The Maybe Baby Conversation

How do couples decide when and how many children to have? The Maybe Baby Conversation can Help.

During our engagement, we took lessons in a Fertility Awareness Method (FAM), then known as Natural Family Planning. Wanting to live a Catholic marriage, we accepted the Church’s wisdom and rejected contraception to follow her moral teaching. We’ve never regretted that decision.

Over six months, a private instructor coached us on how to use the method. One thing we noticed however, was that there was little attention or practical advice on how to arrive at our ‘pregnancy intention’ each month. All the focus was on how to apply FAMs to whatever that intention was.

With our first three children born in a four-year period, we got a crash course in the reality of parenthood. Chronic sleep deprivation, worry, and the frustration of constant chaos pushed us to our limits.

Conscious Parenthood

Painfully aware of the decades of responsibility ahead of us, we were at the pointy end of what the church calls ‘Conscious Parenthood’*.  Originally translated as ‘Responsible Parenthood’, it calls us to consciously and carefully plan for our family. To quote Humanae Vitae (n10):

“The mission of Conscious Parenthood requires that spouses recognise their duties toward God, toward themselves, toward the family, and toward human society, as they maintain a correct set of priorities.”

Over the following years, we muddled our way through with prayer, study, and input from mentors and spiritual advisors. God blessed us with two more children, and a growing ministry in marriage formation.

Our church has always affirmed the inestimable worth of the child and honoured the parents who raise it. Yet, raising a child is a tremendous responsibility drawing on the emotional, physical, spiritual and economic resources of the parents.

Thus procreation is not only about conceiving and giving birth to a child. It is also about forming and parenting that child into independent adulthood. Importantly, it includes introducing that child to the God who loves him or her.

There will be times in a couple’s life when we will discern the need to postpone a pregnancy for a period or perhaps indefinitely. As every married couple is unique, each of us must prayerfully discern for ourselves how many children God calls us to have and when to have them.

Godly decisions

The first question for couples is: are we deciding or discerning? The key difference between the two is the presence of God.

When we actively seek to involve God by basing our choices on God’s principles for living and prayerfully seek his guidance, we can be confident in the wisdom of our choices.

Throughout our married life, God will regularly place before us the invitation to be more life-giving. Sometimes this invitation will take the form of conceiving a child, at others it might be to invest more deeply in one or more of our existing children, foster or adopt a child not our own, care for an extended family member in need, to take up a ministry or get involved in a community initiative.

In seeking to follow him, God will frequently call us to reform our lifestyle to be more available to our spouse or family: we cannot make this discernment in isolation from the rest of our life, as our readiness to welcome another child or to be life-giving in some other way, needs space in our life in order to take root.

Maybe Baby?

The Maybe Baby Conversation is a discernment tool to help couples discern our pregnancy intention for the following fertility cycle. It works to keep us close as a couple, attuned to the other, to God’s presence, and to the stressors in our lives.

Based on section 10 in Humanae Vitae the Maybe Baby Conversation is book-ended with prayer and explores in a ‘correct set of priorities’, each spouse’s experience in their marriage, parenting, and finally their wider social circle.

It’s like a ‘check-in’ with each other on how we are going, inviting us to proactively respond to the needs of our marriage, family and society. It’s a practical way to enable God to influence our family planning and pregnancy intentions.

Having struggled to do this well in our marriage, we wanted to include guidance on this critical aspect of married life in the SmartLoving Fertility course. The Maybe Baby Conversation is one of the tools we wished we had had in our relationship toolkit from the beginning.