it's time to tell you have to transfor I'm sorry,
yes and who. But more and more I'm seeing on Instagram,
in particular, women who are like, I have to have

(01:39:19):
a home birth. I'm not a real woman, I'm not
a you know, good mother if I don't have a
home birth. Who are going so far as to not
have regular checkups because they don't want to be told
that they are risking out. And women who are getting
to the point of like denying that pre acclampsy is

(01:39:40):
a real risk, denying that breach is a real risk,
and we lowered the birthrate deaths for a reason. Army
has thought, what if this is a siop of like
creating a small subsection of women who are having a

(01:40:00):
lot of kids really dangerously to serve as the like
red flag warning for all the rest of Like there,
I mean, even if it's be wise, be what you
can have. You can have a home birth, but like,
at least at least know if your baby's breach, at

(01:40:24):
least be monitoring your blood pressure, Like, at least be
looking for some of these warning signs so you don't
just speed off a cliff for no reason. Yeah, I
think that there are Sometimes it's it's a desperate fight
to control something that is by definition uncontrollable, and and

(01:40:50):
there is there's very very fair criticism of hospitals and
doctors who are, in their own way, trying to control
something that's not controllable, and they're trying to control for
all of these things, and they're airing on the side
of we would rather give you a C section you
didn't need than lose the baby, We would rather xyz

(01:41:13):
than lose the baby. And you can understand why they're
making those decisions, and you can it's it's a good
thing to know when you can push back, when it's
okay to push back on something, when it's okay to say, hey,
this the induction didn't work. I am fine, I'm going
to go home and wait for my body to do
this on its own, or I'm going to deny the

(01:41:34):
induction because there isn't a big enough medical reason. But
I do see women who are denying inductions past you know,
forty two weeks, past forty one, forty two weeks, and
ignoring the statistics that say, like things, things can get
really bad really fast, that there are there are I
think that there's a way in which we overcorrect sometimes

(01:41:55):
and we go the doctors recommend this too often. So
it's never no, never the right thing to do an
induction or never. Your body never needs a little help
getting getting started. So, as an example, if you have
a bun in the oven and you're cooking it, and
then it passes the time that you're supposed to cook

(01:42:15):
it at and then you're still cooking it, it gets overcooked.
This is how but children are born.

Speaker 2 (01:42:21):
Sorry, I'm sorry, I'm sorry.

Speaker 1 (01:42:27):
I love you guys. It's just so story. Well, this
needs to go back to biology. This is clear. I've
heard people like people say like nothing good happens after
forty one weeks. There is there is some like really
there starts to be like if you are actually there's
two things to keep in mind, right, your intuition of

(01:42:48):
your body really strong. If you are forty one weeks,
forty two weeks and you're like, everything feels perfectly fine,
baby's kicking a lot, like I'm healthy. I know in
my soul that things are fine, great, keep going like

(01:43:08):
coe's something wrong? But right, you don't I think that
there's there's like you you don't need to let a
doctor fearmonger you, but you should be listening to your instincts. Yes,
and there are there are ways that like I accepted
my inductions because I was like, oh, absolutely, like I
knew weeks ago, I was running out of runway, like yes,

(01:43:31):
please induce me now because I know where we're at.
So so like, I think there's a way that people
or people let Instagram tell them, like, you are less
of a woman if you don't have a home birth,
You're less of a woman. If you don't go into
labor and naturally you're less of a woman. If you
don't have a natural, un medicated birth, you're less of

(01:43:53):
a woman. If you have a c section, you're less
of a woman. If you can't breastfeed. A lot of
these things are incredibly toxic, and there's layers of status
that I think women are chasing, and I think sometimes
women have more kids quickly because they failed with their inside.
Part of what I did was like I failed with
my first one, so I was like, quick, we got

(01:44:14):
to repeat it so I can do it right. And
God was like, oh, well, it's gonna be way worse
the second. But like that was that was a good
lesson for me to learn. Can't control it. A general
rule of thumb. Has this person had any of her
chromosomes removed? Does she still have the same amount of
X and Y chromosomes? Sorry, she's an X chromosome. She

(01:44:34):
has X and Y, or she's pregnant with the boy,
or she's pregnant with the boy. Right, so if she
still has two X chromosomes, she's still the same exact
amount of woman she was when she was born. This
doesn't apply to men, though, because there are double standards.
There is so much that women let in, like so
much social stuff that influences our self we let influence

(01:44:57):
our self esteem and the state of the Instagram quiver
full trad wife, having lots of babies home birth movement,
I think is pushing a lot of women into dangerous
places where they're making decisions not based on their intuition,
not based on what they know is right for their families,
not based on like prayerfully considering, talking to their husbands,

(01:45:18):
weighing all the things, et cetera, but making decisions based
on like Instagram told me. And I don't think that
that's the top of mind like Instagram told me. Therefore
I have to but it's a much deeper like heart
level and so many of these things I have had
to examine in myself of like, oh that's where my
heart was at with that. Oh that's where my head

(01:45:40):
was at with that. Oh that's what I was trying
to prove, et cetera. And part of my rush was
like I can't believe I turned thirty this year and
I only have two kids, and I got started way
later than I wanted to, and like I'm so behind,
and like I'm whatever, I messed up. I regret I failed,
and it's like, no, well, I John and I I

(01:46:04):
it took me longer to meet John than I want
than I wanted it to take for me to find
my husband right. And then we wanted to get financially stable,
and it took us longer to get financially because of
like the pandemic and everything. Took us longer to get
financially stable than we and we hoped and like did
we wait longer than we had to? Maybe? Or did

(01:46:24):
we did we? I know where we were. We were
in prayer the whole time. We were intentional the whole time.
Should I because I looked at somebody else and said, oh,
they've had four kids before they were twenty five, I
should have done that, Like there's so much comparison and
self recrimination. And I think that the because our conservative

(01:46:47):
Christian society is trying to correct for some real errors,
like we're trying to correct for families have gotten have
gotten too small, Like on average, our families have gotten
too small. There's a lot of there's a lot of
the book Hanna's Children talks about a lot of different
things that would be fixed in society if on average
families were bigger. Again, but keep in mind that, like

(01:47:12):
before you try to base your life off of someone's
life that you've seen on the internet, you know that
they can lie about how good their life is, right
or you're seeing the best moments like when I'm watching
a steady diet of the moment of learning your pregnant
or the moment of having your babies, those are like
incredibly high moments and it doesn't show nine months of
being sick or like whatever else leading up to. So

(01:47:38):
I hope, I hope that we've covered this in a
nuanced enough way that your family size should be between
you and God. Big families are good, can be good,
they can also be bad, and small families can be bad.
And everything can be bad and everything can be good.

(01:47:59):
And I think it ideally, ideally you accept as many
children from God as he wants to give you in
the timing that is right and health and healthy. I
hope to have as many kids as I can reasonably
have without risking something I shouldn't be risking, whether that's

(01:48:24):
risking not properly parenting, or just not being there at all,
or whatever it is. I think that that you your
call is to not have as many children as possibly
your calls to be a good parent, to lead your
children to Christ, to do all well with what God
has given you, have ver much He's given you right.
So I hope we've answered this this well because it

(01:48:48):
is it's a really really nuanced conversation. It's can be
different for everybody. I think the answer of how many
children it is good and right and healthy for you
to have it is gonna be different for us. The answer
is always gonna be forty seven forty seven children. And
I think that there's there's an extent to which God
is going to control, Like you might want more and
He might not give you more, or he might not

(01:49:08):
want more and he might be like, guess what your
birth control didn't work. Yeah, exactly exactly, and I'm prepared
for that to happen. I think that's entirely possible to happen.
But but also there's an extent to which God will
let you deal with the results of your your folly,
your carelessness, and and I think if you should be

(01:49:34):
approaching anything intentionally and carefully, it is having children, because
they are internal souls and all of that, and then
the home birth being like a little side trail that
is like, yea, do what is actually right for you,
because you're you're risking two lives, not just one. Yes.
For for me, I think that like the the core

(01:49:56):
of like it's better to have labor goes better when
you're relaxed. For me, I am more relaxed in a
medical setting, And I think that they're women who just
don't understand that at all, and like, how could you
possibly be more relaxed in a medical setting? In that home?
I just am my blood Like I've seen it in
the data enough times to know that my book pressure
goes down the minute I get out of my car

(01:50:18):
and into a waiting room because I'm like someone's here.
That's like the grown ups to here, I'm going to
be taken care of, and I just I just relax more.
I I my labors are quick, even though they were
induced really early. I've I've had a five hour labor
and to seven hour. But like, mm hmm, I think
that sounds right. I maybe seven and a half, Yeah

(01:50:40):
that five and yeah, anyway, something like that, like very
fast labors. And then there are people who are like
I just I want to give birth at home to
avoid the vaccines, and I want to talk about vaccines more.
I have reached a point of like sheer confusion over
vac scenes after all of my research, where I'm like

(01:51:02):
going back and we were talking about this before we started.
But I think that like you can you can say
no to vaccines in the hospital setting. I personally don't
think it's gonna be hard for me to say no
to vaccines. Is a like a good reason to do
the entire risk of a home birth. I to me,

(01:51:25):
there's a discick there. I don't learn. I don't. Yeah, no,
I think one hundred percent that like learning to self advocate,
learning to push back against a large part of my
medical experience in the last couple of years has been
learning to ask the right questions, learning to do my
own research and bring it in, to not tell the

(01:51:45):
doctors what to do because they don't take that well,
but to know how to ask the right questions, talk
about the right concerns, have the right like terminology for
my concerns, and then say no when I need to
say no, and be confident of that, to stand up
for myself when I need to stay it up for myself,
and to not sit there and like be scared what

(01:52:07):
they think of me. Yeah, I think that, Like if
you're so frightened of what somebody thinks of you when
you say no to a vaccine that you have to
give birth at home and riskcared like it just that
that doesn't connect with me. Maybe you live in a
much tougher state where they shake you way more, and
I can I can understand that I have. I've just

(01:52:28):
signed pieces of paper and no one has ever like
made me uncomfortable about say no to vaccines anyway. Okay,
that is that is quite enough information on lies you
have any final thoughts. I've never had any thoughts to
begin with. Oh, good time, No, I'm kidding, Yeah, No,
I think I think I've said everything that I was
thinking of. The Only thing is if there's one exception
where I think a home birth is super deeper advisable.

(01:52:49):
If you are planning to have a baby that the
government doesn't know exist, so you can train them up
to be a secret spy who is so secret that
there's no record of them. That's one advice, vile reason
to have a home birth. Yeah, I could see that.
Follow me for more tips. Oh I did. I didn't
finish my story, but one of my the one who

(01:53:09):
had accidentally had a home birth, she had her second
one as a home birth. She was like, I can't
go back. Once I accidentally have my first baby at home,
I have to have my second now. I was like, yeah,
checks out, logic checks out. Like look, but for me,
if if I was like, I don't want to be
told I have pre eclipsy again, so I risk out
of a home birth, I just want to have a
home birth and I'm just going to force it, that

(01:53:30):
would be so unwise, That would be so deeply unwise
and just I think we're putting the lord out to
the test. But story going right, I think that there's
like you do need to like I understand why people
get mad at doctors for like fear mongering them about
their baby's life. Yeah, but realize that the risk you're
taking is your baby's life, yes, and your life, and
you're potentially your existing children not having a mother. Like

(01:53:52):
the risks that you're dealing with are They might be
small risks, but they're massively important risks. And those are
the types of things that like that needs to be
between you and your husband and God and not you
in Instagram. Yeah, yeah, so yeah, Okay, But I hope,
I hope, I hope you like this. I hope I

(01:54:14):
didn't offend if you or any of our crunchier moms
around the email dresses complaints at conspiracy pill dot com.
The evil dress is Liz all right. Love you all,
love the choices you have made for your lives. I'm
proud of all of you home birth moms. I really am.
I know how hard that is, and I am proud

(01:54:37):
of you, and uh proud of you who have big
families appreciate you well. Can I thank boo boo big

(01:55:16):
co

All Episodes

The Family Size Question (S1 - E10)

Episode Transcript

Popular Podcasts

Stuff You Should Know

Cardiac Cowboys

The Joe Rogan Experience

.css-15opob5{left:0;position:absolute;top:0.8rem;} All Episodes

.css-14f5ked{margin:0;word-break:break-word;display:-webkit-box;-webkit-box-orient:vertical;box-orient:vertical;-webkit-line-clamp:2;overflow:hidden;}The Family Size Question (S1 - E10)