Anyone who raises a question about the legitimacy of IVF and surrogacy is vulnerable to accusations of being meanspirited or even of denying the humanity of the children born through these methods. My answer to such criticism has always been that I do not deny the humanity of such children but, ironically, the procedure itself encourages society to think of children as commodities. In the eyes of the law, they necessarily become analogous to pieces of property, to things, as the law must intervene in the many complicated situations that arise as a result of divorcing reproduction from its traditional context. When the surrogate child has Down syndrome, for example, who has parental responsibility? Those who donated egg and sperm, or the woman bearing the child in her womb? If the people paying for the process want the child aborted, do they have the right to demand the surrogate does as they desire? And as we move in the (near?) future toward the commercial creation of children from other body cells, the questions will only become more complicated. 

I have never denied the humanity of a child born through IVF or surrogacy. Indeed, it is not the critics of the processes but the processes themselves that are shifting the cultural imagination toward seeing children not first and foremost as persons but rather as things, as pieces of property to be defined and disposed of by the law of the land, not the law of nature.  

But is reproductive technology the source of the problem or rather something made plausible by longstanding shifts in other areas of our culture? A friend who read my manuscript in advance has raised an interesting point: Did the advent in the West of no-fault divorce effectively set this whole process of objectification in motion? In retrospect, it seems obvious how its redefinition of marriage as a sentimental, utilitarian contract paved the way for gay marriage. But what of its effect on how society treats children? No-fault divorce has made into a routine part of our cultural imagination something that previously applied only in extreme cases—the consideration of children as pieces of property whose relationship to parents is necessarily a matter for the courts to decide.

The point is a pungent one and a reminder that marriage is part of the ecology of what it means to be human. Alterations in its definition or function cannot be confined to the domestic sphere but necessarily have a transformative effect on the broader anthropological question. The practical definition of marriage in any given society is connected to how that society understands what it means to be human. Make marriage a sentimental, contractual bond and you have to revise the relationship between the children that are its fruits, and thus parenthood. In short, you have to revise the most basic of human relationships—and therefore the concept of humanity itself—at a foundational level. In a no-fault divorce world, all relationships become contractual, even that between parent and child. And given that the Christian (and Jewish) view is that human beings are made in the image of God, such basic revision of what it means to be human has religious significance. Revise the image of God and you revise the nature of God. 

The next decade looks set to bring a cascade of novel moral challenges into the lives of many people, not least in the area of reproduction. The Protestant churches will find the challenge of fertility treatment to be particularly acute. That is not to say that Catholicism faces no difficulties. The routine and unchecked practical rejection of the Catholic Church’s teaching in the area of reproduction by vast numbers of her adherents is an ecclesiastical scandal, while the annulments of marriages that have produced children look, to this Protestant at least, just a little too culturally convenient when compared to Christ’s own rather more stringent teaching on the matter. 

But those huge problems are for Catholics to address. My Protestant world has problems of its own. It has largely lost its sense of human teleology as a whole and it has bought into a pragmatic, utilitarian view of reproduction. How many pastors even know where to begin when it comes to IVF and surrogacy, let alone what conclusions to draw? Further, and to return to my friend’s comment, its casual acceptance of no-fault divorce many years ago not only altered the ecology of marriage but also of anthropology itself. The churches’ longstanding desecration of man is bearing fruit, not least in the way it accepted divorce laws that pressed us all toward seeing children as things. And that makes clear thinking about reproductive technologies such as IVF impossible, short of a willingness to take unpopular, distressing, and counter-intuitive positions.

The post When No-Fault Divorce Turns Children into Commodities appeared first on First Things.

The piece itself was predictably silly, self-absorbed, and shallow, another entry in the newly popular “actually, divorce is great” genre of chick lit. The gambit will be familiar and makes a certain sort of psychological sense: Turn the tragic into a cause for celebration. Shout your abortion! Throw a divorce party! Women have become expert at turning reality on its head. But while the article may have been banal, the reactions were not. Even New York Times readers responded negatively. Clearly, something had hit a nerve. 

Having recently reread The Odyssey, my own thoughts ran immediately to Penelope, the faithful wife of Odysseus who waited twenty years for his return, raising his son, Telemachus, and caring for his father, Laertes. She manages the estate, outwits the pushy suitors, and looks after the home for which Odysseus so desperately longs. As he says, “Nothing is sweeter than your own country / And your own parents, not even living in a rich house— / Not if it’s far from family and home.”

After a brutal and lengthy war, Odysseus spends ten long years attempting to return to Ithaca. He confronts his own failings and the betrayal of others. He endures and suffers, but always the memory of home, of Penelope and Telemachus, carries him forward.

Imagine Odysseus if he had no home to return to, if he knew that Penelope had abandoned the estate and left him for another. Perhaps she was seeking “self-fulfillment” or swiping right on Hinge. Would he have survived? Would he have perished between Scylla and Charybdis, or lost himself entirely in the ministrations of Calypso?

Western civilization begins with a poem—a poem about coming home. Without home, we are lost, both individually and collectively. We need ties that bind, traditions and rituals, memories and roots.

It is no secret that our culture is marked by unprecedented levels of depression, catastrophically low birth rates, and skyrocketing levels of mental illness—especially among the young. People are lonely, anxious, and overwhelmed. They are adrift, unmoored from any stabilizing community. Technology and social media bear some of the blame, but the rot begins earlier—with the missing home. Cathi Hanauer’s piece is so grotesque and has elicited such a strong response because she exploded not only a marriage, but a home, and for such trivial reasons. Only briefly does she consider the ramifications of the divorce on her children, her parents, or her friends.

A broken marriage upends an entire community, and will shape all of them for the rest of their lives. Should Hanauer be lucky enough to have grandchildren, they too will be affected. Where will they celebrate Thanksgiving? Which of their many “homes” will host Christmas? And what becomes of the family’s unique rituals and traditions? Like the butterfly effect, the ripples of divorce are endless.

Decades of easy, no-fault divorce have paved the way for a culture of homelessness. The children of divorce, sold the lie that they’d be happier if their parents were happy, were shuffled from “home” to “home,” handed off from one parent to another, each with a different set of rules and habits, each with a new girlfriend or boyfriend, maybe new siblings. A rotating, ever-changing cast of characters.

But divorce culture is hardly the sole culprit. Even for those children lucky enough to have two married parents, both were likely to be working full-time, outside the home. Did these children sit down for a home-cooked meal? Did they eat dinner together around a table? Or were they scrolling through Instagram while gobbling takeout? Was Mom flying around the country while Dad was on his cell phone?

Then there are the designer babies, must-have accessories to be ordered and purchased on demand. These are children who will never know the woman whose womb was their first home, or the father whose sense of humor they share. They will always be fundamentally homeless, intentionally deprived of a mother or a father.

Part and parcel of the attack on the home and traditional family is the extraordinary rise of the transgender movement, which is at root a total rejection of the idea of home. What else is an ideology that claims you can literally ignore or remake your first and ultimate home—your own body? The gnostic rejection of the body is the final rejection of home, and it has produced a generation of mutilated, broken children.

How do we remake a culture that has forgotten or deliberately attacked the value of home and all that it means? How do we step back from the abyss of chaos and confusion, of despair and loneliness? How can we return to Ithaca?

As the aptly-named Homer makes clear, Penelope is no one’s fool and more than a match for her husband. She may have stayed “at home,” but she has been busy and productive. Once upon a time, this was a legitimate and highly honorable role in society. Call her a “housewife,” “homemaker,” or “stay-at-home mom.” Tending the home fires used to be essential work, not something to be squeezed in-between other more pressing commitments. And this work was generally the particular stronghold of women.

But we have spent decades now demeaning “housewives,” worshipping abortion, and choosing servitude to the GNP rather than tending our own home and family. Free, universal daycare is the cause of the moment. Women must be liberated from the home so they can climb the corporate ladder. Babies must be handed over to strangers so that comrades might work.

Left unspoken is the possibility that most women, if not all, might be happier and more “fulfilled” were they to raise their own children, at least in the early years, and create a loving home. Like it or not, most men and most women have different abilities, skills, and interests. And even when the mother is absent, it is usually another woman who steps into the void. It has often been noted that Winston Churchill’s nanny saved the free world.

But one way or another, the obvious can no longer be ignored. If no one is in charge of making and tending the home, there will be no home. Without someone whose primary “job” is looking after the house and the people in it, that home and its inhabitants will necessarily suffer. And so will the larger world in which they live. Loving and lovely homes, like functioning neighborhoods and nations, don’t just happen. They take an extraordinary amount of work and care, thought and planning.

The Odyssey is the story of a homecoming, and that story has been retold and reimagined for thousands of years. Our world is quite literally unthinkable without the poem—both as the grounding of all literature and as enduring truth. When I was growing up, there was no more popular movie than The Wizard of Oz. Dorothy knew, and reminds us all, that “there’s no place like home.” It matters more than wealth or power, status or success. Kansas or Ithaca, we all need a home to which we can return.

The post I’ll Be Home for Christmas? appeared first on First Things.

Is there a life beyond the screen? In 2010, Nicholas Carr’s The Shallows described what the internet was doing to our brains. Although still relevant today, Carr’s book came on the scene before two major events: the rapid proliferation of smartphones and the explosion of social media activity. In 2024, Jonathan Haidt’s The Anxious Generation showed that these new developments had ­fueled dramatic increases in rates of depression, anxiety, and other mental health issues in Gen-Z teens and young adults—and left many unable to conceive of a life that isn’t saturated by screens. 

Silicon Valley, we have a problem.

Clare Morell’s The Tech Exit is strong on solutions and strong on hope. Morell begins by laying out the problem, taking aim at two powerful myths in our culture, myths widely repeated because they sound so reasonable. The first is that if technology is harming your child, you can remedy the situation with screen-time limits. Children can use screens less—an hour a day, for example. 

As Morell points out, time limits simply don’t work. Teens crave social acceptance and peer approval, and these cravings are only amplified by screens. Moreover, digital experiences can make the real world feel so unbearably dull that, even after only a little time online, kids will keep longing to return to their devices. The result? Parents who try to enforce screen-time limits “are constantly having to stand between a drug-dispensing machine and an underdeveloped brain. It’s an untenable, exhausting situation.”

The second myth: Parental app controls are effective at limiting kids’ access to harmful online content. Morell demolishes this fanciful idea, pointing out that it’s often easy to find work-arounds and loopholes. She recounts how one boy circumvented a parental monitoring app on his phone by going into the app itself, clicking on the Support button, and then searching for porn from within the browser that opened up. 

And Morell reminds us that kids don’t even need to go looking for explicit material. Social media is a conveyor belt for content so dehumanizing, violent, and grotesque that “the porn children view today makes Playboy look like an American Girl doll catalogue.”

Though The Tech Exit includes some disturbing and tragic stories, refreshingly it focuses not on digital harms, but on reclaiming a life free of screens. Freedom begins with what Morell calls the “fast”: a total screen detox. In a culture such as ours, which operates according to the Rule of Tech Ubiquity—­technology anywhere, anytime, for anyone, to do anything—complete withdrawal may be a daunting proposal. There are nuances and exceptions in Morell’s approach, but the initial prolonged period of abstinence is essential if we are to discover who our children are.  

The first couple of weeks, ­Morell concedes, can be “hell,” with kids upset or distressed that they can’t use their screens anymore, and parents having to spend far more time with their children. (Five hours of Monopoly a day, anyone?) But as one mom observed, once tech “gets out of their system and if you hold your guns, you will see these versions of your kid that you’re like, ‘Well, if I had known this, I would have done this forever.’”  

The core of Morell’s prescription is not the fast but the FEAST—her acronym for five basic commitments toward reclaiming a low-tech life. Find and connect with likeminded families; get buy-in from kids by explaining and educating them on the harms of digital tech, and exemplifying healthy tech use; adopt alternatives to smartphones; set up accountability and screen rules; and trade screens for real-life responsibilities and pursuits. 

Morell emphasizes that families cannot be islands of tech resistance, but must join with other families in their neighborhoods and schools. This gives parents allies and kids friends who aren’t on screens. Some families sign on to a version of the Postman Pledge (named after Neil Postman, the media critic), formally affirming their commitment to limit their tech use and build a new community ethos. Specific tech-­reduction strategies include: having a landline at home; replacing smartphones with “dumb phones,” with only call and text options; giving children not just chores, but “adult” responsibilities such as cooking and shopping (or home repair, we would add); encouraging play in nature, walks, reading, board games, crafting, music, journaling, and tinkering.

All that might sound ambitious, but our impression—­having lived as a low-tech family for twenty years—is that Morell’s approach is realistic and her hope ­well-founded. Some reviews of The Tech Exit have accused Morell of idealism, as if she assumed that life will be perfect once the screens are gone or greatly minimized. This is a misreading. If anything is unrealistic, it is the conventions of contemporary parenting. 

Many years ago, long before we had our own children, we ­attended a christening. It was a solemn ­liturgical ceremony, as high as high church can get, except at the end, when the priest passed the swaddled infant back to the husband and wife and casually remarked, “Good luck with your project.”

It sent a chuckle through the congregation. It seemed just a quip at the time, but now, as we look back at that event a quarter century ago, we can’t help wondering whether the priest meant something more. Our culture, then, was drifting from a traditional view of family, which emphasized parental responsibility and self-sacrifice, toward an emphasis on parents’ personal fulfilment. 

The same attitude was transmitted to children. The result, today, is “acceptance parenting,” whose central mantra, as Mary Harrington has written, is: “I don’t mind what you do. I just want you to be happy.” If so much of what we do and makes us happy and fulfilled emanates from a screen, then the idea of a screen-free or low-tech life remains—for many parents and their children—an unfathomable proposition.  

The Tech Exit doesn’t address this foundational change in our culture. It assumes that parents will gladly take on the duty of instructing, guiding, and setting rules—such as “no private tech use” during childhood. This assumption doesn’t negate Morell’s message, but her approach might resonate primarily with parents who are comparatively traditional or authoritative in their parenting styles. 

For these parents, at least, a low-tech existence is not just possible, but fruitful—a life in which children play outside together, a life of music and games and homes full of books, where “screen entertainment is a rare treat, not a ­daily ­occurrence, and where parents might decide to equip their teenage son with a pickup truck rather than a smartphone.”

The closing chapters of Morell’s book shift from ground-up FEAST solutions—what we as parents and families can change—to top-down solutions: how our laws and policies need to change. For instance, kids can easily lie about their ­ages in order to access adult content. Our age-­verification law is useless, almost by design. Meanwhile, a law known as Section 230 is so ­abysmally written that internet companies face “absolutely no consequences for promoting child sex abuse ­material”—even if it results in the sex trafficking or death of children.

What keeps our laws so impotent? Morell, as a former adviser to Attorney General Bill Barr, writes: “Often as a bill gets close to getting a vote, either in Congress or in a state legislature, Big Tech swoops in with their armies of lobbyists and lawyers, an incredibly organized machine, and mounts a tremendous pressure and intimidation campaign to scare lawmakers away or buy them off.” Nevertheless, this is not a fatalistic book. Its last section, in particular, offers feasible pathways for change that can be implemented by schools, school districts, and entire towns.  

Brad East has observed that when Christians write about technology, they tend to rehearse truisms: “God is the source of all creativity; God made us to be makers; any tool can be bent toward sin or gospel service; what we need are wisdom and virtue and good habits.” This sentiment, when applied to smartphones, is like printing a holy icon onto a pack of Marlboros and expecting teen smoking to serve the good, the beautiful, and the true.

Still, worldview matters. Our ultimate beliefs—those that declare the “first things” of life—shape our values and behaviors. Even the best tech books are often reluctant to acknowledge this point. The illuminating chapter on spirituality in Jonathan Haidt’s Anxious Generation is about psychological feeling and spiritual practice more than existential beliefs. In the final pages of The Tech Exit, Morell discusses Maslow’s self-actualization theory and our need to transcend ourselves by “focusing on things beyond the self like altruism and spiritual awakening,” but again the theme is individual growth. 

So, although Morell demolishes popular beliefs around screen-time limits and parental controls, she sidesteps a conversation about ultimate beliefs. Yet just as her strategies and practices make sense only within a certain model of parenting, the FEAST to which The Tech Exit points us—real relationships and pursuits in the real world—makes sense only within a world­view that gives primacy to these domains. 

Could Christianity serve as this model? It might, depending on how we frame the model, and assuming we go beyond vague and watered-down recommendations about the use of our God-given powers of creativity. There are more vital imperatives to consider. We are commanded to be stewards of the primary things God made. Above all, we are commanded to love God and each other. 

Certain corollaries follow. We cannot allow virtual reality to become more important than physical reality; we cannot allow an impulsive or emotional attraction to social media or AI to become more important than our relationships of love and self-­sacrifice to real people. And if technological innovations interfere with the primary imperatives, then the innovations must be rejected or radically modified. 

Not everyone will agree with this application of the Christian worldview. But only an encompassing worldview can provide a foundation for our tech-reduction strategies. Without a foundation, individual strategies become ideas on a checklist, difficult to sustain amid technological and social ­pressures. 

The Tech Exit speaks to parents who want to save their children from the digital universe. In this way it taps into the love of mothers and fathers for their sons and daughters. A parent’s love is a powerful motivation, but not everybody is a parent or a child. Our whole society would benefit from a more principled approach to technology use. 

When it comes to managing our screens and devices, the only consensus, so far, is that if our tech makes us suffer badly enough, we should stop using it. But why make suffering the motivator? We have just undergone an uncontrolled global experiment in what smartphones and social media can do to the mental health of our kids. AI is now enticing those same kids, and us, into a new rat cage. But we are not obliged to plunge into another reckless experiment. 

Morell concludes her book with these words: “Removing digital tech from childhood is the first step, but the far greater task ahead of us is to reclaim true human flourishing.” Quite so. This ambitious and essential book throws open the door to reality. Do we have the courage to step through?

The post How to Become a Low-Tech Family appeared first on First Things.

One former women’s magazine editor wrote an essay entitled “All* of my friends are ending their marriages . . . *and I’m pretty sure I know why.” In it, she notes that it is her female friends in heterosexual marriages who have generally been married to “good guys,” rather than to abusive men, who are filing for divorce. For many of these women, divorce signals what they see as a positive change. It’s even tucked into the vocabulary: the “ending of a marriage” rather than “a divorce.” Memoirist Haley Mlotek, author of No Fault, says that divorce is now “so common that it really is twinned with getting married and staying married, and every year that someone stays married, the eyebrows go up. ‘Oh—10 years! How do you do it?’” The critically acclaimed 2019 film Marriage Story plays on this confusion of concepts: Despite its title, the film is actually about a divorce.

The pop culture narrative around divorce has taken a turn toward framing divorce as an often-necessary evil for women who want to be most fully themselves. Its ability to enable their self-fulfillment is something to be celebrated. While they love their children, and sometimes even their ex-husbands, these women tend to see marriage as part of a larger, more problematic patriarchal system. Maggie Smith describes the divorce memoir trend as “unpacking not just marriage and divorce but patriarchy. . . . There are all these issues that ripple out from the stone of the divorce being thrown into the pond. The ripples are much bigger than that transactional event.”

This wider cultural conversation is often spurred on, however, by smaller events, commonly seen as transactional. Women are speaking openly about the burden of carrying the weight of domesticity, usually in relation to trying to establish or maintain a career as well as care for children. In Splinters: Another Kind of Love Story, Leslie Jamison describes the grueling nature of taking her newborn on a book tour, something that her husband did not join her for: “Taking my baby on tour was a way of saying, I can be the father who goes away, and the mother who stays.” 

In an effort to help couples sort through the many tasks involved in living family life, and particularly to help men see the “invisible work” of the home done by their wives, author Eve Rodsky decided to apply organizational management principles to marriage. “Fair Play” is a gamified system of domestic organization. In addition to a best-selling book, you can buy a pack of Fair Play cards, which list over one hundred household tasks. Each task includes not only the execution, but the conception and planning as well—the “mental load” aspect of domesticity that often remains unseen or unspoken. 

But for one woman, the conversation about “Fair Play” with her husband eventually led to their divorce. In her essay “Our Fair Play Discussion Signaled the End of My Marriage,” Cindy DiTiberio explains how she found herself trying to build a career while also caring for her daughter and carrying what she felt was more than her fair share of the domestic burden. When the pandemic arrived, she decided to let her career take the hit, because her husband not only earned more money but also owned his own business. Still, she was unhappy. Even if her husband pitched in when asked, “I wanted the weight of the mental load to be lighter, not to dole out tasks like a sergeant in the army.” 

After they went through the deck of Fair Play cards, DiTiberio’s husband “pulled up a spreadsheet of all he did for his clients, all the tasks he was tasked with at work. He felt like his paid work, and how much bandwidth that required, should be factored into the equation.” Her reaction? “Dumbfounded shock.” She writes that while she knew “he was exhausted and overworked,” domestic work like “baths and bedtimes and walking the dog and taking out the trash, cooking meals, cleaning up, folding laundry, making sure the household is maintained . . . was no less his responsibility than mine just because he earned a bigger paycheck.” Two years later, they were divorced.

DiTiberio seems to fit the popular trend: The marriage wasn’t abusive; they just couldn’t get on the same page. Like Smith and Jamison, DiTiberio blames (at least in part) marriage itself for being patriarchal. 

These women’s stories seem to follow an almost uncannily similar pattern: They meet a man, fall in love, get married, and for a while, are happy enough with parallel careers. But then, a baby arrives, and motherhood turns their world upside down. They begin to—naturally or culturally, depending on the perspective—take on more of the childcare and domestic tasks required for family life. Their careers get pushed to the margins, and they are ground down by boring Sisyphean tasks like laundry and carpools. They feel unappreciated, and communication about it seems to lead nowhere. One day, they look up and realize they don’t recognize the person they’ve become. 

In 1991, Wendell Berry described the vision of marriage that seems to be alive and well in the divorce memoir trend:

Marriage, in what is evidently its most popular version, is now on the one hand an intimate “relationship” involving (ideally) two successful careerists in the same bed, and on the other hand a sort of private political system in which rights and interests must be constantly asserted and defended. Marriage, in other words, has now taken the form of divorce: a prolonged and impassioned negotiation as to how things shall be divided.

Berry names a fatal flaw in modern marriage, but it is tied to another: the view of children as merely incidental add-ons, to be gotten (or disposed of early on) at the whim of the spouses. The problematic nature of this approach is myriad; but one practical issue is its false idea that bringing a child into a family involves the equivalent of simply adding in one more set of tasks to be negotiated. Taking out the trash or doing the dishes lend themselves to being divvied up on a spreadsheet; pregnancy, nursing, and being the listening ear for a sick child who “just wants mommy” or “just wants daddy” do not. 

Children introduce not only new tasks but a new dimension to marriage—usually one that demands far more self-sacrifice than two competent people with independently busy lives have had to engage in before. This seems to come as a surprise to many of the popular divorce memoirists, whose inability to feel fully themselves appears tied to the need to give up quite a bit in service of marriage and family. They feel that if they need to sacrifice, men do too—and in the same way. 

Popular culture both shapes and is shaped by its own expectations. For many decades, we’ve been talking about how men and women are the same, and most of these women have found that to be generally true when it comes to intellectual careers. Berry’s description of marriage “involving (ideally) two successful careerists in the same bed” works—right up until it doesn’t, usually when children and their needs get added to the mix. Spreading one’s limited time and energy between maintaining a marriage, caring for children, and continuing to pursue a demanding career seems to put a lot of couples on thin ice prone to cracking. 

An alternative to the “private political system” vision of marriage comes from the Code of Canon Law: “a man and a woman establish between themselves a partnership of their whole life.” This partnership of the whole life is not only “ordered by its nature to the good of the spouses” but also toward “the procreation and education of offspring.” While each spouse may take on different roles, tasks, and financial burdens, each of these serve the family as a whole. This hardly seems patriarchal, since the father of the family is no more serving himself than the mother is herself.

If divorce is a social contagion, perhaps stronger marriages can serve as an antidote. As Berry writes, “There are . . . still some married couples who understand themselves as belonging to their marriage, to each other, and to their children. What they have they have in common, and so, to them, helping each other does not seem merely to damage their ability to compete against each other. To them, ‘mine’ is not so powerful or necessary a pronoun as ‘ours.’” 

The post Why Are Divorce Memoirs Trending? appeared first on First Things.

The broader question of reproductive technologies like in vitro fertilization (IVF) creates real tension within the Christian and pro-life communities. Just last week, the Trump administration announced initiatives to make fertility treatments more affordable, including a deal to reduce the cost of IVF drugs. While our culture often insists that children are burdensome, Christians must continue to resist that narrative. We recognize that raising children is one of life’s greatest blessings and affirm that life begins at conception; that each human being bears a soul before being fully knit together in the mother’s womb. Yet within the pro-life movement, debate continues over which technologies align with biblical ethics. IVF has allowed many couples to have biological children when they otherwise could not, but it also raises deep moral and theological concerns.

Millions of embryos—human lives—are now frozen in storage around the world, often referred to as “babies on ice.” The process of creating and selecting embryos introduces troubling ethical issues: Embryos are often genetically screened and discarded or indefinitely frozen. Even the collection of sperm and eggs involves morally and medically questionable practices. IVF severs the intrinsic connection between marital intimacy and procreation, reducing conception to a laboratory procedure, and ultimately, to the commodification of human life itself.

In the United States, IVF operates with minimal federal oversight compared to nations like the United Kingdom, where every clinic is licensed and monitored by the Human Fertilisation and Embryology Authority. By contrast, U.S. fertility centers are largely self-regulated; about 10 percent fail to report outcomes to the CDC, and there are no federal limits on the number of embryos created, frozen, or discarded in the process. This lack of oversight only compounds the ethical problems, opening the door for further exploitation.

The prospect of turning ordinary skin cells into eggs, and eventually into embryos, takes this one step further. It transforms human life into a product that can be easily created, bought, and sold. Such technologies, rather than dignifying life, further commodify it and deepen the fractures in marriages, family, and society.

While the administration’s intent to make family-building more accessible may appear aligned with pro-family values, it also exposes a deep inconsistency. One cannot champion life while simultaneously embracing practices that bring about its destruction at the earliest stage. This moment invites Christians to consider what it means to be fully pro-life, where conviction outweighs convenience.

It is tempting for Christians to celebrate any policy framed as “pro-family.” Yet Scripture reminds us that children are not manufactured goods but divine gifts. “Children are a heritage from the Lord, the fruit of the womb a reward” (Psalm 127:3). God’s design for family life is not arbitrary; it reflects his character and the relational nature. From Genesis onward, we see that human life springs from the union of man and woman; a creative partnership that mirrors the image of God himself (Gen. 1:27–28). Technologies that bypass or distort that design risk placing human ambition above God’s thoughtful design.

The White House’s announcement should prompt sober reflection among Christians, even those who have long supported this administration. To be pro-life means to defend human dignity at every stage and in every context, even when it challenges our preferred political leaders. We can celebrate the desire to support families while refusing to accept the destruction of embryos as a price of convenience.

This is a moment for the church to model integrity; to affirm good where it exists, to call out what is wrong, and to remember that our ultimate allegiance is to the Author of life himself. As James 1:17 reminds us, “Every good and perfect gift is from above.” Children are not owed to us; they are entrusted to us. To pursue parenthood apart from the moral order God established is to confuse gift with entitlement, creation with control.

The post Children Are Gifts, Not Products appeared first on First Things.

As the ad kicks off, a few of its youngest actors—plus the episode’s guest host, comedian Dan Levy—glare suggestively at the camera, removing jackets and inhibitions as smooth background music sets a frisky tone.

“Are you bored?” asks one actor. “Looking for something to spice up your life?” coos another. “You used to want sex,” a third declares, twirling on his unmade bed, “but you’re in your late thirties now . . .” “And sex isn’t really doing it for me anymore,” says another. “You need something new.” “Something exciting!” “I need a new fantasy.”

And that new fantasy, it is soon revealed, is Zillow. The smooth music grows smoother as the actors scroll through America’s most popular real estate website, excitedly muttering sweet nothings, like “an updated colonial with mature landscaping,” as if they are looking at pornography.

Because, in truth, they were: The joke worked because Zillow—which, according to some statistics, enjoys a mind-boggling 227 million monthly users—has become the place many Americans go these days to escape into sordid daydreams of different lives and instant gratifications. And daydreams they mostly are. Although the website was started to help people rent, buy, or sell homes, data suggests that 83 percent of all of Zillow’s users surf the site with no intention of engaging in any transaction whatsoever. All they want to do is gawk at that ranch-style house on 1.3 acres in a good school district with a finished basement and a nice backyard and imagine that maybe they, too, could one day wake up in a place as nice as that. 

What does this real estate obsession mean? Sure, it’s the rare human who wouldn’t gladly trade a small and plain abode for a roomier, prettier one. But spending minutes—or hours—every day thumbing through hundreds of photos of homes you could never afford in towns you would never call home is a curious new phenomenon, one suggesting that the fault isn’t in our studio apartments but in ourselves. We ogle houses because what we want is a home, which is much less about price per square foot and much more about a life worth living. 

Just ask Scott Harris. One of New York City’s most celebrated real estate brokers, he spent more than two decades selling high-end property, the collective value of which surpasses the GDP of some nations. His interactions with Manhattanites desperate for more living space helped him forge an unorthodox—and sorely needed—understanding of what we really talk about when we talk about real estate. 

He collected his insights in a new and deeply moving book, The Pursuit of Home. It’s one part guide for anyone desiring to achieve the American dream of home ownership and one part spiritual meditation on our collective real estate obsession, why we so frequently let it cloud our judgment, and how we can learn and grow not only our square footage, but, more importantly, our souls. 

Real estate is the most concrete (no pun intended) of all industries. It deals with a finite number of units and buildings, not financial products or digital applications or other valuable objects whose earthly presence is more ephemeral. Harris acknowledges, of course, that the industry has its fair share of real-world problems that have little to do with how we feel or think about our homes. Nearly a third of the largest properties in America, he reminds us, are owned (and, alas, underutilized) by empty nesters, while growing families with children compete for fewer and fewer suitable units. Institutional investors, too, are playing their part to turn real estate into a blood sport. They currently own 10 percentof all apartments in America and were snatching up one in four single-family homes in 2023 alone, transforming us from a nation of homeowners rooted in their communities to a gaggle of renters living at the whims of a corporation. 

Rather than tackle these very real issues, however, Harris dives into constraints that are harder to spot in statistics but are much more ruinous when it comes to helping Americans settle into the homes of their dreams. Call it the Zillow mindset. “Just as technology has empowered us,” he writes,

it has further loosened the physical ties that bind us. We work remotely. We resign in droves and fan out across the country, trying out tiny houses or migrating from one short-term rental to the next. It is an odd juxtaposition. We spend more time in virtual fascination with real estate, even as every societal pillar that would support community-building—that is, the same conditions that support neighborhoods and real estate in general—moves in the opposite direction.

And that, Harris regrettably declares, is our own darn fault. The internet, he observes, has done to home ownership what pornography has done to human sexuality: take a magical, intricate, and layered pursuit built on trust and presence and long-term relationships and turn it into a frantic and futile search for fast, facile gratification that severely damages our ability to live rewarding lives in the real world.

Which is why the job of the real estate agent—at least, that is, a good one—has changed dramatically in the last twenty years. Circa 2000, “real estate agent” was the land shark prowling your neighborhood in search of properties about to go on the market, the go-getter who lived or died by being first to the deal. These days, to hear Harris tell it, the real estate agent is something much closer to a rabbi or a priest, first listening to the buyers’ or renters’ confessions and then helping them work through a thicket of sinful distractions until they find the home they truly want rather than the one they may simply—and erroneously—desire. 

Harris’s book is filled with joyous, almost spiritual conversions: stories of clients who walked into his office asking for one thing only to realize, many conversations and open houses later, that their initial request was the result of some profound personal misalignment, from struggling marriages to crippling competition with professional peers. With each passing year, the people who walked in through his door wanted what Zillow taught them they should want: bigger, newer, and better priced. Harris learned that it was up to him to remind them that the real estate they were about to buy isn’t just a collection of metrics—price per square foot and so forth, the sort that data algorithms so excel at processing and prioritizing. It will be their home, the basecamp of their lives, the place where they would be best served as they strive to love and heal and support each other and their loved ones. The perfect home has to suit not only their budgets but their beliefs. It turns out that in a Zillow-saturated world, this is a big and eye-opening realization for most people.

But educating Americans to become, quite literally, home-makers—people who think about what they truly value and then invest in homes that reflect these virtues—doesn’t just make for happier consumers. (Only half of all Americans, Harris reminds us, are currently satisfied with the homes they have bought; the rest have regrets about their dealings.) Home-making, as opposed to real estate dealing, makes for a happier nation, one made up of citizens who feel empowered, engaged, and tethered to the land and to each other. It makes the nation as a whole into our shared and precious home—not some ephemeral idea we can compare online to other options as we pine for a quick fix to all of our yearnings, but a messy, grounded, beloved, and utterly irreplaceable corner of the world that belongs to us. 

I commend to you Harris’s book. It should be required reading, not only for folks on the market, but for all of us who want to make America great again, one “sold” sign at a time. 

Image by Guy Kilroy, licensed via Creative Commons. Image cropped. 

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Yet statistics don’t reveal every truth. My own parents divorced soon after I was born. My mother remarried when I was five, which means that for most of my childhood and adolescence I had a stepfather, too. But he was as far from being an ogre as a man can be.

This stepfather was a man of astonishing good humor and steadiness, despite a life punctuated by many trials. He grew up in poverty on a primitive family farm. He lost his first wife to cancer early on. Decades of manual labor tested his endurance. But there was another test, the most formidable of all. He survived what 12,513 of his fellow American fighters did not: the eighty-two-day Battle of Okinawa during World War II, whose eightieth anniversary, like that of the end of World War II itself, is upon us this year.

The bloodiest battle of the Pacific theater, as well as the largest amphibious assault ever launched in that ocean and one of the largest of all time, Operation Iceberg began on April 1, 1945—which was also, that year, Easter Sunday. Lasting eighty-two days, it involved four U.S. Army and two Marine Corps divisions, a fleet of 1,300 American ships and 251 British naval aircraft, and a Commonwealth fleet including Australian, New Zealand, and Canadian ships and personnel. The Battle of Okinawa was also the occasion of the largest number of Japanese kamikaze, or suicide, attacks. More than twenty-six American ships were sunk in the waters around the island, and 168 severely damaged. Some 40 percent of the battle’s American casualties were sailors lost to those assaults.

Okinawa was “the most nightmarish experience of the entire Pacific war—over 12,500 soldiers and sailors killed, and the greatest number of combat fatigue cases ever recorded of a single American battle.” So writes Victor Davis Hanson in his introduction to With the Old Breed, a first-person account of the ground war in the Pacific by E. B. Sledge, a member of the 1st Marine Division. Suffering fifty thousand casualties during nearly three months of combat, the Allies fought a brutal, sometimes step-by-step war on the island, as the Japanese military withdrew into a labyrinth of caves and tunnels atop and within steep ridges. It was one of the fiercest battles of attrition in history.

My stepfather’s story does not appear in Tom Brokaw’s landmark 1998 tribute, The Greatest Generation, though it certainly could have. Without doubt, like the other subjects on whom Brokaw reported with such admiration, he was formed by the experience of World War II. But his story deserves sharing not only because, eighty years on, the war generation has almost vanished from the scene. Although I hardly knew it at the time, he also imparted without words a wider lesson about how to live with grace in a world so often full of tribulation—and sometimes outright evil. Now words are the only way left of honoring my late stepfather, whose circumspection about his war days I will observe posthumously by using his first name only: Roy. Or, as I knew him, Dad.

The future Private Roy was born three years before the crash, in 1926, in a hamlet at the northeast corner of Oneida County in Central New York, to a family of French-Canadian origin. He grew up in Steuben, another tiny town tucked under the Adirondacks. Named for Baron von Steuben, the Prussian officer appointed by George Washington to lead the Continental Army, this little village lies within the tract of 16,000 acres granted to the baron by the fledgling American government. His monument and tomb are a short drive from the now vanished little family farm where my stepfather grew up.

Dad’s mother, it was said, worked before her marriage as a maid at Kykuit, the Rockefeller family estate in the Hudson Valley. Her first husband died in the Spanish influenza of 1918, leaving her with two small boys; she married again a few years later and went on to have Dad, one more boy, and two girls. Dad’s mother and father spoke pidgin French, not English, and the children attended a one-room schoolhouse, still visible, albeit ancient, today. In deepest winter, my stepfather said, they would arrive there on snowshoes or homemade cross-country skis.

The farm lacked electricity for part of his childhood, and the landscape was topped with lake-effect snow for almost half the year. He and his brothers would arise at four o’clock and descend from their room in the attic to milk the family’s cows and feed whatever other animals were around. Their mother would come downstairs soon afterward, to make the day’s food from scratch, usually starting with johnnycakes, whose origins are traceable to the Pawtucket Indians. (His mother never did get used to mid-century technology. Later in life, convinced that since she could see the people on television, they could also see her, she would sit before it only if dressed in her Sunday best.) The family vehicle, during my stepfather’s early life, was a horse attached to a flatbed carriage; later they got a Model T. On Sundays, as a treat, the children would ride whatever transportation they had to a nearby town, often to pick up a new wheel of cheese. Dairy farming being the area’s main industry, family-run cheeseries were commonplace.

Dad’s family lived more like the frontiersmen of the nineteenth century than like twentieth-­century Americans. But no American of his age could escape the Second World War. And so, in April 1944—one day after his eighteenth birthday and less than a year from the first landings at Okinawa—a future Army infantryman showed up in Remsen, Central New York. According to his registration card, he was five feet eleven inches tall and weighed 157 pounds, with brown hair and gray eyes.

Private Roy enlisted on December 19, 1944. Following basic training, his unit was sent to Hawaii for more drilling, and finally on across the Pacific. In 82 Days on Okinawa, ­another first-person account, Army Colonel Art Shaw explains, “The army whipped us into line and turned us into killing machines in only thirteen weeks. Now we were all human torpedoes, butcher boys, gunmen.”

Many sources document the inferno that raged in 1945 on that island four hundred miles from mainland Japan. Crucible of Hell, by historian Saul David, delivers in its title the gist of these war stories. By some estimates, around three thousand people were being killed on Okinawa each day. Joseph Wheelan reports in Bloody Okinawa that on April 20 alone, the 27th Army Division—my Dad’s—lost 506 men, “the greatest one-day loss of the campaign by a division.” In all, a quarter of a million people perished on the spot known today as “Japan’s Island Paradise.” And staggering though their losses were to the Allies, Imperial Japan and the indigenous islanders under its control lost far more. More than 100,000 in the Japanese military were killed or committed suicide, as did a roughly equal number of Okinawan civilians.

Statistics alone cannot capture the savagery that became synonymous with Okinawa. Hundreds of thousands of soldiers armed with massive weaponry contested amid civilians on an island smaller than the city of San Antonio. The intense concentration of men and arms was also pounded throughout by nature, including heat, monsoons, and mud, as well as by miseries of infestation such as huge flies, bloated from feeding off bodies. The result was a relentlessly putrid, polluted war zone. As one sergeant observed of the deadly struggle over a rise nicknamed Sugar Loaf Hill, which cost the 6th Marine Division thousands of casualties: “We were fighting and sleeping in one vast ­cesspool. Mingled with that stench was another—the corrupt and corrupting odor of rotting human flesh.”

Horrors that didn’t have a name abounded. Here is Sledge after describing a scene in which enemy artillery shells pierced through soil and mud to upend newly buried Japanese corpses, ­scattering maggot-ridden body parts all over a band of American soldiers: “We didn’t talk about such things. They were too horrible and obscene even for hardened veterans. The conditions taxed the toughest I knew almost to the point of screaming. . . . [It was] preposterous to think that men could actually live and fight for days and nights on end under such terrible conditions and not be driven insane.”

Death loomed everywhere—underground, on the surface, in the skies. At sea, suicide planes and suicide boats menaced the Allies constantly. On land, American soldiers saw, and did, the barely imaginable. They poured napalm into caves full of holed-up Japanese fighters and ignited them with phosphorous grenades. They manned ­Sherman tanks that launched enormous spires of fuel, with a reach of up to eighty yards. “The flames couldn’t be put out before they were finished burning,” notes Shaw; thereby were some of the enemy roasted alive. Titanic artillery fire rocked the island day and night, even as much of the combat remained face-to-face, and at all hours, in bunkers, pill ­boxes, caves, and foxholes.

Some Japanese soldiers mutilated enemy ­­corpses. Some Americans desecrated bodies too, including by pulling katanas out of dead officers and keeping them as trophies. Nor was it only men in uniform who participated, willingly or no, in brutality. American troops watched in horror as native Okinawans, drilled in propaganda about American rape and murder, killed themselves pre-emptively by taking strychnine, or by strangling one ­another, or by jumping off cliffs into the sea; some also murdered their own families. Many thousands of Japanese soldiers died by suicide, especially during the last days of the war. Their methods of destruction were myriad: racing into American fire, falling onto a sword, being strangled by friends, or hugging grenades—a practice known as “poor man’s hara-kiri.”

So monstrous was the moral and human apocalypse of Okinawa that it proved a forcing crisis to two more acts of mass destruction. As death spread its dominion across land, sea, and air, President Harry Truman and his military withdrew their planned invasion of the home islands, rather than risk “Okinawa from one end of Japan to another,” as he put it. The cancellation of Operation Downfall undoubtedly saved the lives of hundreds of thousands, perhaps millions, of American soldiers (and Japanese soldiers, too). Its collateral damage was also fearsome, as two hundred thousand more lives—mostly civilians—were lost to atom bombs in Hiroshima and Nagasaki on August 6 and 9.

Even the end of the war itself, on September 2, 1945, could not erase the human devastation. For decades after the battle, reports Joseph Wheelan in Bloody Okinawa, farmers and construction workers routinely uncovered corpses still mired in the haunted soil. This was the netherworld that my stepfather, alongside his fellow soldiers and sailors and Marines and airmen, had entered on Easter Sunday 1945. Following the headlong plunge into death that was the Pacific Theater, peace descended just as suddenly, and to wild jubilation, as the war ended on September 2. Twelve million Americans in uniform returned home, and warriors were again made into family men. There was a marriage boom, and a baby boom, and picket fences were layered en masse, and speedily, over the trauma. One by one, Americans drained by the war turned away from Hades, and back to home and hearth. “For many [veterans],” as Brokaw observes, “the war years were enough adventure to last a lifetime.”

In this new domesticity, Dad’s life followed the script of the Greatest Generation. He returned to upstate New York in 1946 and married his high school sweetheart. In short order they had five children, including twin boys who would later be drafted during the war in Vietnam. For much of that time, the young veteran worked as a logger in Oregon, a region he particularly loved; he made a point of traveling to forty-eight of the fifty states, and he often told his children that Crater Lake was the most beautiful spot on earth. Following a fall from a redwood tree that broke several bones, ending his work as a lumberjack, he returned with his family to Central New York in the late 1950s—only to lose his first wife unexpectedly young, to cancer.

Sometime in the early 1960s, working as a handyman in a small nursing home near the hamlet where he grew up, this widower met my mother, a newly divorced nurse with two little girls. Two years later, they married, and they went on to have three more boys—including another set of twins, one of whom would become a career Marine. For the next three decades, my stepfather worked many jobs, often simultaneously, most of them blue-collar, scattered across a fifty-mile or so radius in rural Central New York—changing towns and hamlets as often as needed for work, or on a whim, or both, with my mother and their newly blended family.

Brokaw’s book speaks of the “self-reliance and gratitude” exhibited by the men he profiled. I would add, in my stepfather’s case, exceptional improvisation. Throughout the years, he worked variously, sometimes simultaneously, as an auto mechanic, carpenter, electrician, mason, bartender, and fix-it man. I have never known anyone as competent as he was with tools of every kind. When a back injury took him out of the heavy labor force for a year, he pivoted once more, and moved us to the upstairs of a historic, if dilapidated, tavern that he ran with my mother for a while on a defunct branch of the Erie Canal.

Adaptability, flagged by Brokaw as another characteristic of the war generation, was matched in my stepfather’s case by social energy, especially outdoors. At different times, he was an amateur stock car driver, a motorcycle enthusiast, a farm team baseball player, a square dance caller. For years he coached both my brothers’ Little League team and the softball team to which my sister and I belonged. He took all of us fishing in the region’s abundant lakes and creeks, and if we didn’t learn patience from him, it wasn’t for want of example; no one was ever more content to stand by water’s edge for hours on end, waiting. Like most men in the region, he also hunted occasionally—but only if he kept the kill for food. It was said that the former Private Roy was an exceptional shot.

He was a man’s man, in the best sense, with infectious confidence, a favorite among his peers in an age when manliness was prized. Even in explosive situations, he maintained an epic cool. Once, when a local boy stepped out of line with one of his kids, Dad called the offender and his father into our kitchen as I hid around a corner, watching. As the nervous, unwilling guests entered, my stepfather took his Buck hunting knife from its sheath, placed it on the table with no explanation, and informed them both in a low voice that there would be no more transgressions. And there weren’t. (This scene, buried in memory for decades, resurfaced only recently, when I first heard Rodney Atkins’ popular country song, “Cleaning This Gun”—which makes the same point.)

Like his fellow veterans, my stepfather’s postwar course, and my mother’s, too, were worlds removed from the collapse of American community described in Robert Putnam’s 2000 study, Bowling Alone. Though we moved ­often—nine times in thirteen years—my parents were popular in every village and town where we landed, and they ran in convivial circles. Since most families in that time and place couldn’t afford babysitters, the adults’ social life was ours, too. Card games like pitch, poker, hearts, and rummy, played with rotating family and friends of all ages, took us through long winter evenings. Cigarette smoke was everywhere, a toxic if indisputably common bond. Johnny Cash eight-track tapes ruled in the car. Church was another constant of the landscape, wherever we were; my brothers were altar boys, my sister and I sang in choirs. We also marched in a drum and bugle corps that paraded through quaint tiny towns.

In summertime, like other local families, we were regulars at “field days”—open-air festivals of rides and carnival games by day that turned, by night, into dancing and drinking marathons. And though other kids sometimes dreaded the evening hours, especially those whose fathers or stepfathers were drunks, our clan never had to worry. Thanks to Dad, we were always safe.

“They were proud of what they accomplished,” writes Brokaw of the veterans, “but they rarely discussed their experiences, even with each other.” Neither did my stepfather, for the most part, so the handful of exceptions bear mentioning.

One was a story about that training time in Hawaii, as he prepared with thousands of his brothers in arms to ship out. Toward the end, he told me, soldiers were granted some free time, as a break before heading off to war. Most of the guys he knew spent those unsupervised days and nights as one would expect—drinking, gambling, chasing girls. But for some reason he never offered, maybe because it couldn’t be explained, Dad chose to devote his leave time to something else: optional extra lessons in hand-to-hand combat, from an Army veteran in Hawaii who offered them on the side. Those lessons, he believed, saved his life in the foxholes to come.

He was wounded in Okinawa, lightly, three times—twice by shrapnel and once by a bullet that passed clean through his hand. Despite that, only one physical “tell” of the war’s trials remained for the rest of his life. Days spent in wet foxholes led to jungle rot, which in turn morphed into chronic psoriasis on the soles of his feet. They were excruciatingly sensitive, and everyone at home and work knew not to pass near them, even when they were protected in the thickest of steel-toe work boots.

In other ways, my stepfather departed from the generational script. Historian Allan Nevins asserted famously in 1946 that “probably in all our history has no foe been so detested as were the Japanese.” Yet oddly enough, and despite Okinawa, one would not have known this from listening to Dad. He made the point that he admired the discipline and courage of the Japanese soldiers—and he volunteered that he never took a katana out of any dead fighters, from respect. In 1980, when the televised version of James Clavell’s Shogun, a drama about Imperial Japan, became a massive hit, I gave him a copy of the book because of his fascination with things Japanese. Dad’s last grade of education was ninth. It was the only volume I ever knew him to read all the way through.

Dad also diverged on another point. Though the postwar years were marked by a religious boom that persisted into the 1960s, he bucked this trend. To be sure, he was nothing if not Catholic; he did not lean toward any other sect, and he believed, and imparted, that the Church taught truth. But rarely did he attend Mass. (Neither, for many years, did my divorced mother, until being granted an annulment.) By way of explanation, he would only say cryptically that he and God—I am quoting from indelible memory here—had “come to an agreement in a foxhole.” Even so, he saw to it that the children of the house attended regularly, including on holy days of obligation, and that we participated in parish life as well.

Like any child, I took the status quo of our household for granted, including its religious ­paradigm—in our case, that kids go to church and that parents who don’t will nevertheless insist on Catholic rules. Not until many years later would I realize how far from normal our family’s religious regimen was.

Though individual experiences were downplayed by adults of that time, the war itself was hardly omerta—far from it. Many of my parents’ friends were veterans. Though I don’t know of any who survived alongside my Dad, I do recall one who’d served in the European theater showing hushed respect in his presence, shaking his head gravely on hearing that word, “Okinawa.” Even so, my stepfather exhibited no visible signs of trauma; he was neither a brute, nor an addict, nor a recluse. A rare exception to his calm broke through in the early 1970s, when my mother reported his suffering a few intense episodes of hallucinatory night terrors. During them, he was insensible to all else for some long minutes, she said. The script was the same each time: sitting up suddenly in the dark, yelling the names of men she’d never heard of before, and begging those companions to “get up, get up!” Dad claimed no memory of these events. My mother believed, and she was surely right, that they were triggered by the drafting of his older two sons, one of whom had just been sent to Vietnam.

One last detail of war shared by my stepfather concerned his unit’s munitions bearer, known to us only as George. A black man, George was assigned to support services, including stretcher-bearing. (The U.S. Army would not officially integrate ­African-American soldiers into combat roles until 1948, when Truman signed an executive order mandating the desegregation of the armed forces. The last segregated units were not dissolved until 1954.) My stepfather always referred to George in admiring tones—in fact, “George” was the only name I recall his sharing with us from his war days. He mentioned more than once that George had courageously carried away wounded soldiers under enemy fire, and he told us—also more than once—that in his opinion, black American soldiers should have been fully armed and trained.

Though there’s no way of knowing for certain, that friendship under fire between my stepfather and George might just have had something to do with one other chapter of Dad’s postwar life—in some ways, the most remarkable of all.

In the mid-1970s, my stepfather settled into the longest-running of his many jobs: head mechanic at a “youth camp” tucked away in a sylvan corner of Oneida County. The bucolic phrase ­amounted to window-dressing for a minimum-security pre-prison of sorts for boys aged fourteen to seventeen, who had been sent up on various criminal charges. Most were from New York City, nearly all were fatherless, and a majority were brown or black. Too young for prison and too problematic for society, these young offenders were being held in “camp” for sentences of a year or so, in hopes of rehabilitation.

Some of the rural-born men charged with supervising these rejects of New York City held the kids in contempt—but not my stepfather. In another turn I took for granted as a child that in retrospect cries out for reflection, Dad became something else: the camp’s de facto mentor-in-chief, teaching not from the classrooms where campers were counseled by social workers with college diplomas, but instead in the garage, the place some boys seemed to like best of all. There, the practical skills he’d picked up through decades of varied work were imparted to willing campers. The list in full over the years can’t be captured here. But several of the boys whom my stepfather took under his wing, episodically signing them out of custody and into our homes for dinner, as a treat, remain vivid in memory.

One was Diamond, a small, scarred Puerto Rican boy from the Bronx. He was caught at the age of fourteen having stolen $4,000 worth of loot (about $23,000 today), to qualify for membership in the local gang. Diamond was quick to learn about engines, Dad reported. With no real home to go back to, he ended up staying longer than most in the camp and hence had extra time with my stepfather. One of the nights Diamond came to dinner, my mother surprised him with a cake for his fifteenth birthday. On seeing it, as I will never forget, this tough son of Gotham broke down crying like a toddler. No one had ever celebrated his birthday before. Eventually, Diamond returned to New York and worked as a mechanic for some years.

Another of my stepfather’s proteges was an ­African-American boy named Lloyd. Born and raised in Harlem, he was one of the few campers with no real criminal record. A fearful mama’s boy, by his own description, he was sent to camp for truancy after refusing to join the local gang, whose leader had threatened to break both his thumbs. My stepfather tutored this protege in tools, including how to use a chainsaw to fell trees. (Though as Lloyd pointed out in our house one afternoon, if he took that skill to Central Park, he’d be arrested again.) Humorous and outgoing, Lloyd was a family favorite, and he, too, stayed in touch for years after returning home.

Not all the campers fared well. Jed, a white boy from the Hudson Valley, whom my stepfather assessed as possibly the most skilled thief in all the institution, also hung around the garage. Shortly after being discharged, he was arrested again for something serious and sent on to real prison, not camp. Then there was Jimmy, a thin African-­American boy from Bedford-Stuyvesant, at that time one of the worst neighborhoods in all New York. Quiet and observant, with knife scars on his face, Jimmy shadowed my stepfather for months and was another sometime guest in our home. Dad thought Jimmy promising and talked to him, and about him, often. Then, the night after returning to the city, Jimmy was killed in a knife fight over a card game. Half a century later, Dad’s grief on hearing that news reverberates. One death too many, Jimmy’s end marked a close to the itinerant hospitality in our home of some of New York City’s spurned sons.

Early in the 1970s, some of the boys rioted, momentarily imperiling the extended property and its authorities. Throughout that day, fires were set in the main building and elsewhere, and c­ampers armed with improvised weapons roamed the grounds. Their ringleader, an imposing young man named Rico, entered the camp’s garage without permission along with several others, only to find my stepfather at his metal desk amid the camp’s vehicles. 

The potential for destruction in that moment must have been prodigious. Buses and trucks were on hand to be stolen or vandalized; tools could easily have turned into weapons; and all that stood between the boys and the garage was a single, ­unarmed man—Dad. As he told the story, a Western-­type standoff ensued in the garage that day. Rico surveyed the scene in silence for a few tense moments while his followers stood still, waiting for a sign. Finally, Rico ordered, “This is Roy’s place. Leave it alone.” And so the marauders did, rendering the garage the only major site left unmolested.

The shepherding of so many boys remains an extraordinary record of voluntary, unremunerated mentorship—the more so for Dad’s patent indifference to race, or color, at a time when indifference was anomalous. Nor did he seem perturbed by the unsavory circumstances that landed his charges upstate in the first place. On the contrary, he mixed the boys from time to time among his own wife and children—as effortlessly and as unconcernedly, one might say, as he mixed my sister and me with his own kids, along with the parade of neighbors and friends and other stray souls who came and went from our homes, wherever we were living at the moment.

My stepfather likely never encountered the Jesuit motto, “a man for others.” He just lived it. At eighty-six years old and in his right mind, as ever, he took himself off dialysis, knowing the decision would end his life within weeks. He filled those remaining hours surrounded by family and friends. A few days before dying, he had breakfast with an old buddy and told him with a grin, “Vinnie, this is it! This week I’m going to heaven.” No one listening had a dry eye. Except Dad, unflappable as usual.

Not long ago, I read for the first time J. Glenn Gray’s classic 1959 study of the psychology of combat, The Warriors: Reflections on Men in Battle. I was especially taken by the author’s thoughts on what he calls the “ache of guilt” carried by soldiers after war. That ache, Gray observes, has far-reaching consequences. Some men are driven mad by what war has made them do. Others follow a different route toward oblivion, and long for death themselves. Still others escape by throwing themselves into sensualism, a life of distracting pleasures. In measuring those possibilities against my dad, I find that none fit the bill. But there was one other response remaining on the list.

If a soldier is strong enough, says Gray, “Atonement will become for him not an act of faith or a deed, but a life, a life devoted to strengthening the bonds between men and between man and nature.” I thought back to Brokaw’s book about my Dad’s generation. Atonement: That word goes missing in action from the Greatest Generation narrative. Yet it might, in the end, help to explain not only my stepfather’s vibrant postwar years, but by extension, those of the many other souls scarred in the Second World War whose lives became so justly admired.

After all, with atonement comes grace; and grace, more than any other factor, is surely the invisible filament binding together the pages of my stepfather’s story—a grace that appears even to have pierced some of those around him, protecting them against harmful rays of the age. Because of Dad, small knots of working-class people and their kids found genuine community. Because of him, some thrown-away boys, abandoned by everyone else, had a shot at rejoining society. Because of him, a single mother gained a second chance at marriage and family; and two girls who weren’t even his, one of them this author, would dodge the grim arithmetic of a ruptured home and know a father’s steadfast love.

What, besides grace, can make sense of Roy’s life? Somehow, inexplicably, this rural white man of his time remained completely ­untainted by racial prejudice. Somehow, just as unlikely, boys intent on violence one day passed him by. ­Somehow, mirabile dictu, a bunch of kids whose parents didn’t attend church were raised ­Catholic. And somehow, a soldier who suffered and took part in one of the grisliest battles on modern ­record retained not only a lifelong respect for his enemy, but in the end, a certainty about his own reward.

With all due appreciation for Tom Brokaw, The Greatest Generation misses something essential. Maybe the remarkable accomplishments of yesteryear’s veterans, many as unknown to the larger public as my Dad’s, were driven in part by something unseen. That supernatural evil has a hand in the destruction known as war has never been hard to entertain. Less visible is something we’re told is also true: that where sin abounds, grace may come to abound more.

Neither I nor most of those reading this have served in combat or been driven to kill—let alone been part of an annihilation like the Battle of Okinawa. But all of us, in the community of sinners, are just as much in need of atonement and charity as were the soldiers described by Gray. And maybe that is the final lesson left by the Greatest Generation, a lesson that soars beyond the war years, and the postwar years, into eternity: ­Only love, and love’s propitiation, make possible for any of us a shot at that ultimate victory, redemption.

The post Finding Private Roy  appeared first on First Things.

The Catholic view used to be, well, catholic. Martin Luther and John Calvin regarded contraceptive sexual acts as a grave moral sin; this was the universal Christian position until the 1930 Lambeth Conference, at which Anglican leaders gave their official opinion that contraception was not in all cases sinful. Other denominations quickly followed. But though Protestants on the whole have left behind contraception as a moral issue, a growing number of Protestant women have begun to reject the pill. I interviewed three who are discovering more than Natural Family Planning—they are discovering an embodied faith.

Kelsey Meyers, twenty-five, is a new wife, mom, and lawyer who attends an Anglican church in Washington, D.C., with her husband and infant son. We both fed our babies as we talked on the phone.

Kelsey had been prescribed the birth control pill as a treatment for hormonal acne when she was in high school, and again later when she approached her doctor with symptoms of polycystic ovarian syndrome. But she didn’t like how the pill made her feel, and it didn’t seem to address her symptoms. “Every time I came with an issue, that was the Band-Aid solution that they slapped on it.”

Kelsey’s experience isn’t unique. Women are prescribed hormonal birth control for many issues: acne, mood swings, irregular or painful or heavy periods. In the United States, hormonal birth control is prescribed to girls as young as eleven, and there are neither federal age restrictions for its use nor longitudinal studies of its effects on girls who have yet to undergo puberty.

Once she got engaged, Kelsey researched alternatives to hormonal contraceptives. Catholic friends encouraged her to read Taking Charge of Your Fertility by Toni Weschler and The Genesis of Gender by ­Abigail Favale. Kelsey began to use the Tempdrop fertility tracker, which uses basal body temperature to track ovulation. She felt that it helped her better understand her body, including some of the symptoms for which she had approached her doctors. “I kind of came to realize that a lot of these things that doctors had told me were wrong with my body, like these longer periods and these longer cycles, were actually just my body operating normally.”

Kelsey began to question the morality of contraception. Whereas Catholics have a well-developed teaching on marriage and sex, including a prohibition on all forms of contraception, the nondenominational Protestant churches in which Kelsey grew up never taught on contraception. Across Protestant churches and denominations, there exists little to no engagement with the morality of contraception or with the Catholic arguments against it. “I would just love to see more Protestant women discussing what a consistent ethic with this is,” Kelsey told me. “I don’t have a consistent theology right now behind it. I’m still learning. But having the conversation is important.”

Chaney Gooley, thirty-­three, is one of the few Protestant women I know who refused the use of contraception on almost purely theological grounds. She attends an Anglican church in Alexandria, Virginia, with her husband. But like Kelsey, she first began questioning the morality of contraception due to questions about health: not for herself, but for her future baby.

Through her volunteer work with a pro-life sidewalk ministry, Chaney learned about the potential abortifacient effects of hormonal birth control methods, including the pill. “I would never want to do anything to cause a baby to not have the nutrients it needs to implant in my womb,” she told me on the phone as I watched my children play in the front yard on a warm afternoon in March.

Birth control pills and IUDs work in three main ways to prevent pregnancy: a primary means and two secondary backups. First, they suppress the hormone that triggers ovulation, reducing the likelihood that an egg will be released. Second, in the event of “breakthrough ovulation,” they thicken the cervical mucus that carries the sperm to the egg, providing a physical barrier. Finally, as a fail-safe, they thin the lining of the uterine wall to prevent the implantation of a fertilized egg. “In moral philosophy, that’s an abortion,” Jefferies told me. Breakthrough ovulation—the release of an egg despite the use of ­hormonal birth control—varies in ­frequency from woman to woman. Nearly half of all women on the mini-pill (a ­progestin-only pill) continue to ovulate. Breakthrough ovulation is somewhat less frequent in other forms of hormonal contraception, but women who use it while sexually active for several years are likely to have at least one instance of breakthrough ovulation.

Most pro-life women don’t ­realize the potential abortifacient effects of hormonal birth control. This is partly because medical experts have changed the definition of “pregnancy.” In 1965, roughly concurrent with the development of the pill and the IUD, the American College of Obstetricians and Gynecologists updated its definition of “pregnancy,” which was now said to begin at implantation rather than fertilization. Hormonal contraceptives were therefore classified as birth control rather than abortifacients. Previously, in medical and lay contexts alike, pregnancy had been understood to begin at fertilization, the moment when a unique organism is created. Just a dozen years before the change in definition, Watson, Crick, and Franklin’s identification of DNA as the chemical signature of a unique living being had brought new insight ­into that moment of beginning. The change in definition denied a reality that was being understood with greater exactness every year.

Chaney also takes issue with the way hormonal contraception ­changes the female body. She calls it “antifeminist” to make women’s bodies “more like the male body”—that is, unable to conceive. She thinks that fertility cycle charting should be taught to girls as they enter puberty, to foster “body literacy.” And as a woman with endometriosis, she believes that Natural Family Planning can help diagnose reproductive diseases earlier. (Endometriosis, a known cause of infertility, takes on average seven to nine years to diagnose, despite affecting 10 to 15 percent of women of reproductive age. Symptoms of endometriosis are most often treated with the pill, despite the fact that it does not cure or even curb the underlying condition.)

In addition to gaining a better understanding of her body as God created it, Chaney has realized that there is “a deeper spiritual meaning to keeping the unitive and the procreative purposes of sex united”: She and her husband practice continence during her fertile window when they prefer not to conceive, yet they leave open the possibility of children when they do come together. She compared the marital act to participation in Eucharistic union with Christ: “We are to take and eat and to be united with him, and whether we believe that’s symbolic or literal or somewhere in between, there’s a very real sense in which he has given himself to us on the marriage bed of the cross.”

Ben Jefferies, like ­many Protestants I’ve talked to, found his way into thinking about contraception through the writings of Pope John Paul II, which he praises for expressing a poetic and poignant view of marriage, despite “being written by a chaste man who was never married.”

Though the Anglican Communion broke with the broader Church’s position on contraception at its Lambeth Conference in 1930, Jefferies reads its resolutions as more aligned with historic Christian teaching than most modern Anglicans do. He reads them as explicitly sanctioning only condoms (since hormonal methods did not yet exist), and only when there is, in his words, a “clearly felt moral obligation to limit or avoid parenthood and . . . a morally sound reason for avoiding complete abstinence.” (Interestingly, Jefferies’s reading of the Lambeth Resolutions on contraception is similar to the stance recommended for the Catholic Church by the Pontifical Commission on Birth Control in the 1960s.) Though ­Jefferies thinks there are times in the lives of many married couples when both of these provisions are met, he explains that those times are few, and that abstinence (perhaps paired with a fertility awareness–based method) is the ­only licit means for Christians to avoid conception at all other times.

In defense of his pastoral allowance for the use of barrier methods when circumstances warrant, ­Jefferies told me that he believes that Pope John Paul II’s phenomenological interpretation of the body does not take “sufficient account for the degree of depth to which things have become broken and muddied by the Fall.” He mentioned specifically the emotional, financial, and health implications of a couple’s having a child “every twelve to eighteen months for a twenty-year window,” which may be the ideal in a perfect world but quite difficult to achieve in our fallen state.

He thinks the Lambeth approach of permitting certain contraceptive methods in some cases at some times is more fitting. “I do sometimes wish that we had a stronger magisterium,” he told me. But he regards “trusting the Holy Spirit to be the teacher” as a more patient and persuasive pedagogy, “so the actual pastoral outcome is comparable or better to what the Roman Catholic Church is getting with their ironclad magisterium.”

Brooks Anderson is a forty-­five-year-old birth doula, graduate student, and “not-so-stay-at-home stay-at-home mom” to five children in Albuquerque, New Mexico, where she and her family attend a Presbyterian church. She and her husband have primarily used Natural Family Planning for the nineteen years of their marriage. Her youngest child was born when she was forty-three.

Brooks is the eldest of eight living children. Her parents were influenced by the Quiverfull movement, which teaches that because children are a blessing from the Lord, Christians should try to have as many as possible. Brooks remembers with awe her mom’s pregnancies and births, which impressed her with the miraculousness of the female body.

Brooks fondly described watching her younger sister’s birth when she was six years old. “The doctor put gloves on me and let me feel the placenta and explained how a baby lives and the way that God designed it.” For one of her brother’s births, she cut the umbilical cord. She remembered less fondly her mom’s last pregnancy, at forty-four, when Brooks was a junior in college: “You can’t get away from knowing that your parents are still having sex because there’s your mom, waddling around campus.”

Brooks witnessed five of her seven siblings’ births, including the ones that nearly claimed her mother’s life. Brooks’s parents’ theology has shaped her. But so has the difficulty of her mother’s pregnancies. “I really resented [that] my parents [kept] having children” despite her mother’s rare blood disorder and severe morning sickness. “I was like, ‘I’m not going to do this to myself, right? I’m going to respect myself.’”

She recalls writing a college paper on the question of whether Christians should use birth control, and in the course of writing she encountered Catholic theology of the body. She also learned about the negative effects of hormonal birth control on the female body. Though she ultimately rejected her parents’ maximalist Quiverfull approach, she realized that whether or not to use birth control was a question that merited prayerful consideration. A few years later, she discovered Natural Family Planning, and she came to appreciate the way it honored both the female body and God’s design for marriage and children.

She reflects with satisfaction on the times in her marriage when she and her husband used NFP: “We were not holding sex in a controlling way over one another, and we were both taking our desire, fear, whatever to God individually.”

A 2020 study by the Catholic Medical Association shows a 58-percent decrease in the likelihood of divorce among couples who have used Natural Family Planning. Other studies show an even greater association between NFP and marriage stability. Whether that association is correlative or causal, Brooks emphasized the need of husband and wife to be equally yoked—to be on the same page about these things, and for neither to pressure the ­other—especially since NFP requires self-control in the form of periodic abstinence.

As her children vied for her attention on the playground, Brooks told me that she had never heard a pastor discuss contraception from the pulpit. “Everything that I had always been taught had been geared towards me as a woman, like you submit to your husband. You don’t say no to sex. Don’t deny your ­husband. You make yourself available. It was never taught from a place of mutual responsibility and mutual honor.”

She contrasted that messaging with advice she heard from a Catholic priest: When looking for a spouse, look for someone with self-control, the ability to fast, because such a person “will be able to do hard things that will be necessary in marriage.” Brooks elaborates: “If you truly do Natural Family Planning, you have to say no to your own desires at times . . . and recognize that denying ourselves draws us closer to God.”

It may seem implausible that something as private and, well, human as a menstrual cycle could draw a woman into a deeper relationship with God, with her husband, with her own body. It’s no surprise that Jefferies’s tracts on contraception keep going missing. Many Christians prefer to keep God out of the bedroom. But Christians believe that Jesus submitted himself to the confines of a womb, a womb that underwent the same physical changes some Protestant women are beginning to embrace as part of their embodied faith. And as Chaney told me, it’s hard to keep God out of the bedroom when you keep a crucifix above your bed.

The post Protestants Against the Pill appeared first on First Things.

These authors are all onto something: Pace Gordon Gekko, greed is not “good.” The American workplace has encroached ever more on the time of its employees. This is particularly true among white-collar, especially salaried, professionals: The “forty-hour workweek” became something for blue-collar types that watched the clock and didn’t demonstrate “commitment” to their careers, something these “professionals” would not do. They worked into the night, on weekends. The growing divide between the doing and the thinking classes exacerbated that chasm.

Covid shutdowns had some effect on mitigating that trajectory. Many people discovered two things: Work did not have to be a time-Minotaur, and there were other things in their lives (like what their children were being taught) that, thanks to their more flexible hours, they could now pay attention to—and should have been paying attention to. Currently, there appears to be conflicting tension among three things: a growing employer push to “get back to the office”; a pushback by (not just) some employees against going back to pre-pandemic time demand creeps; and instability from the current economy and job market.

The relationship between work and time goes back a long way in American labor. One of the first achievements of the U.S. labor movement in the nineteenth century was the forty-hour workweek, the first taming of “greedy work” by limiting it to roughly one-third of an employee’s life. That attainment should not be marginalized as a “working-class” thing.  

But the work/time problem persists, and not just in the form of “back-to-the-office” versus “flex time/hybrid workplace” conflicts. We need to broaden our aperture when it comes to talking about “time,” expanding it to a “whole career/employment lifetime” perspective.

Regarding America’s fertility implosion and aging demographics, some think expanding state-subsidized childcare is the solution. That “remedy,” however, assumes the economic factors impinging on family life—including work hours, two-earner families, and career paths that still often do not account for children—should remain undisturbed. American Compass recently commented that the people most directly touched by this state of affairs—young families, especially mothers—do not want more government childcare as much as time off without penalty to be with at least their youngest children. Other pro-family scholars (such as Brad Wilcox and Tim Carney) concur. The question becomes: Which is the “problem,” our economic model, or our kids?  

The earlier scholars got close to this idea but failed to draw conclusions. Goldin seems to have seen “greedy work” as the cause of sex-based pay disparities. Hochschild’s book’s subtitle also got close to the reality: “When Work Becomes Home and Home Becomes Work.”  

But what many do not recognize is that “time” is not just a question of hours per week. It’s also time during life: time when making and progressing in one’s career conflicts with time making and raising a family. As a stable middle-class life became increasingly dependent on a family having two wage earners, women particularly have discovered that they were sold a false bill of goods in the slogan “women can have it all.”

Laissez-faire economists, libertarians, and radical individualists all combine to dismiss, in practice if not theory, family formation as something the economy should account for. They prefer to deem them “personal choices” that public policy should not necessarily “privilege.” And those who see no problem with an ever-expanding social welfare state offer expanded daycare rather than wrestle with the broader organizational model of our economy, especially when it comes to parents—particularly women—in it. Les extrêmes se touchent.

Neither economics nor “sacred markets” run on autopilot; they learn to adapt to policy choices made for non-economic (such as political or even human) reasons, like the forty-hour workweek. Sure, “productivity” in theory would rise if there was no cap on the workweek, but we concluded more than a century ago as a society that Ecclesiastes 3 was onto something: There is a time to work and a time to refrain from working.

Similarly, a wider lens on human time would make us reckon with the opportunity for a person to become a parent and exercise that parenthood vis-à-vis their offspring—at least in their most formative early years—is a social common good toward which our public policy choices should shape job paths and the socio-economic cultural expectations that undergird them. (They might also influence other economic and cultural expectations, such as the intrinsic value of a secure retirement as more than just a period before death minimized to ameliorate financial impact on the Social Security trust fund—but that’s another issue.)  

Modern medicine notwithstanding, there’s still validity in the Psalmist’s insight that a human’s time is “seventy years, or eighty for those who are strong” (90:10). Within those four score years is written what really matters in someone’s life. As many pundits have observed, no one lies on his deathbed lamenting, “I wish I put in more time on the job!”

The post Reclaiming Time from Work appeared first on First Things.

Orchid could only exist in an age where IVF is common (one in fifty American births) and used far beyond its original purpose as a remedy for infertility. American IVF has already offered parents around the globe the chance to choose the gender of their child (broadly illegal elsewhere). It enables commercial surrogacy, and it opens the door to mix-and-match gametes for three-parent families. But more than anything, it is the extreme extension of the idea that parents are their children’s authors, rather than the stewards of children received as a gift. 

Siddiqui has been clear that she hopes to see insurance cover embryo screening, and her analogies for her services suggest that she hopes it will become near universal, if not mandatory. When Siddiqui got criticism from parents grateful that they’d received children they wouldn’t have “chosen,” she shot back: “Trusting God doesn’t mean skipping the car seat. You still buckle your child in because protecting them is part of your job. The same is true for their genome. Hoping for the best is not the same as guarding them from preventable harm.”

It’s important to note first that Siddiqui is not offering CRISPR gene therapy, which could indeed snip out a sickle cell gene and spare a particular child pain. She is suggesting that parents protect themselves by selecting which of the children they’ve conceived that they feel most inclined to parent. Her product is not about curing, it is about choosing.  

Parents may have lost some of their antibodies to this pitch, however, if they do think of their children’s lives as entirely the parents’ fault. Extreme orthorexia during pregnancy, anxieties about attachment parenting after delivery, texting children throughout the school day all betray a fear that children are fragile, easy for parents to ruin. Some amateur (and professional) therapists encourage clients to look back to their parents to figure out how their bad parenting is to blame for present misfortune. 

The whole world is clamoring with the question: “Rabbi, who sinned, this man or his parents, that he was born blind?” Fewer and fewer parents can rest in the peace of hearing Christ’s answer: “Neither this man nor his parents sinned, but this happened so that the works of God would be displayed in him.” Each of us bears wounds, natural or spiritual, few of which have a clear genealogy of fault. To be a human person is to be exposed and permeable, to harm as well as healing. No parent (save Joachim and Anne, Mary and Joseph) will raise a sinless child. No child (save Jesus) has a sinless parent. 

But in a secular age, the best foil to Siddiqui’s pursuit of perfection may be economist Emily Oster. In her pregnancy guide, Expecting Better, Oster is upfront with her reader that she will not give a guide to eliminating risk. Driving risks to zero is impossible, and even getting them to the realistic minimum is rarely worth the parental sacrifice. As an economist, Oster is well aware of the 80–20 Pareto rule of thumb—that 80 percent of the desired result is often available with 20 percent of the effort. Focusing on the most manageable risks (such as knowing the signs of preeclampsia) provides moms with huge benefits. Chasing down the last little risks (defensively microwaving deli meat) provides a minimal risk reduction while being onerous. 

Parents should think about how they spend a non-zero risk budget. As a mother, I want to teach my children to balance prudence and trusting profligacy. It’s ok to extend yourself a little farther than you think you can reach. You can try hitting a note at the edge of your range at karaoke in front of your friends. You can go sit with a sick friend and sometimes bring the germs home to all of us for a miserable week. You can fall on your first swing on the monkey bars and probably be ok, but maybe break your arm. 

Whether your children have their genomes scrutinized or not, it’s hard to know, moment to moment, what talents they’ll be gifted. All we know for sure is that they (and us) are asked to spend them to the last. We want to meet Christ empty-handed, having let all the gifts that he has given us pass through our hands to wherever he directs them. 

I hope my children are healthy. I hope they are happy. I hope, most of all, that they are holy. I want better for each of them than I could author if I held them tightly.

The post Parents Are Not Their Children’s Authors appeared first on First Things.

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Marriage, as I argued, has always served a vital function: binding children to their biological mothers and fathers whenever possible. The government’s interest in marriage has never been about adult companionship. That is because the state generally has no interest in regulating when human relationships begin or end, whether that be a friendship or a romantic partnership. Marriage is the exception.

Why? Because the state’s interest in marriage has always been about creating a stable environment in which children can know and be raised by the two people who co-created them. That connection—biological, emotional, and societal—is not a private preference, but a public good.

The Supreme Court’s ruling in Obergefell v. Hodges redefined marriage into a genderless institution based primarily on adult desires and feelings. Against the backdrop of a Constitution that said nothing about this subject, the majority held that same-sex couples had a so-called constitutional right to marry, effectively erasing the longstanding understanding of marriage as child-centered. At the time, many marriage advocates warned that this shift would have profound consequences—not only for the institution of marriage, but for children themselves.

Regrettably, those warnings have proven true.

In the years since Obergefell, we’ve witnessed a legal and cultural shift away from the idea that children have a natural right to be raised by their biological mother and father. Marriage is increasingly seen as a contract between any two adults, untethered from procreation or sexual complementarity. Birth certificates have even been revised to remove references to mothers and fathers.

Parenthood is now determined in many jurisdictions by “intent” or contract rather than biology. Marriages are being entered into for a limited number of years, no matter the interests of children. A New York judge has even ruled that individuals involved in a throuple (a relationship between three people rather than two) should have the same legal protections as a married couple with no consideration of children’s best interests.

Most significantly, children are increasingly being brought into the world through practices that intentionally separate them from one or both biological parents, such as anonymous sperm or egg donation and commercial surrogacy. In other words, the law, influenced by Obergefell’s logic, now often prioritizes the desires of adults over the needs of children to know their mother and father.

These were not unforeseen developments. During oral arguments, Justice Alito asked whether redefining marriage would diminish the rationale that marriage exists to connect children with their biological parents. That question went unanswered. I argued that the state has a compelling interest in preserving the definition of marriage as one man and one woman—not to exclude anyone, but to affirm what marriage uniquely provides to society: a structure that recognizes the irreplaceable contributions of both mothers and fathers in their children’s lives.

The United States has paid a steep price for ignoring that truth about marriage. While many cultural impacts are at play, redefining marriage to focus on adult feelings rather than children’s needs has exacerbated several disturbing trends.

First, a historically low marriage rate: An all-time low of 46.8 percent of households were headed by a married couple in 2022. Second, a historically low birth rate: Live births decreased nearly 9 percent from 2014, the year before Obergefell was decided, to 2019, the year before Covid-19 decreased live births even further. Third, young people are increasingly confused about their identity: Americans aged eighteen to twenty-four who identify as transgender increased 422 percent from 2014 to 2023.

Additionally, we are seeing the consequences of intentionally creating people who will never know their biological mother and father. The overwhelming desire to be connected to one’s biological parents is evident in the 70 percent of donor-conceived adults who believe they have been harmed by not knowing the identity of a biological parent. Seventy-seven percent agree that a sperm or egg donor is “half of who I am,” and 86 percent believe that a biological parent’s information belongs to the adult child.

These are not abstract trends; they negatively impact children every day.

A just society must be willing to ask hard questions: not only, “What do adults want?” but, “What do children need?” Modern society frequently focuses on the wrong question. We must confront the reality that children need their mother and father, together, whenever possible.

This does not mean condemning those who raise children in other contexts, such as adoption or single parenthood when necessary. But the law should not be blind to what is optimal for children. Marriage, rightly understood, reflects that truth. It is not merely a symbol of affection or recognition. It is a social covenant that binds together the two halves of a child’s origin and affirms their right to be known and loved by both.

Obergefell may be the law, but it is not the end of the conversation. We must continue to advocate for an understanding of marriage that serves the common good, one that remembers that every child begins with a mother and a father, and that society has an obligation to support that connection wherever possible.

Same-sex marriage proponents promised that a ruling in their favor would not affect anyone else. That promise has been demonstrably false for children and those who have lost jobs, careers, and reputations for supporting marriage between one man and one woman. Let us re-center marriage where it belongs: not in validating adults, but in protecting children.

The post How <em>Obergefell</em> Harmed Children appeared first on First Things.

Household size dropped in the mass exodus to the suburbs, even as square footage grew. But recent polls indicate that after Covid, multigenerational living is on the rise. Daunted by a competitive job market and the skyrocketing cost of housing, many young Americans are opting to move back home, and even to start their own families while living with their parents. But others are doing so because they recognize the emotional and moral benefits of living with one’s extended family.

Typically, social conservatives have made it their business to defend the nuclear family—a mother, father, and their children—from threats posed by progressives, who would have us believe it is the fruit of an oppressive capitalist system and that it perpetuates “heteronormativity” and confining gender roles. According to Shina Shayesteh, the nuclear household model is fairly novel, becoming normative only after “the rise of the suburban development pattern in the latter half of the twentieth century.” Camille Paglia, in Vamps & Tramps, pins the excesses of identitarianism and lifestyle progressivism on the nuclear household model. The lack of historical precedent for the nuclear family and the renewed interest in multigenerational living ought to provoke conservatives to reevaluate their priorities in the culture wars.

In addition to saving money, multigenerational living allows parents to rely on relatives for childcare, and it guarantees elderly family members will be cared for. It is also healthier for children to grow up among numerous relatives spanning multiple generations. They’re able to draw from a deeper well of wisdom and experience, and feel more rooted to a particular culture and patrimony. They are thus more likely to develop a stable sense of identity. They acquire knowledge and life skills unavailable through formal schooling or extracurricular activities, let alone social media.

Paglia, who grew up in a tight-knit Italian family in upstate New York, laments the “sense of displacement and loneliness” that plagues most assimilated, upper-middle-class kids growing up in the suburbs with just their parents. “Two parents alone cannot possibly help you to understand the world,” she claims. She observes that her students from working-class backgrounds tend to have “stronger personalities” because “they have a sense of their place in the universe,” thanks to their extended family members who prized family bonds over upward mobility. 

The multigenerational household also diffuses certain psychological tensions. Parents worn down from disciplining their kids can count on their own parents for advice. Kids who are annoyed by their parents can turn to their more lenient grandpa. Spouses who are getting on each other’s nerves can blow off steam with other adults in the house. The “isolated unit” of the nuclear household, however, “is claustrophobic and psychologically unstable,” says Paglia. It is “seething with frustrations and tensions.” The nuclear household is a “crucible for Freudian neurosis” that inculcates children into solipsism.

It is typically her students from more affluent, nuclear households that are “taking antidepressants and throwing themselves out of windows,” or who struggle with “all kinds of sexual issues.” It was such students “who most spout the party line” of progressive platitudes, their “grisly hyperemotionalism” satisfying their “hunger for meaningful experience outside their eventless upbringing. In the absence of war, invent one.” 

On my first day of orientation as a college freshman, I was initiated into the sacred rite of checking my white privilege at the door. It was startling because I had always thought of “white people” as the “medigans” who weren’t “cultured” like the Greeks and Italians in my family were. If anything, my most tangible privilege—more so than my perceived race—was growing up in a financially stable family. But I’ve come to realize that my greatest privilege was growing up in close proximity to extended family members. 

This not only shaped my sense of identity; it made me excited to live life. Learning from my grandparents’ stories, taking them out and about, and eventually caring for them at the end of their lives became a source of pride for me. It was fulfilling in a way that occasionally visiting one’s grandparents could never be.

The photojournalist Chris Arnade once wrote about meeting a young Mexican-American woman in Los Angeles who decided to attend her local community college instead of pursuing a more prestigious education: “I need to stay here because I’m my mother’s translator.” Arnade notes that those living on America’s “front row” tend to value measurable virtues like resume-building and have few qualms about leaving their family to pursue work opportunities. Many on America’s “back row,” on the other hand, are less inclined to “give up the non-material forms of meaning like place, family, and faith.” 

Indeed, many see foregoing career opportunities in the name of living near family members as a mark of immaturity or selfishness. A fully formed adult ought to be prepared to sacrifice in order to live a successful, independent life. While the specter of the emotionally underdeveloped man-child mooching off his parents looms large, we should reject the idea that valuing proximity to one’s family is merely a sign of one’s failure to launch. In a culture that has severed nearly all tradition, conservatives would do better to set their eyes on defending the dignity of the multigenerational family.

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