CW//Mentions of child sexual assault and abuse
Religious values vary greatly from culture to culture, domination to domination, and even from church to church. Despite this variance, the predominant religious groups in North America proclaim in one way or another that it is the duty of every individual to marry for the purpose of procreation (6). There are a number of ways this is encouraged within religious communities beyond its proclamation in religious texts, including social pressure and shame towards those who remain childless within marriage or who remain unmarried outside religious oath. The Catholic Church specifically has stood that all artificial family planning methods are unnatural and wrong because they defy God’s will in the reproduction process; this includes condoms, abortion, oral contraceptives, intrauterine devices, and sterilization (4).
These values and tactics seem to have an effect on religious folks’ childbearing in practice; it has been suggested that the U.S.’s high birthrate as compared to Europe may be explained by higher rates of fertility among religious groups. Data analysis predicts that if women aged 18–44 in the United States valued religion to the degree of European women, their fertility would decrease by nearly a quarter (3). Additionally, looking to a study within U.S., the number of children a woman had was found to be correlated with how frequently she attended church between 1982 and 2020. While weekly church goers averaged 2 children per woman, those who did not attend at all averaged just over 1.5 (5). This religious pressure to birth, and the correlated shame towards contraceptive use those who do not have children, serves to hamper reproductive autonomy by encouraging folks to have children in marriage regardless of whether they truly desire them. If the subconscious fear of eternal damnation is the reason one desires to reproduce in marriage, I would argue this is not something the individual desires at all.
The view that one must reproduce to fulfill a religious duty also puts women in danger by denying them necessary medical treatment in many emergency scenarios. Healthcare providers in one sample reported they often find themselves unable to provide the standard of care in emergency-pregnancy scenarios lest being in conflict with the ethics of the Catholic hospital committee. For example, there are often instances where a life-saving abortion is possible to perform however the Catholic hospital committee would often not approve of performing such procedures. Providers reported that even when they agreed with the Catholic church’s stance against abortion, they felt a moral opposition to the limits placed on the type of emergency-pregnancy care they were able to provide (2).
In the most extreme cases of religious pressures to reproduce in marriage, such as in the Fundamentalist Church of the Ladder Day Saints (FLDS), men are coupled with many women to maximize birthing rates and therefore maximize the ratio of the ‘virtuous population’. Women may also be married at an extremely young age in order to have as many children as possible in their lifetime. In the FLDS, folks are told by religious leaders who to marry and how to behave more generally. They can be sent into isolation, separated from their children, or cast out entirely for disobeying these leaders’ orders (7).
These cases are rare, and often occur in isolated religious communities where members are in geographical proximity to each other. While this means these extreme cases are affecting less people, they are also extremely dangerous and often go unnoticed due to their isolation. In the case of FLDS, even local law enforcement were themselves FLDS members making the abuse all the harder to escape. When the first woman was finally documented as having escaped the FLDS, the legal flood gates were open to reveal a great number of illegal practices going previously unnoticed by law enforcement including sexual abuse, child abuse, child sexual assault, and domestic abuse among other things. Hundreds of children were taken from their homes and separated from their mothers, despite many of those mothers being victims, not perpetrators, of the same abuse the children were subjected to, demonstrating how even when ‘help’ is found they often do little to truly support victims (1).
The various pressures placed on religious communities to marry and have children, regardless of extremity with which those pressures are enforced, are a violation of reproductive autonomy. It may be extremely difficult for folks who are or have been influenced by religion in these ways to discern their own true desires from those which religion has pushed on them. The choice to have a child ideally will not come from a place of fear or shame but from genuine personal longing, longing which has not been fostered by an array of external pressures.
References
[1] Eaton, N. [Meetin’ the Eatons]. (2016, May 30). Escaping polygamy with Carolyn Jessop. YouTube. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4sAQf9q_Mqo
[2] Freedman, L. R., & Stulberg, D. B. (2013). Conflicts in care for obstetric complications in Catholic hospitals. AJOB Primary Research, 4(4), 1–10.
[3] Frejka, T., & Westoff, C. F. (2008). Religion, religiousness and fertility in the U.S. and in Europe. European Journal of Publication, 24(1), 5–31. https://doi.org/10.4054/mpidr-wp-2006-013
[4] LeMaire, W. J. (2016). The roman catholic church and contraception. International Journal of Reproduction, Contraception, Obstetrics and Gynecology, 5(6), 2065–2069.
[5] Stone, L. (2022, August 8). America’s growing religious-secular fertility divide. Institute for Family Studies. Retrieved October 29, 2022, from https://ifstudies.org/blog/americas-growing-religious-secular-fertility-divide
[6] Thompson, S. (2022, July 16). July 16, 2022. YouTube. Retrieved November 23, 2022, from https://youtu.be/1MXdPL3hceA
[7] Veevers, J. E. (1972). The Violation of Fertility Mores: Voluntary Childlessness as Deviant Behavior. Deviant behavior and societal recreation, 571–592.
