Albert Mohler: Put a Stop to Large Families?

September 18, 2008

These days, the issue of family size can be controversial -- just ask any couple with several children. Large families are often seen as oddities and treated as an imposition. Why would anyone willingly have so many kids? Don't they know about birth control?

Few comments reveal as much about our times as these. Those with even the slightest historical awareness would know that large families were the norm throughout human history, and for good reason. In the Bible, large families are seen as a sign of God's blessing and children are celebrated as God's gifts. Only with the development of modern birth control and the transformations of values and worldviews that followed, does any other view of large families make sense.

The pill changed everything. In addition, concerns about human overpopulation and an ecological crisis led some to see large families as expensive and inefficient hobbies, or worse. Social planners held out the example of the two-child family, and some ideologues wanted to define "normal" as one child per couple. By the early twenty-first century, reproduction rates were falling around the world. Some European nations were facing a demographic crisis of low birthrates and not a single major European nation was reproducing at even the replacement rate. the rest image