Fundamentalists embrace Quiverfull, reject birth control

Posted by Lindsay Beyerstein at 6:25 AM on November 16, 2006.

The liberal blogosphere is buzzing over Katheryn Joyce's Arrows For the War, an intimate look at the so-called Quiverfull movement. Quiverfulls are a loosely organized Protestant subculture that rejects family planning in all its forms. Even the rhythm method is considered too interventionist.

Quiverfull wives are expected to welcome as many babies as God sends them.

"Our bodies are meant to be a living sacrifice," write the Hesses. Or, as Mary Pride, in another of the movement's founding texts, The Way Home: Beyond Feminism, Back to Reality, puts it, "My body is not my own." This rebuttal of the feminist health text Our Bodies, Ourselves is deliberate. Quiverfull women are more than mothers. They're domestic warriors in the battle against what they see as forty years of destruction wrought by women's liberation: contraception, women's careers, abortion, divorce, homosexuality and child abuse, in that order. [...] Instead of picketing clinics, Pride writes, Christians should fight abortion by demonstrating that children are an "unqualified blessing" by having as many as God gives them. Only a determination among Christian women to take up their submissive, motherly roles with a "military air" and become "maternal missionaries" will lead the Christian army to victory.

Some Quiverfulls have their sterilizations reversed. Blessed Arrows a sterilization reversal ministry pools the money of the faithful to fund reversals for those who can't afford the procedures--so that the "beneficiaries" can have as many children as the Ultimate Birth Controller sees fit.

Trystero and Amanda discuss the barely concealed racist political agenda of the seemingly gentle Quiverfulls. Digby decries the sheer lunacy of a Democratic Leadership Council operative who's trying to welcome these people into the Big Tent of the Democratic party.

[Hullabaloo, Pandagon]

Tagged as: christian, religious right, wingnuts, quiverfull

Lindsay Beyerstein a New York writer blogging at Majikthise.