Bumpaholism?!? Really???

As I was getting ready to head out the door this morning, I caught a story on the Today Show asking whether being pregnant could be addictive. The stated questions in the story involved wonderment at why so many women were getting pregnant up to '3 and even 4 times.' The telejournalistas and their guests were exploring the possibilties of feminine self-medication with pregnancy, warning about the 'wrong reasons' to become pregnant. I almost choked on my coffee.

The jarring bit of the story was not the surface content, discussion of the opinion that one should not go about getting pregnant in order to solve problems, that many aspects of pregnancy, including biochemical and social benefits can be very pleasant, and perhaps addictive, etc. It's true, just about any good thing in life can be overdone, or done for the wrong reasons. People can become addicted to the sensation of eating quite apart from the nutritional requirements of our bodies. Using anything, including pregnancy, as a 'fix' for problems in our lives we ought to address more directly, such as relational problems (unhappy marriage, troubled relationship, lonliness), depression, etc., creates new problems. Besides, it seems like a total 'nuclear option' to become pregnant in order to stitch together a broken marriage or a failing relationship. I think we have examples of how our national narcissistic search for 'self-realization' can lead to the bizzare situation wherein a woman gets pregnant quite apart from any relationship with a man, in order to attain to a certain sense of self-fulfillment, which is just as bad as using pregnancy as a drug or relational splint. The Today Show producers, or at least their guests had a good point: if one is going to choose to become pregnant, it should be for the right reason--intentionally to bring a new life into the world.

The problem with this morning's discussion is that the entire question of becoming pregnant has been thoroughly divorced from the familial context created when a man and woman unite for life in the sacred bonds of matrimony. The assumption underlying the conversation is not merely that it's ok for people to engage in sexual activity without being well-disposed toward becoming pregnant; we left that frontier behind decades ago as a nation. The assumption is that becoming pregnant is no longer seen as just the natural consequence of sexual activity (which we could optimistically refer to as love-making, were it not the case that much of what happens sexually between two (sometimes more) human beings today is more about mutual libidinal self-gratification than the self-donation genuine love-making expresses). The assumption is that a reasonable, well-balanced woman only becomes pregnant because she has decided (chosen), for whatever reason, to bring a new life into the world at this particular point in life. Implicit in this 'choice' script, by the way, is the legitimacy of a 'choice' at some point not to remain pregnant until the pregnancy reaches a natural conclusion.

For a very long time, pregnancy was seen as the natural development of successful love-making. I'm not denying that pregnancy can also be the result of some rather tragic things, but that fact does not negate the reality that love-making naturally begets new life (which is the most important aspect of pregnancy, I'm sorry to have to make clear). It's one of the most beautiful aspects of human living, not just a clinical medical condition characterized by differing hormones, or a social reality characterized by extra attention and tenderness. It should set us back and set us thinking that merely 100 years ago, pregnancy was routinely accepted as the result of sexual activity. In fact, most people considered it a blessing, a cause of great joy, something to be looked forward to as a normal aspect of marital relations. Pregnancy was seen and accepted, quite correctly, as part of the natural reality of human sexuality.

While one could get into questions of sexual morality, and such a discussion is certainly legitimate, no matter how much our society pushes for a laissez-faire attitude toward sexual behavior, I don't think we have to go there in order to make this point. Almost everyone these days, excepting the 'Bigs' (Big Oil, Big Pharmeceuticals, etc.), acknowledges that behaving in ways that correspond to the natural design (whether accidental or intelligent) of our bodies and the rest of the natural world is preferable to excessive artifical interference. We desperately need to begin having that attitude toward human sexuality. Taking such a truly natural, and perhaps even contemplative, approach toward human sexuality would go a long way to healing troubled relationships. It would tend toward minimizing the emotional tragedy so often experienced today when people engage in sexual activity with uncommited partners, with whom they have no intention of raising children. It would tend toward reducing the phenomenon of 'unwanted' children, and thus the heinous action of procured abortion. Even better, this approach would tend toward the development of a greater concentration of happy, emotionally balanced human beings, more likely to happen given a higher concentration of people who see pregnancy and parenthood as something to be joyfully anticipated within the experience of lovemaking, and without which sexual activity would not be worthwhile.

With regard to the stimulus for this blog entry, the telejournalistic media 'article' about pregnancy sought without the procreation and rearing of children as the main intention, I agree that no one should seek to become pregnant for the wrong reasons. In fact, I would say that no one should seek to become pregnant at all, as it's own primary end. Married couples, by which I mean a man and a woman, should seek to express their self-donative love toward each other in the way they naturally have since the dawn of the human family, joyfully anticipating the possibility that they may be blessed with the gift of new life

Finally, the point to be made by launching this blog is that we should all listen carefully and critically for the assumptions that underlie the presentation of media stories and other cultural and political phenomena, because those unspoken assumptions can shape the way we think, often going against our own convictions.