Marriage is in the foreseeable future, and I would like to ask you for any advice before it happens. Can we avoid any mistakes? Would it be helpful to meet with a pastor for premarital counseling? Are there any helpful tips you could give from a Christian perspective or from your own experience?
Thank you in advance!
Zareen
Here are the main pieces of advice Dr. Craig gives:
Resolve that there will be no divorce
Delay having children
Confront problems honestly
Seek marital counseling
Take steps to build intimacy in your relationship
And here’s the controversial one (#2):
2. Delay having children. The first years of marriage are difficult enough on their own without introducing the complication of children. Once children come, the wife’s attention is necessarily diverted, and huge stresses come upon you both. Spend the first several years of marriage getting to know each other, working through your issues, having fun together, and enjoying that intimate love relationship between just the two of you. Jan and I waited ten years before having our first child Charity, which allowed me the finish graduate school, get our feet on the ground financially, establish some roots, and enjoy and build our love relationship until we were really ready to take on the responsibilities of parenthood. The qualifier here is that if the wife desperately wants children now, then the husband should accede to her wish to become a mother, rather than withhold that from her. Her verdict should be decisive. But if you both can agree to wait, things will probably be much easier.
I wonder if the married readers agree with him about the “waiting at least a year after marriage bafore having children”?
I am opposed to any policy or program that increases the odds that a child will not have a relationship with their biological father as they grow up. This would include anything that makes it easier for parents to divorce or that facilitates single motherhood. Consequently, I oppose premarital sex, abortion, sex education in schools, no-fault divorce, and giving legal recognition to cohabitation or same-sex marriage. I want children to be able to have their biological father and biological mother close at hand, and to be able to rely on them and know them, so that they don’t feel alone and lost in the world. Although I am willing to permit other arrangements, I think society should celebrate traditional marriage – for the sake of the children.
Well, consider one challenge to this ideal situation where a child grows up with a mother and a father: conception via anonymous sperm donor.
Here’s a video that shows how children are hurt when they are denied a relationship with their biological father: (H/T Stacy McCain)
The practice of anonymous sperm donors, and children fathered by them, is certainly legal and has a market. That would lead one to conclude that it is ethical, rather than unethical. In other words I’d say ethical means ‘not illegal’.
But is it moral? […]That is, does anyone think that the Almighty is pleased, and/or glorified by people thumbing their noses at the clear, simple, obvious, form-follows-function beauty of:
Therefore shall a man leave his father and his mother, and shall cleave unto his wife: and they shall be one flesh. Gen 2:24
There is vast capacity to use modern technology to tinker about with the natural order of things. I’d like to fall short of a sweeping judgement here, in the space of a blog post. It’s possible that there may exist a really good case for why using an anonymous sperm donor is not immoral. But it seems that protecting the father’s (or the mother’s in the case of an egg donor) privacy at the expense of dropping a sizable existential dilemma on the offspring is immoral. That is, the biological parents (i.e. DNA providers) are doing to the child emotionally what the government is doing economically: casting debts upon them without any sort of dialogue. A variation on taxation without representation, if you will. Progressivism seems to be about finding the least vocal victim.
I don’t think that it’s enough for the child to just know who their biological father is, or to just see a picture of their biological father. I think it’s important that we promote the best situation for children, where each child has a real relationship with their biological father. And we can do that, if we are serious, in several ways.
Promoting marriage
Here are few wild, shoot-from-the-hip ideas to help children to have access to their fathers:
We can research how fatherlessness affects children
We can research what decisions are likely to lead to stable marriage, e.g. – regular church attendance and chastity
We can repeal laws that are hostile to lasting marriage, e.g. – no-fault divorce
We can enact laws that are hostile to divorce, e.g. – shared custody laws
We can stop paying unmarried women to have babies
We can give tax deductions to married couples who have babies
We can give tax deductions to couples planning on marrying if they undergo marital counseling from a program of their own choosing
We can give tax deductions to married couples whose children earn incomes, e.g. – the parents get a tax deduction for 1% of income earned by each child for life
We can give tax deductions to married couples whose children don’t collect government assistance, e.g. – the parents get a 1% tax deduction on their household income for every child who doesn’t collect government welfare during the year
We ban IVF for women who have not been married for at least 5 years
We ban all taxpayer funding of IVF treatments
We ban ban all private insurance coverage for IVF treatments
And so on, like that. This communicates to women that it is not OK to have a baby with an anonymous sperm donor. It communicates that we as a society want fathers to be around their children. It communicates that cohabitation is not the same thing as marriage. It communicates that marriages are for life. We need to get tough if we want children to be spared from the harm of not knowing their biological fathers.
Dr Evan Harris (LibDem), David Allen Green (LibDem) and Chris Bryant (Labour) aren’t at all happy with Nadine Dorries. In what is being billed as the biggest shake-up to abortion law in a generation, her modest proposal is that women should be offered independent counselling to give them a breathing space before proceeding with termination. ‘Pro-life’ campaigners estimate that some 60,000 children would be saved every year. ‘Pro-choice’ campaigners insist that it will mean more stress for the women concerned.
[…]At the moment, abortion providers like BPAS and Marie Stopes offer counselling to women, but they are paid only when the termination is carried out. Each year in the UK, some 180,000 children are dispensed with through this method, at a cost of some £60 million to the tax-payer. There is an evident bias because companies like BPAS and Marie Stopes are profit-making businesses and have a vested interest in procuring abortion: when women are dissuaded, it hits the profit margin. There is nothing independent about BPAS advice or impartial about Maries Stopes’ counselling at all. Mrs Dorries says:
‘Abortion has become a factory-efficient process that denies women the right to independent, professional counselling. Many women who are given the opportunity to talk through their situation in a calm environment cease to panic and begin to consider other options. It is every woman’s right to be given the choice of access to professional help at the time of a crisis pregnancy.’
According to former MP Dr Evan Harris, Nadine Dorries is ‘mad’. According to lawyer David Allen Green, she is ‘illiberal’. According to Labour MP Chris Bryant, she is ‘misguided‘.
[…]All across Europe, there is legislation requiring informed consent, and these countries have significantly lower abortion rates. In the UK, there is no requirement in law for women to be informed about the abortion procedure or the alternatives. If you want evidence of the present ‘conveyer belt’ approach to abortion, read this report in the Telegraph, and then thank God there are people like Nadine Dorries and Frank Field in Parliament with the conviction to confront this systematic state slaughter of our children. Oh, and they’re both Anglican, by the way.
Now you know what Liberal Democrats mean by “pro-choice”.
I note that Nadine also supports abstinence-only sex education and school choice and has run her own business. Nadine blogs here. You can see a picture of her here. I don’t endorse everything about her, but she has some good ideas.
WINTERY KNIGHT 