Whether fertility is good might seem a weird question—except, in our times, it seems that those who say it is, as J.D. Vance did during his campaign for vice president last year, are deemed “weird” by cultural movers and shakers. The reaction to Vance’s encouragement of people having babies demands we address this question.
Yes, Virginia, fertility is good. That is the classical perspective of Judaism and Christianity. God pronounces it good in the first words he speaks after creating human beings male and female. “Be fruitful and multiply; fill the earth and subdue it” (Gen. 1:28).
St. John Paul II was wont to note that this is God’s first blessing to newly created man and woman, the “only creature God wanted for himself.” Everything else God creates, he subordinates to human dominion. Man is the only creature whom God directly wanted for himself (for man) and himself (for God)—as a person with whom he could enter into a personal relationship.
God created the human person “in our image and likeness”—not “my” image, but “ours.” Already we see that God is not alone, an isolated individualist, but a communion of persons. And God does not create the human person alone, but in a complementary two-some. (In Genesis 2, where the Yahwist writer does separate the creation of man from woman, God is anthropomorphically presented as recognizing that “it is not good that the man should be alone.”)
So, not only is God a communion of persons, who creates human beings as a communion of persons, but his first blessing on the human couple is fertility, enabling them to perpetuate and expand that communion: “Be fruitful and multiply.”
In traditional Jewish law, Genesis 1:28 is presented as both a blessing and a mitzvah, a commandment—indeed, the first command God gives human beings. It is God’s intent that the human person have babies. This is why celibacy was so radical a New Testament change: it was not a value in Old Testament Judaism.
As Catholics, we affirm that grace builds on nature. That’s why the Church would affirm that this “fertility is good” perspective is not some quirky Catholic doctrine relevant only to Friday fish-eaters. No—it’s grounded in and binding on every human being as part of natural law.
Genesis does not present God making Jews and Catholics in his image and likeness. It presents him as making “man”—i.e., all humankind—in his image and likeness. The fact that something has theological justifications does not mean that it only is justified theologically.
Take Erik Erikson’s stages of psychosocial development. Put most basically, they recognize that human development is a progressive getting out from one’s self toward other persons. A child passes critical developmental milestones when he realizes that Mommy is not just the food-and-comfort extension of me, but somebody else. (That’s another reason why fatherhood is more than just insemination and why fathers and mothers are not merely interchangeable, socially gendered “parents.”) He gradually advances from dealing with others to taking responsibility for another (marriage) to taking responsibility for someone who does not yet exist—i.e., children (“generativity”). This progressive going out of self toward another is prerequisite to every human being’s normal development, even if it also tallies with the biblical injunction about needing to lose one’s self to find it (Matt. 10:39, 16:25).
So fertility is good. But what kind of good?
In philosophy, there are two kinds of good: a bonum honestum, or something that is good in itself, and a bonum utile, or something that is good because it is useful. Catholic thought regards fertility as a bonum honestum.
Fertility is good because life is good. Period. Not because it is useful—nor does it cease to be good when it is not useful, when it is inconvenient or problematic.
Here is precisely where the nub of the modern problem lies.
The modern world would have you believe that fertility has no inherent significance, no intrinsic value. Fertility is “good” if it is “good for you,” if it is useful or convenient to your “life project” at this moment. If it’s not, then it’s bad, something to be suppressed, eliminated, destroyed. Fertility—and by extension, life—gets its value from how it fits or does not fit your life project.
That’s why fertility—a perfectly normal and natural dimension of a healthy, post-pubescent human being—is destroyed, temporarily (contraception) or permanently (sterilization). It’s why the current transgender mania defends permanently destroying the fertility of a minor child, even before that fertility has normally developed, as “health care” and “therapeutic.”
But consider this: if fertility has no inherent meaning or value except what a particular person assigns to it, that means that every normal human being is naturally developmentally deformed . . . because every normal person is fertile, a man from puberty onward and a woman intermittently from puberty until menopause. That would mean that the default method of function of only one of the nine systems of the human body—the generative (note what that word entails)—is congenitally defective.
Do you really believe that?
There is a reason why kids once upon a time played Mommy and Daddy. There is a reason why, once upon a time, people—in contrast to our era—married. There is a reason why people wanted to have babies (and why parents and in-laws sometimes obtrusively wanted to nudge that process along). These are natural and normal things of human life and development.
What is “weird” is the idea that human beings develop “normally” by being isolated individuals at odds with their biology, at odds with how human beings have developed for millennia, at odds with “what comes naturally” . . . in order to fulfill the expectations of a particular socio-cultural construct of our time.
The question ultimately comes down to this: is fertility good? And—pace the Planned Parenthood message—the answer of our Judaeo-Christian heritage has been unequivocally “yes.”