A Pastoral Theology of Childlessness

Emma Nash

• Publisher: SCM Press
• Year: 2021
• Print ISBN: 9780334060512
• eBook ISBN: 9780334060536
• Topic: Theology & Religion
• Subtopic: Christian Theology

The experiences of infertility and childlessness, while not worse than other griefs and disappointments people experience, are nevertheless distinctive in a number of important respects. Unlike other griefs, they often take place in private, with no body, no funeral, and no public acknowledgement of the loss.In her profound and wise theology of childnessness, Emma Nash takes her own story as a starting point, examining several distinctive features of this painful human experience. She asks what biblical and theological resources offer consolation, and what liberative action individuals and churches might take to make an appropriate response.Weaving trauma theology together with personal experience, Nash offers a profound and heartfelt theological reflection which breaks the barriers between pastoral resource and carefully constructed theology.

1. Alone

There are no meal trains organized by the [synagogue], no sympathy cards sent, no notices emailed to congregants: The Abramson’s are saddened to announce the passing of the children they never got to have. Our loss is invisible and suffered in utter silence and isolation.1

The experience

People do not talk in fertility clinics. They do not even make eye contact. It was a counsellor who pointed this out to me. She worked with people being treated for cancer as well as those undergoing fertility treatment. The atmosphere in a cancer ward is very different from that in a fertility clinic, she explained. People with cancer talk to one another; they swap stories and tips; they keep one another’s spirits up. In fertility clinics, no one speaks. As I sat in the counsellor’s office, I could barely make eye contact with her. I was utterly defeated.

I do remember someone once catching my eye in a fertility clinic. It was a man, and I was furious with him. He and his partner were there with a baby. It was clear that they were undertaking another cycle of IVF to try and have a second child. Maybe they couldn’t get a babysitter, my rational, adult internal voice suggested. But my inner child was raging. How could they be so insensitive? How could they have brought a baby into a fertility clinic? He caught my eye and he tried to smile. I think he was trying to encourage me – ‘look, it works!’ But I didn’t want his encouragement: I wanted him and his partner and his baby to disappear.

By a strange coincidence, a few months after the unsuccessful end of my fertility treatment, I was able to observe the atmosphere in a cancer clinic for myself. I had to have surgery to remove a benign breast lump, which meant a few trips to the breast clinic. I was one of the lucky ones, but I was in a waiting room with women having treatment for breast cancer. I was in my late thirties, but looked younger. As they called my name and I got up, the older woman sitting next to me patted my arm and said, ‘all the best – you’ll be fine’. I was really touched.

I never had any desire to talk to anyone else in the waiting room of a fertility clinic, and I carefully avoided eye contact. I was so very unhappy, and so very angry with the world and everyone around me. If I spoke to the woman sitting next to me, I might find that she was younger than me, more fertile, with better odds, and that would only make me feel worse. No two people going through fertility treatment are alike, and I found the comparisons very painful. Others had more eggs, more embryos, even a child, and were coming back to increase the size of their family. Others complained of the side effects of the follicle stimulating hormones: I did not experience these side effects, for the simple reason that, even on the highest dose, I did not respond to the drugs. Some people had achieved a pregnancy but suffered the agony of miscarriage. I felt that they had suffered more, their hopes realized only to be cruelly dashed – what did I have to complain about? And yet, my grief remained. Those women’s bodies could achieve a pregnancy, I told myself, whereas mine was then, and remains, barren. I did not want to swap stories. Sharing the pain sometimes increases it.

Infertility and childlessness can be extremely lonely. They trap a person in their own misery, driving a wedge between couples and separating childless people from others. Friends and family who have had no difficulty conceiving children may be hard to be around. Childless friends may quite understandably be unwilling to discuss their own childlessness. It can be very hard for a person struggling with childlessness to find a safe person to talk to. Childless couples have to negotiate difficult conversations, talking together about this huge issue in their lives and yet not talking too much or too often. The pain and the bitterness are exhausting, and they have to give each other a break from it. Then they have to decide who they will tell about their situation. The rigours of fertility treatment mean that a working person will almost certainly have to tell someone at work in order to get the time off they need for appointments. Some treatments, particularly IVF, are unpredictable and require both partners to have a day off at times that cannot be planned far in advance. But they will probably not want their treatment to become general knowledge. The pain of involuntary childlessness is so deep and the treatment so personal that those going through it will probably need a high degree of privacy to protect them from other people’s unwelcome questions. They will not want to discuss their sex life or reproductive health with many people – if any at all. They probably will not want friends who are parents to explain how tired they are all the time and how having children isn’t easy at all – and almost implying the childless person is lucky they don’t have any.

The feelings of shame, inadequacy and bitterness that childlessness brings are difficult to talk about, and therefore profoundly isolating. Childlessness brings bitterness because having a baby is so easy for most people. Statistically, after a year of unprotected sex, 84 per cent of couples will conceive a child (‘infertility’ is therefore defined as failure to conceive after one year).2 Some of those couples who don’t conceive in the first year will, though, conceive in the second year; in other words, some will experience infertility, perhaps anxiety about their ability to conceive, only to find it happens naturally given time. Of course, it is well publicized that fertility declines with a woman’s age, particularly after her mid-thirties. Nevertheless, the majority of couples will be able to conceive naturally even when the female partner is in her late thirties.3 Knowing these statistics, failure to conceive after months and years of trying is very galling. All around, friends are falling pregnant with apparent ease; they decide they want another baby, and along it comes; they may have two or three children already, and another one comes along as a surprise. Seeing a woman pushing a double buggy with twins is especially painful: to an unhappily childless person, a woman with twins has hit the jackpot. They may worry as time goes on that they barely have time to conceive one child, let alone more, and yet they may not want their baby to be an only child. When you cannot conceive one child, or your pregnancies end in miscarriage, seeing someone with twins is like watching them eat a hearty meal while you are starving.

Some of the isolation of childlessness comes through others’ inability to understand it. Brené Brown writes of the ‘unintentional shame’ that happens when people are uncomfortable with a topic, such as infertility and childlessness: ‘Unintentional shame often happens when people are trying to be helpful but end up either giving unsolicited advice, judging or shutting down the conversation out of their own discomfort’ (Brown 2007, p. 165). Talking about childlessness can be dangerous because childless people run the risk that their pain and struggle will be dismissed, denied, or met with judgement rather than acceptance and empathy. Sometimes people may seek to deny or minimize the pain by talking about the difficulties of raising children or the financial and social benefits of remaining childless. Often they will respond with a miracle baby story in the mistaken belief that this will be encouraging. Jody Day sees the ‘miracle baby story’ as a form of denial – of refusing to tolerate the discomfort of the possibility that their friend’s childlessness may not be swept away with a miracle (Day 2016, p. 85). Sometimes advice may be given about an alternative treatment the person once read about in a magazine. In Christian circles, denial and minimization are likely to take the form of a declaration that ‘God’s timing is perfect’, ‘God is in control’, or an exhortation to pray harder. While these statements may sound pious on the surface, in effect they seek to tidy away the pain by invoking God’s plans and purposes. These platitudes can be used as a barrier which protects the hearer from having their beliefs about life and God challenged by someone else’s pain. In episode 41 of the Ali Prato podcast Infertile AF, Karen explains that, while everyone in her family knew she was having intra-uterine insemination, no one talked about it.4 Sometimes people are unwilling to have the conversation in the first place – it is just too awkward and uncomfortable.

Childlessness is more than a feminist issue, and yet the isolation that childless women feel may be compounded by their gender. Historically, childbearing has been seen as a vital part of what it means to be a woman, and this view of womanhood persists, causing great pain to women who cannot have children. Women’s rights are enshrined in law and, in the affluent global north, almost all areas of work and experience are available to both women and men. Women are not, in theory, defined solely as baby-makers but as human beings who are able to pursue an education, climb a mountain, find stimulating work or start a family, or any combination of the above. More than at any other time in history, not having children should not be a source of shame to a woman – and yet, for so many, it is. Madelyn Cain describes this as the ‘last great arena of feminism’ – being able to be childless without having to justify one’s state (Cain 2001, p. xvi). The notion that a woman’s purpose in life is to have children has been profoundly challenged by the women’s movement, and yet it seems to be so deeply ingrained that she should seek to reproduce. And when she cannot, the failure is very hard to bear. Jody Day’s analysis of childlessness among women in the global north identifies the fetishization of motherhood, which declares that the only way for a woman to lead a meaningful life is through becoming a mother. It is not that a woman cannot seek meaning in other ways, but these are all seen as ‘less than’ the project of becoming the mother to a man’s children. She sees this as pronatalist ideology founded on patriarchy. ‘Pronatalism’ or ‘natalism’ is the belief that people should reproduce, and consequent prejudice against people without children. Jody Day argues that this is a personal, social, economic, political and structural prejudice against people without children.5 Some pronatalists are motivated by their Christian faith, in particular their readings of various Old Testament texts that seem to promote large families as a blessing from God and even a Christian duty (McKeown 2014). This is an ideology Day seeks to challenge in order to release childless women from the belief that their lives are over because they are not mothers (Day 2016, pp. 68f.).

Involuntary childlessness causes pain to both men and women, however, and I would not want to argue that a woman’s pain is deeper or more devastating than a man’s. Robin Hadley has researched the impact of childlessness on men’s well-being, and found that men and women report similar levels of unhappiness and yearning around their childlessness.6 In a video conversation created for World Childless Week 2020, four men, including Hadley, discuss the effect childlessness has had on them and on their relationships. Hadley explains that his desperation for children and anger about his situation consumed him in his mid-thirties. Sikhumbuzo Dube, a Christian pastor, describes the pain he feels every time he conducts a dedication service for a new baby in his congregation – a duty he cannot avoid and that triggers his grief. Andy Harrod explains that, while his wife cried, he felt angry, and yet feared upsetting his wife if he expressed this uncomfortable emotion. Michael Hughes shares a photograph of his visit to the grave of an ancestor, the first in a line of six ‘Michael Hughes’. The visit brought home to him the crushing reality that he would be the last. He confesses that, two years later, it is still painful to look at the photograph. All four men describe the difficulty of communicating grief between partners, arguing that men are conditioned to express grief differently from women and may feel that they have to be strong and protect their partner from what they are feeling. The isolation childless people feel from those around them who are parents can thus be carried into their relationships, when each partner grieves differently and may not see each other’s grief.7

People who cannot have children do not fit in. They are naturally excluded from the social networks that form organically at the NCT class and the school gate. There is no place for them on Mumsnet. Actually, this is not strictly true – there are threads on Mumsnet about ‘trying to conceive’ (abbreviated to ‘TTC’). Once you have come to the realization that you will never achieve a BFP – Big Fat Positive, i.e. positive pregnancy test – there is no longer a place for you in the forum.8 Some of the social isolation childless people experience can be self-imposed. They may withdraw from social situations that are painful, such as baby showers and christenings. They may avoid large social gatherings where they anticipate seeing lots of people with their children. I was once secretly glad to receive a wedding invitation that explicitly stated that no children could attend the reception. Unfortunately, when I got to the wedding breakfast, I discovered a number of breastfeeding mothers who could not, of course, leave their babies at home. The absence of toddlers and older children running around simply drew my attention to precisely those tiny children whose presence caused me the most visceral pain.

Social media can cause pain to people experiencing many different kinds of loss and struggle, including people who are involuntarily childless. ‘Baby spam’ can appear in your Facebook or Instagram feed at any time of day.9 It has become axiomatic that we tend to post only edited, airbrushed highlights of our lives on our social media accounts. People post photographs of themselves on holiday with their family, or write about the cute and funny things their children have said. They are less likely to write about the sleepless nights, the tummy bugs, the existential angst they may feel despite being blessed with children. Here is an extract from my private journal, written five years ago when we had begun to realize that we were having trouble conceiving:

Checking my Facebook news feed is a risky business. I never know when I’ll next be ‘baby bombed’. Another picture of a newborn accompanied by ‘may we introduce … to the world’. It’s only natural, and I guess it’s the quickest and easiest way of making the announcement – far quicker, easier and cheaper than sending out cards. But it means that the circle of those from whom I receive these announcements is wider. Friends from way back, friends of my younger brother, people younger, and in some cases far younger than me have become parents. It all adds to my panic. Every baby announcement that isn’t ours seems to make ours less likely. Every successful conception, pregnancy and birth makes me wonder why my body isn’t playing ball – whether it ever will.

I’m probably – definitely – over-sensitized, but I ...

Table of contents

• Copyright information
• Dedication
• Contents
• Introduction
• 1. Alone
• 2. In Pain
• 3. Powerless
• 4. Barren
• 5. Guilty

• 6. So, What Now?
• Conclusion
• Acknowledgements
• Bibliography