Theopedia

Child bearing

“Children are a heritage from the LORD, the fruit of the womb a reward.”

— Psalm 127:3 (ESV)

Definition

Childbearing is conceiving, carrying, and bringing forth children within marriage. Scripture presents it as part of God’s original blessing on humanity to “be fruitful and multiply” (Gen. 1:28), a “heritage” and a “reward” rather than a burden (Ps. 127:3), and one of the ends for which marriage itself was ordained, alongside mutual help and the guarding of God’s people from sexual sin. The fall brought pain into the process (Gen. 3:16), yet childbearing remains a blessing under grace rather than merely a hardship to be endured.

Confessional Witness

The 1689 London Baptist Confession names childbearing among the very reasons marriage exists:

“Marriage was ordained for the mutual help of husband and wife, for the increase of mankind with a legitimate issue, and the preventing of uncleanness.”1

Marriage thus serves three ends together, not childbearing alone: companionship between husband and wife, “the increase of mankind with a legitimate issue” (children conceived and raised within a lawful marriage rather than outside it), and protection from sexual sin.1 Bearing children is accordingly not an incidental byproduct of marriage on this reading but one of its intended purposes, tied from the start to the honorable, exclusive union of “one man and one woman.”2

Biblical Basis

The creation mandate makes bearing children a task, not merely a possibility. Having made humanity male and female in his own image, God blessed them and commanded them to “be fruitful, multiply, fill the earth, subdue it, and rule over it as God’s representatives”; without both man and woman together, “God’s work of creation was incomplete” (Gen. 1:27-28).3 That mandate carries forward into God’s later covenants: the same blessing of fruitfulness is renewed to Noah after the flood and to Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob, so that childbearing continues not only creation’s original blessing but God’s ongoing covenant promise to his people.4

Scripture consistently frames the children this mandate produces as gift rather than burden. “Sons are indeed a heritage from the LORD, offspring, a reward. Like arrows in the hand of a warrior are the sons born in one’s youth” (Ps. 127:3-4).4 Old Testament history reflects the same conviction: fruitfulness is promised for Israel’s obedience and threatened to fail for disobedience (Deut. 28:11, 63), and individual barrenness, though never a reliable index of an individual’s own sin, is treated throughout as genuine grief rather than a matter of indifference.4

The fall did not cancel this blessing, but it did attach suffering to it. God’s judgment on the woman in Eden included, alongside her subjection to her husband, “multiplied pain and sorrow in childbirth” (Gen. 3:15-16).5 Scripture holds that same judgment together with a promise rather than leaving it as pure loss. Herman Bavinck reads Genesis 3:16 and Paul’s statement that a woman “will be saved through childbearing” (1 Tim. 2:15) as two sides of a single post-fall reality:

“The penalty for the original transgression strikes the woman both as mother and as wife: suffering and pain in bringing forth children, desire for and submission to her husband. Yet, she will also be the mother of all living and blessed in bearing children.”6

Paul’s own qualification keeps this from making childbearing itself the ground of a woman’s salvation: the blessing holds for a woman who “continue[s] in faith and love and holiness, with self-control” (1 Tim. 2:15), the persevering faith that Scripture elsewhere names as what actually saves, not the act of bearing children as such.

Objections and Responses

Isn’t it selfish, or a denial of God’s blessing, for a Christian couple to use contraception to delay or limit how many children they have? Scripture consistently calls children a blessing to be received, not a burden to be minimized, but it also calls Christians to genuine stewardship of the resources God gives them.7 J. Alan Branch argues that “decisions to space the birth of children based on financial concerns, when made with caution and biblical reflection, can be consistent with Scripture,” so long as the reasoning is real financial need rather than consumerism dressed up as prudence: wanting to delay childbearing “so they can buy a Harley Davidson motorcycle or a new Ranger bass boat” is not the same thing as being genuinely unable to provide for a family.7 Paul’s own instruction that “if anyone does not provide for his own… he has denied the faith and is worse than an unbeliever” (1 Tim. 5:8) cuts against treating children as an indefinitely postponable inconvenience, not in favor of doing so.7

Related Doctrines

References

  1. The Second London Baptist Confession of Faith (1689), chap. 25, “Of Marriage,” para. 2. ↩ ↩2

  2. The Second London Baptist Confession of Faith (1689), chap. 25, “Of Marriage,” para. 1. ↩

  3. Ken Magnuson, Invitation to Christian Ethics: Moral Reasoning and Contemporary Issues (Grand Rapids, MI: Kregel Academic, 2020), chap. 6, “Sexual Ethics.” ↩

  4. Ken Magnuson, Invitation to Christian Ethics: Moral Reasoning and Contemporary Issues (Grand Rapids, MI: Kregel Academic, 2020), chap. 11, “Infertility and Assisted Reproductive Technologies.” ↩ ↩2 ↩3

  5. James Petigru Boyce, Abstract of Systematic Theology, 2nd printing (Baltimore: H. M. Wharton & Company, 1887), 239. ↩

  6. Herman Bavinck, Reformed Dogmatics: Abridged in One Volume, ed. John Bolt (Grand Rapids: Baker Academic, 2011), chap. 14, “The Only Begotten Son of the Father.” ↩

  7. J. Alan Branch, 50 Ethical Questions: Biblical Wisdom for Confusing Times (Bellingham, WA: Lexham Press, 2021), chap. 34, “May Christian Couples Consider Finances When Thinking about the Size of Their Family?,” 153-156. ↩ ↩2 ↩3