EP 68: The Time My Husband Nearly Got a Vasectomy
It’s Thanksgiving week, so I’m counting my blessings, and my 12 children are right up there at the top of the list. Another thing I’m grateful for? The fact my husband didn’t cut my childbearing years short by getting a vasectomy, though he definitely considered it at one point.
I’m so grateful he didn’t go through with it. Listen to this week’s episode to hear why, and to learn what stopped him from making what, for us, would’ve been a huge mistake.
Show Notes:
VERSES CITED:
- Colossians 1:16-17 – “…all things have been created through Him and for Him. He is before all things, and in Him all things hold together.”
- Hebrews 1:3 – “The Son is the radiance of God’s glory and the exact representation of His being, sustaining all things by His powerful word.”
- Revelation 4:11 – “You are worthy, our Lord and God, to receive glory and honor and power, for you created all things, and by your will they were created and have their being.”
- 1 Corinthians 8:6 – “…there is but one Lord, Jesus Christ, through Whom all things came and through Whom we live.”
RELATED LINKS:
- More than Meets the Eye – this is the book by Richard Swenson that made such an impression on my husband (I don’t think I gave the title in the podcast)
- Always Open: 5 Reasons I Love Having My Tubes Intact – my response to an article from the other side of the issue, written by a woman who was grateful to have hers tied
- Postponing Motherhood: At What Cost? – my review of Holly Grigg-Spall’s Sweetening the Pill
The Closest My Husband Ever Came to Getting a Vasectomy
Full transcript for Episode 68
Hello, friend.
Welcome to episode 68 of Loving Life at Home. Since this is Thanksgiving week, and because my family is one of the things for which I’m most profoundly grateful, I thought that this would be a great time to share with you some of the decisions and convictions that led to my husband and my having 12 children, as well as some of the temptations and trials that conspired to prevent or having all those kids.
Having a big family was something that we discussed long before we decided to marry. I knew I wanted a bunch of children, and I did not want to risk falling in love with somebody that didn’t share that same desire. And so we talked about it very, very early on, when we first started dating, and agreed that we would try to have a big family.
But at the time, my husband still had a lot of school ahead of him, and so we toyed with the idea of waiting to get married until after he was finished with school. Not just his bachelor’s degree, which he hadn’t completed when we did marry, but also his medical training and possibly even his residency, which would have added another 8-10 years onto our engagement…which we’re not big fans of long engagements. And that obviously is not how it played out.
But we thought that perhaps all of our advisors and parents who warned us it was going to be difficult to have children while he was still in school, that maybe they were right. And so we thought going into marriage that we would just abstain from sex during fertile times as a way of delaying having children.
I’m sorry if this is too much information, but as Providence would have it, I began my cycle about 15 minutes before I walked down the aisle to exchange vows with my husband. And after we abstained until that was over, he was not very interested in following through with our original plan to abstain during fertile times.
And so we threw caution to the wind and got pregnant two weeks into our honeymoon.
And then we had that baby nine months later.
And I’m still operating on the thought that we are going to abstain during fertile time.
So after the season of waiting postpartum, for me to heal up was complete, again, he did not want to extend that period of abstinence any further.
So again, we tossed that plan out the window, and I got pregnant with #2 when our firstborn was six months old.
So when number two was born, I had a serious talk with my husband and said, ”Listen, we need to be on the same page. Either we’re going to do what we said we were going to do and abstain during fertile times, or we’re just going to accept these babies as they come. But I don’t want to be in the position of trying to decide whether I follow what we agreed upon or what in the moment you are interested in.”
Time to reassess
And so we — at that point, after our second baby was born — decided, “Well, God is doing a great job of adding to our family as it is, and so we will just trust Him to send us the children that He wants to send us in His perfect time.”
Now, I know some people think that that is very irresponsible. I’ve had people write to me on the blog and tell me as much. And my response to them is that I view it a little bit like going to eat at a five star restaurant and walking in, sitting down at the table, and saying, ”Don’t even bother to show me a menu because I know that whatever the chef prepares is going to be a delight to my senses, and I just would rather He surprise me.”
That’s not being an irresponsible diner. If you have full trust in the talents, skills, abilities of the person preparing your meal and you truly believed that whatever they chose would be amazing, why wouldn’t you let them pick?
So that’s how we came to view family planning — as God knows better than we do and His timing is perfect. And so we just mentally shifted to the idea of, instead of even pretending to have an element of control in this matter, which we obviously didn’t, we would just trust God to send us the children He wanted us to have as He felt appropriate.
Now, interestingly, after we decided that, we had our longest gap between children. In fact, it was long enough that we started thinking that maybe two was all that God was going to send us. And we canceled our maternity coverage. It was costing us a lot of money to be covered for babies. And so we thought, “We’ll save money. Obviously I’m not getting pregnant as easily as I did with those first two.”
And so that’s what we did. And of course, a month later I was pregnant again, and we had to pay for that one out of pocket. But I think I’ve shared before that that third pregnancy was a little bit difficult. (Not compared to what some people with truly difficult pregnancies endure, but compared to the ones that came before and all the ones that came after.)
It was hard because my baby was in such a position that it made it real difficult and painful for me to walk, especially during the last three months of my pregnancy or so. And so I just hobbled around for that period of time. And my father observed the difficulty with which I was getting around during that final trimester and pulled my husband aside after the baby was born and tried to talk him into getting a vasectomy without my knowledge.
He thought that that would be the most prudent course of action, because I think he felt like if I had any more children, I was going to be in a wheelchair, based on how difficult it was for me to walk during that last pregnancy.
But fortunately, my husband was not persuaded by my father’s arguments. And so it was a little bit easier for me to forgive my father for even meddling in that way and to realize that he really was giving advice based on what he considered best for me. He loved me and wanted me to be safe and healthy and able to take care of the children God had already given me. So I can, in my mind, think, ”Well, that’s why he tried to talk my husband into doing something that was so obviously against what our plans and hopes and dreams were.”
However, Dad was not the last one to try to talk Doug into doing something permanent like that. After we moved to Tyler… let’s see… we were expecting #6 by the time my husband finished all of his medical school and residency training and got the job that he’s had since 1997 in Tyler, Texas. And so, when we got to Tyler, he worked with a variety of surgeons, including some urologist who routinely did vasectomies. And a couple of them and some of his other colleagues really started to get in his ear about how much better life could be with a vasectomy.
And he’d laugh it off and ignore him for a while. But after our eighth child was born, he started thinking maybe our goal of having a big family had been realized. In fact, he said as much to me while I was in the delivery room with that newborn on my chest, like, maybe this should be our last baby.
Which, oh, my goodness, was the wrong thing to say to a hormonal woman who loved having babies, loved being pregnant, could hardly wait to come back every time they wheeled me out of the hospital with a newborn in arms. And so I was just in tears the whole two days I was in the hospital with that baby. And I’m sure the nurses were very concerned about my mental state and must have been thinking that I was suffering from profound postpartum depression.
But that really wasn’t the case. I was just trying to adjust to the idea that this might be my last child. And the idea that we would volitionally choose to end our fertility, when for so long we had completely trusted God with it, was really hard to reconcile in my mind.
Under a lot of stress
Now, looking back on it, I realize that a lot of things were contributing in addition to his colleagues’ comments and offers to do the vasectomy for him for free — and to do it even without my knowledge, if possible. As it happened, #8 was born after my husband had been away for two weeks. He was in the Army Reserves at the time. And so that summer, he had to drill. And so we had been separated for two weeks while he drilling in El Paso. And so, number one, that was a strain.
And then secondly, the closer I get to delivery, the more my nesting instinct kicks in. And so while he was out of town for two weeks, I started all sorts of projects at home to get ready for the baby that did not get completed before he made at home and I almost immediately went into labor: I’m talking, I ripped out carpet and had the floors recovered and re-sodded the backyard and dug up a bunch of flower beds because I wanted to plant vegetables. And I pulled the toilets so that I could redo the bathrooms.
All of this was going on at once, you know, because, like, during the day, I could lay grass outside, but I couldn’t very well do that after dark. And so I would do the home projects by night and the outdoor projects by day.
So when my husband came home from drilling, he found me checked into a hotel with all the kids, waiting for the air to clear because we had had the brick floors at our home refurbished while he was gone. And then, suddenly, I go into labor and have to go to the hospital and deliver this baby. And my parents come out from Dallas and help keep the kids and supervise the flooring being put in and the toilets being put back and finishing up the landscaping. And oh, my goodness, it was just a mess. And my husband doesn’t do very well with messes, so that also contributed to the stressors that he was experiencing at that time.
Nevertheless, when I came home from the hospital, it continued to be a source of contention. And, a big discussion that we continued to have.Doug was leaning heavily towards getting a vasectomy, which broke my heart
And he would give me his perspective, and I would give him my perspective. There seemed to be no way that we could both be happy with the decision. He was really leaning heavily towards getting a vasectomy, which just broke my heart.
And I guess I should point out that there was one more stressor. So the stress of being separated for two weeks while he did his army reserved drills, the stress of the mess that he came home to with all my nesting projects, the stress of having colleagues think that you’re crazy because you keep having children when it would be such an easy matter to just put an end to all that. And then, fourth, his medical training, you know, as a physician — especially as one that works in labor and delivery — has seen all sorts of things.
A lot of the times when I was pregnant, he was doing high risk pregnancy rotations or working with children, children who were profoundly disabled. And when you see that kind of thing every single day, you start thinking that it’s a lot more common than it is. And in fact, I think he started believing that it was just inevitable if we kept having children, we were going to wind up with some horrific outcome in his mind.
And one thing that, as we discussed these ideas, that I kept coming back to is that if God had lessons for us to learn that could only be learned by caring for a handicapped child, I would not have to give birth to a baby that was disabled. Any one of our strong, happy, healthy children, in a moment, could be rendered profoundly disabled. All it would take is a car wreck or a freak accident, a fall, a broken neck on the slip and slide, or meningitis or some other life threatening disease. And so I felt like we should trust God with the health of our children as well as the number of our children.
The hardest letter I ever wrote
Nevertheless, it continued to be an ongoing discussion. And no matter how well I articulated my position or backed it up with Scripture or communicated it through tears, it didn’t seem to be moving the needle anymore. And so finally I wrote my husband a letter and told him, ”You knowwhere I stand on this issue. Nevertheless, I married you, and I’m willing to trust God to lead me through you.”
I got to the point that I realized maybe God was putting this on my husband’s heart. I didn’t understand it. It didn’t make sense to me. It didn’t seem to line up with trusting Him the way we had historically trusted Him. But I realized that I needed to defer to him in this matter.
So I wrote him that letter and told him,
“You know where I stand on this. However, I’m going to trust God to lead me through you. And so if you have prayed about this and are convinced that this is what God would have you do, I will sign the papers.” (Because, as it turns out, I don’t think you can, as a husband, get a vasectomy without your wife’s knowledge. I think she does have to sign off on it, or at least at that time she did. )So, ”I’ll sign the papers for you to do that, or if you feel like it would be better for me to get a tubal ligation, then I’m even willing to do that, if that is what you prayerfully and honestly believe God would have you do, I’m not going to fight with you anymore about it. I’m just going to pray for you as you make the decision.”
a Letter to my husband
And so that was probably one of the hardest letters I’ve ever written, but I meant every word of it. And it was shortly after that, that Doug read a book [More Than Meets the Eye] by an author named Richard Swenson. And the book was actually divided into two parts. The first part was about cell biology, and the second part was about astronomy, so it was going from the microcosm of the cell to the macrocosm of the universe.
And it was written by a Christian, Richard Swenson. I still have so much gratitude that he wrote that book, because while reading it, my husband came to realize that if God holds all of nature together in His hands, and we believe He does, and the Bible teaches that He does.
Colossians 1:16-17 - "For in Him all things were created things in heaven and on earth, visible and invisible, whether thrones or dominions or rulers or authorities, all things were created through Him and for Him. He is before all things, and in Him all things hold together."
Or Hebrews 1:3 - "The sun is the radiance of God's glory and the exact representation of His nature, upholding all things by His powerful word."
Or Revelations 4:11 - "Worthy are you our Lord and God, to receive glory and honor and power. For You created all things; by Your will they exist and were created. "
Or 1 Corinthians 8:6 - "For us there is but one God, the Father, from whom all things came, and for whom we exist. And there is but one Lord, Jesus Christ, through whom all things came and through whom we exist." • • • "
So if He is holding all of creation together, from the smallest detail of our DNA and the protons and neutrons and electrons that make up each atom of our body, to the billions and billions of stars that make up the universe and galaxy upon galaxy, then He can certainly be trusted to take care of every detail of our life as well.
And so not only did my husband read that book (and God used it as a means of grace to change his mind on this issue), but he read the book aloud to us, as well. And I don’t know that our kids really grasped at the time how important that book was to the future of our family. But I know that later, when two of my children were in dental school in San Antonio, Richard Swenson came to address the Christian Medical and Dental Association there in town. And they got to meet him face-to-face and tell him how impactful his book had been on our family.
So after that one little glitch in our family history, we were right back to trusting God with the number and spacing and timing of our children. And we ended up having four more babies before it was all said and done.
God is in control
I think it is interesting that the Bible talks about how God opens and closes the womb. And I continued to have 12 years of regular cycles — like clockwork – after our #12 baby was born. And my husband and I continued our same schedule and never did anything during that dozen years to prevent pregnancy (and faithfully did what it would take to conceive again). And yet, 12 was obviously all that God had planned for our family.
I had one miscarriage after my youngest was born, but to my knowledge after that, I never conceived again, despite not going through menopause until I was 57 or 58. My youngest child was born the day after I turned 45. And as much as I would have loved to have another baby (or two or three), I have no regrets about how we conducted our life and how we put our own fertility on the altar to God and trusted Him with it. We didn’t squander a single moment of it.
Again, as I’ve said before, I had easy pregnancies, easy deliveries, healthy babies, a stable marriage and my husband had a steady job that provided for us well. And so it really was an easy matter –most of the time — to trust God with our family planning. And we’ve been so delighted with the results of that that it makes me want to be completely sold out to Christ in every area of my life.
I shared this story with some dear friends of ours a few months ago, and they were surprised to hear it. Sometimes we think that people that have a lot of faith and are strong in their faith never have struggles or doubts, and that’s not always the case.
The important thing is what you do with those doubts.
My advice is to take them to the foot of the cross, pour them out before the Father, and search His word for encouragement. God is good all the time. All the time, God is good. And He gave us His Word so that when we face trials and temptations, we would have that solid foundation beneath us on which we can stand firm.
I hope you have a wonderful Thanksgiving this week. Let us carry that spirit of gratitude for God’s abundant blessings forward not just on Thanksgiving Day, but moment by moment, day by day, the whole year through.
The Word of God is full of wisdom for every facet of life, but we’ve found it especially helpful in building a happy, healthy marriage. For a fascinating look at how science has confirmed the superiority of God’s design, check out my book Love Your Husband/Love Yourself.
