Book cover photo courtesy of Beacon Press

“The womb is such a powerful weapon; it’s a weapon against the enemy.”

So said Nancy Campbell in an NPR piece about the Quiverfull movement that aired yesterday.

Maybe it’s not fair to start with the most alarming quote from the entire story, but trust me, I felt alarmed when I heard it.  The womb is a weapon?  What on earth was this woman talking about?

It turns out that the Quiverfull movement is an extreme manifestation of a trend among evangelical Christians to have as many children as possible.  They shun birth control (generally even natural family planning) as improper meddling with God’s will.  They are also all over the blogosphere these days, thanks in large part to a new book by journalist Kathryn Joyce called Quiverfull: Inside The Christian Patriarchy Movement. The publishing house’s blurb about the book asserts that

In direct and conscious opposition to feminist calls…

America Magazine, a national Catholic weekly, recently published “A Sexual Revolution: One woman’s journey from pro-choice atheist to pro-life Catholic” by Jennifer Fulwiler.

Hers is an interesting chronicle. The beginning of her journey will be familiar, I think, to many in our culture. She writes:

Growing up in secular middle-class America, I understood sex as something disconnected from the idea of creating life. During my entire childhood I did not know anyone who had a baby sibling; and to the extent that neighborhood parents ever talked about pregnancy, it was to say they were glad they were “done.”

In high school sex education class, we learned not that sex creates babies, but that unprotected sex creates babies.

Even recently, before our marriage was blessed in the Catholic Church, my husband and I took a course about building good marriages. It was a video series by a nondenominational Christian group, and the segment called “Good Sex”…