I was 24 years old. I was walking up Ionia Avenue, back to work from my lunch break. It was an unusually cold and icy day in March 2014, and served as a reminder that Grand Rapids, Michigan had just survived the "Polar Vortex". It had been a terrifying winter for me. That winter, my body had been blackened and bruised by ice and pavement over and over again. I was so afraid to leave my apartment every morning. I didn't trust my body to keep me safe.
A co-worker of mine had been pregnant that winter, and as her belly grew with new life, I noted how challenging it was for her to navigate through her daily life. I was thinking about her as I was walking back to the office that day. I was thinking about my own limitations with Cerebral Palsy, and how I couldn't even fathom the compound difficulties of carrying a human life in my often hostile body. And then, just like a light switch, an idea came to my mind. "I don't need to give birth in order to be a mother."
I was single at the time, and in my first year of graduate school to become a social worker. I had never been in a serious relationship, so the hope of marriage seemed very unrealistic. Yet, this idea of adoption-only motherhood opened the possibility that I could still love a child, and raise a family, even if I didn't have a husband.
This decision sat in my heart and mind for a while, with more than just my disability building the logic of my case. As a social work student, I was continually being exposed to the overwhelming need for good and loving parents in a very broken foster-care system. To live out the social justice of my profession, I had a moral responsibility to adopt and advocate for adoption above all else. I even wondered why couples were still choosing to have biological children -- didn't they know that this world is overcrowded, and that thousands of children age of out foster care without knowing the stability of loving parents? Adoption, I self-righteously believed, would be my radical proclamation that my children don't need to look like me in order to be loved by me. As an adoptive mother, I would be respecting my physical limitations and reflecting my professional convictions.
Sharing my decision, however, was something I was less comfortable with. I knew that people face infertility, so choose to adopt. Or I knew people like my parents who, as part of their deliberate family plan, have two biological children and one adopted child. But were there people who could have children, but chose to adopt instead? Would people consider me less of a woman because I was willingly giving up a natural, God-given function of my biology?
Some people cautioned that my feelings would change when I met the "right man”. They assured that if he wanted biological children, I would, too, and that it wasn't entirely fair of me to make this decision on my own as a single woman. Or, from the disability angle, they would tell me stories of other women they knew who have Cerebral Palsy, and how, "She had children, you can, too!" Even my gynecologist was skeptical of my absolution. She shared stories about patients who have Cerebral Palsy and actually experienced relief during pregnancy. She didn’t want me to make such a life-altering decision at such a young age.
The following summer (2015), was an incredibly reforming summer for me. I began truly exploring my Christian faith for the first time in a long time. I began reading books and articles about the importance of honoring Christ as a celibate, single Christian. In that elementary research, I began to learn very sound Biblical teachings about the rightness and importance of adoption in the Christian life. It was refreshing and relieving, so different from the "be fruitful and multiply" Christian rhetoric and culture that I was so familiar with.
That same summer, I met David, and for the first time, saw the glimmer of a good and God-honoring relationship. When he and I were first spending time together, I was nervous about sharing my convictions with him. My choice to not have biological children was resolute, and if he expected to marry a gal who would bear him lots of children, then I had to tell him wasn’t the one for him. I brought up this “deal-breaker” on our second date, and carefully outlined all of my reasons. He was immediately affirming of my decision, and pointed to Scripture’s revelation that we are adopted through Christ. He shared stories of Christian couples he knew who chose adoption as a way in which they deliberately lived out the Gospel, and as an answer to the problem of abortion. I had never heard of this before, and I deeply respected it.
My thoughts on parenthood and fertility and reproductive choice have ebbed and flowed over these last three years, and this blog piece has been drafted, deleted and re-written numerous times over the last year – our first year of marriage. This summer, I discovered the writings of Rosaria Butterfield, and though I resonated with so much of her clear, direct Gospel-centered writing, the way that she writes about her role as a foster and adoptive mother, has finally prompted my own writing about this subject. I cheered out loud when I read the following passage from her book, The Secret Thoughts of an Unlikely Convert. She writes about the struggles and heartbreak of a failed adoption when she says:
“Betrayal and risk are at the heart of the gospel life. This I know: God heard my prayers. In this broken world, people break promises (and contracts). The social worker that made the contract and the social worker that broke the contract are women I respect and value. We come to the table with different points of view. Because we are Christ’s, we know that children are not grafted into a family to resolve our fertility problems or to boost our ego or to complete our family pictures or because we match color or race or nationalities. We know, because we are Christ’s, that adoption is miracle. In a spiritual sense, it is the miracle at the center of the Christian life. We who are adopted by God are those given a new heart, a ‘rebirth’.”
If David and I adopt children, we know that there is potential for heartbreak and struggle and uncertainty. Yet we also hold firmly to the convictions that Paul writes in Ephesians 1:4-14:
“For he chose us in him before the creation of the world to be holy and blameless in his sight. In love he predestined us for adoption to sonship through Jesus Christ, in accordance with his pleasure and will— to the praise of his glorious grace, which he has freely given us in the One he loves. In him we have redemption through his blood, the forgiveness of sins, in accordance with the riches of God’s grace that he lavished on us. With all wisdom and understanding, he made known to us the mystery of his will according to his good pleasure, which he purposed in Christ, to be put into effect when the times reach their fulfillment—to bring unity to all things in heaven and on earth under Christ.
In him we were also chosen, having been predestined according to the plan of him who works out everything in conformity with the purpose of his will, in order that we, who were the first to put our hope in Christ, might be for the praise of his glory. And you also were included in Christ when you heard the message of truth, the gospel of your salvation. When you believed, you were marked in him with a seal, the promised Holy Spirit, who is a deposit guaranteeing our inheritance until the redemption of those who are God’s possession— to the praise of his glory.”
This is our aim in marriage, in (potential) parenting, and in life. That all things may be done to the praise of his glory.
