Yikes! The Hot Debate Over Deliberate Childlessness

My commentary for today,”Deliberate Childlessness: Moral Rebellion With a New Face,” has incited a good bit of controversy. The essay was originally published last year, but when the Web site BeliefNet.com reprinted the piece recently, my mail box began smoking. Take a look at the essay and see what you think. Looking at the commentary again, I am even more convinced that I am right.
I am not even addressing couples who experience fertility problems or those who have a genuine medical reason for preventing pregnancy or procreation. Those are special cases that deserve our prayer and concern — not our moral censure. In this essay, I do not even address the larger issue of contaceptive use by married couples. I have dealt with that question in other essays.
My concern is with those couples who, now freed by contraceptives from the ‘threat’ of children, have simply decided that they will choose to be married but choose not to have children. The rise of ‘lifestyle’ childlessness is a new thing among human beings — much less among Christians — and it is a willful rejection of God’s procreative purpose for marriage.
Children are to be welcomed and loved, not avoided and denied. God intends for us to raise the next generation for His glory, and He teaches us lessons through parenthood that we would never otherwise learn. Let me know what you think. My challenge to those who disagree is to come up with an adequate theological rationale for your position. Read the commentary for yourself, and then write me at mail@albertmohler.com.