Katy Vs. Her Ovaries - Babies and God

I used to think that having a baby must be the closest manifestation of God that a human can experience on earth. The idea that I could (theoretically) create a person, carry them in my womb, and then deliver them into this world used to assure me that there was something bigger at work in this universe than I could conceptualize. I used to think having children was a miracle that God controlled. I assume by now you've noted the past tense of the first three sentences. I used to.

My thoughts about God and babies are very different now. The past two years have allowed (forced?) me to view having kids from a much more scientific, much less miraculous filter. It’s not just my struggle to get pregnant that has jaded me. In the midst of not being pregnant month after month after month, I have paid a lot more attention to who is getting pregnant.

Case in point, Michelle Duggar’s reality TV show is currently exploring her attempt to have her twentieth child. I know. I know. The Duggar’s are not the folks to use as evidence against God’s role in pregnancy, but we must all admit that it is pretty looney tunes that she is considering having twenty children all to herself. My next reality TV pregnancy debacle is pretty much every person on MTV’s Teen Mom or 16 and Pregnant. I just recently watched Jenelle Evans abort a child and then get pregnant ON PURPOSE mere months later with a man that she’s been dating for eight weeks. She then proceeded to explain to her first biological child that she is pregnant with his brother or sister (it’s a boy by the way that she named Kaiser, logically) and then leave that first child with her own mother to continue to raise. Mind blowing. Outside of reality TV, I have spent the past two months teaching a girl in my fourth period English class who is with child. She is sixteen and has hot pink hair. She can’t pass freshman English, yet she managed to get pregnant. I don’t have the opportunity to see her on a regular basis anymore because she was recently put in jail for truancy as part of her probation program. She is now sixteen, pregnant, and in jail. I’m twenty-seven, barren, and ridiculously normal. 

It just doesn’t add up. It’s hard for me to understand God’s willy-nilly system for handing out embryos. If pregnancy is a gift from God, if it is divinely inspired, what am I doing wrong that Jenelle is doing right? How is my fourth period English student a better candidate for a baby than I am? I’ll stop there. I know better than to compare myself to Michelle Duggar. She seems like the sweetest lady that ever existed. I don’t mind if she gets the big 2-0 if she’s willing to put up with Jim Bob. A saint I tell ya.

It’s not just reality television and teenage pregnancy that have shifted my ideas about children. When someone starts considering removing eggs from your body and injecting them with your husband’s sperm in some lab somewhere, the glossiness of conception sort of wears off. There’s nothing miraculous about latex gloves and microscopes. There’s nothing Godly about $10,000 to outsmart natural selection. This isn’t about God. I can’t have children because the cells in my uterus attack the rest of my body each month. God didn’t give me endometriosis just like he doesn’t control whether I get pregnant. Jenelle Evans doesn’t pray for babies in between joints. Fourth period pregnant kid doesn’t conceive because of God’s plan. She gets pregnant because she’s sixteen and irresponsible and apparently fertile.

I guess what I’m getting at is that if you attribute getting pregnant to God then you also have to attribute not getting pregnant to Him as well. And then you’re left wondering how in the world any of this makes any sense at all. People have children when they’re bodies allow it. Not when God does.

When I was flying home from Mexico a few days ago, there was a Baptist preacher seated in the row directly in front of me. I know this because he was having a conversation with a man beside him about God. He was sharing his testimony as Baptist folks would say. Later in the flight, the preacher proceeded to type on his laptop about his recent experiences in Mexico doing mission work. In between the seat backs, I read his screen as he went on to explain that people often get hung up on why life is not fair. The preacher noted that people question the existence of God when they have terrible things happen to them. Things that they deem not fair. I'll be the first to tell you I don’t think it’s fair that I am struggling with infertility. I do think I would make a good mother and Cody would be a good father. I am not on heroin. I am not sixteen. I have a job. I pay my taxes. I don’t smoke cigarettes. I have really exceptional hand-eye coordination. This is not fair.

I started paying more attention to the blinking cursor on the laptop in front of me. I started to wonder if maybe this man’s response about fair and unfair life experiences would be the explanation I needed to quit questioning God’s role in pregnancy and honestly God’s role in everything.

The preacher’s response eventually boiled down to this: humans don’t actually want a fair God because that would mean we would all be going to hell because we are all sinners. Moreover, humans don’t actually know what they need or want so our thoughts of fair and unfair are pedestrian (my word, not his) desires that aren't actually what God deems fit for our lives. There were a lot of biblical references in there, but I stopped reading after that. My hope for a message sent from above was lost on me. . Some people get pregnant. Some people don’t. It depends on anatomy, not religion. You don't have to believe in God to get pregnant. You don't have to deserve a baby (whatever that means). God does not release eggs and swim alongside sperm. He doesn't attach an embryo to a uterus. Human bodies do that just like dogs and horses and squirrels. 

I say all that to say that sometimes you just draw the short stick, regardless of whose hand you think you’re choosing from.