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When large families make it to the movie and television screen, in shows like Yours, Mine and Ours, Cheaper by the Dozen, and The Brady Bunch, children fare better. But comedy, it seems, is all that can be expected of a pack of kids. Chaos generally rules, with Disneyesque household destruction following in the wake of an errant animal or child, a riotous bedlam that miraculously concludes with everybody fed and dressed and out the door each day looking nearly normal.

When mothers of many children make the newsroom cut, the story is usually of the "man bites dog" variety. A mother of nine who is athletic and fit, not a bulge on her body, makes national news, including Oprah. The woman in Arkansas who gave birth to her 16th child in October and "is ready for the next one" is covered by the Associated Press and MSNBC.

The reporters for these stories do not ask the burning question—the question most people are still too polite to ask, though I wonder how long until this boundary is breached and it's open season on every couple's reproductive life. The only time I recall being asked it was at an academic conference, by a lesbian poet, as we compared our lives over dinner. "Why do you have so many children?" she queried, her face honest and open. The question wasn't, "Why do you have children?" After all, having one or more children is overwhelmingly the norm for the majority of American women. The question was, "Why so many?" She caught me off-guard. My unpremeditated answer was something like, "When we sit around the table and hold hands to give thanks for our food, I like it that the table is big and the circle is wide."

Given the rise of the Childfree and One Child Only movements and my nearly weekly public encounters, I feel moved to post a reply—a moral, biblical, and political defense of the larger family, or at least some insights for those who are genuinely befuddled or even fearful. I can do this because I understand the concern and befuddlement. It took ten years of marriage before I ventured nervously into motherhood. Before that, high on education and world travel, I scanned the sidewalks and the public horizon searching for news and interest, visually bleeping over mothers with baby backpacks pushing strollers. Either I did not see mothers with children at all, or, if I did, I would count the children out of curiosity; as the numbers climbed, my estimation of the mothers usually sank. I had an impressive list of prejudices and stereotypes, many of which I now see on the Childfree websites.

In giving this defense of why people have children, or why they have 2 or 6 or 16, I don't want to go overboard. In Reclaiming the Body: Christians and the Faithful Use of Modern Medicine, authors Brian Volck and Joel Shuman confront the question in a chapter entitled, "What Are Children For?" After tracing the effect of an increasingly intrusive medical technology that reduces conception and the building of a family to a consumer choice, they warn, too, against a nearly opposite trend—the temptation to worship children and life as uniquely sacred. "Only God, who gives each of us life, is sacred. Christians must therefore respect life, but not worship it."

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August 2006, Vol. 50, No. 8