The blog No Longer Quivering details the experiences of refugees from the Quiverfull movement, an evangelical movement that promotes family planning in the old catholic style, in which women continue to bear children as many times as they become pregnant.
“Calulu” relates the frustration and heartbreak of finding oneself barren in a faith group that emphasizes fertility as a sign of god’s grace, and describes a culture in which lack of fertility is attributed to divine punishment for the sins of the would-be mother- everything from secret abortions to petty lapses in nutrition. In one incident, she describes a church newsletter’s speculation on her “unrevealed” sins:
“Some began to suggest in prayer that whatever I’d done to bring this barrenness upon myself be revealed to me so I could repent, pray and be healed. After all, God did bless the righteous with many arrows in their quivers so obviously there was something unrighteous about me. It didn’t hit me fully how looked down upon I’d become until a church member referred to me as her ‘heathen buddy who only has two children’ Someone else spread on the prayer list that I had problems related to a past abortion, even though I’d never had an abortion.”
I find this tendency to blame the victims of birth or circumstance for their conditions to be one of the more disturbing aspects of fundamentalist Christianity. This isn’t an isolated idea, either- the news media was shocked when a Virginia Republican suggested disabled children are God’s punishment for past abortions, but I’m guessing this was sadly familiar to a lot of Christian women.
