Brainwash be gone. A podcast for women who've left a high control, high demand religion. In every episode, we deconstruct one specific rule you were taught so you can let go of the harmful conditioning and live an amazing life on your own terms. Today we'll be talking about:

" Have as many babies as possible."

In high demand religions, there is pervasive pressure to have as many kids as possible. In this episode, we're gonna talk about the impact of this mandate and about how it perpetuates generational religious trauma. Listen to this, if you wanna free yourself from any remaining guilt you might have about.

Choosing to have fewer children or choosing not to have children at all, and we'll talk about how it's not too late to create a better example for the children we already have and break the cycle of spiritual abuse.

I know all of you listening out here in the audience were former members of all different types of high control, high demand religions. We've got ex-Mormons, former Catholics, former Jehovah's Witnesses, former Evangelicals and other groups as well, and. Although they had different specifics in terms of what they advised about why you should have more children.

It seems to be so typical across the board that there was pressure to have to have children and to have more children and to have as many babies as possible, essentially. And there were different reasons given for that. I know in my Catholic tradition, I was taught, I don't think I ever believed this, honestly, but I was taught that there are a bunch of souls waiting out there to be born and.

You know, if you don't have those babies into a Catholic family where their souls will be baptized and saved, then they're gonna get born into some other family across the world that's not Catholic and you know they're gonna go to hell. So it's like adopt the poor orphan souls and bring them into this world so that they don't burn in hell forever.

That's a really weird construct and a really weird reason to pressure people to have more children. 

and I know many of you were given different reasons that were honestly just as weird, and a lot of times there was. Sort of an idea of divine will, be fruitful and multiply. It says in the Bible, and God just wants us to have all these babies and if we really trusted God, we would just have babies without thinking about the consequences of having babies.

And then you add in the fact that motherhood is supposedly our only and highest and holiest calling and there was just a general idea of moral superiority for large families that showed your righteousness, your selflessness, your faith in God's provision. At least those are the reasons that we were told explicitly were the reasons that we were supposed to have more children.

I think it's pretty clear, especially when we look at how typical this advice was, that there were definitely some other motives behind that as well, it's certainly a lot easier to grow a religion by having children into families that are already part of this religion, indoctrinating them from birth, and then keeping them in the faith with, essentially psychological torture in a lot of cases, and spiritual abuse, religious trauma, than it is to recruit other people who weren't raised in this system, who weren't ever brainwashed during their formative years.

To bring those types of adult people into the religion is a lot more work. It's just a lot more resources. It's a lot more difficult to acculturate them into your religion than just having more children. More members of the religion can mean more influence, more power, definitely more money for the entire group.

There's definitely a lot of motive to keep the numbers growing through a high birth rate. You also retain members realistically through the dependency of families that are big. When a woman has so many children, she has so much less time, so much less money, so much less energy to question authority or to leave.

And the children tie her to a spouse. And that also prevents her from potentially wanting to leave, even if it's a bad situation in her particular case.

And often there's a social structure that's built on unpaid female labor where the women are doing the childcare, they're doing homeschooling, potentially they're doing all different types of community support, and that becomes very normalized under a system where you're having lots of children and the church and the community is depending on that.

So there's encouragement for us to stay in that system causes a lot of cultural isolation. Extremely large families are not as common in the general culture here in the United States or in other countries where people might be listening to this podcast. It's a lot more common in these ultra conservative groups, and so when you have a bunch of children, it actually makes it harder for you to participate in other.

Standard parts of our culture, even just going out to a restaurant becomes difficult because they just don't make seating for, you know, 12 people as a common expectation in most parts of the United States. So that forced isolation and exclusion from the general culture pushes it even further into an us them sort of mentality.

So what's the impact of following a rule like this? There can be a ton of guilt and shame for women if you suffer from infertility. If you simply do not want to have children, or you just don't wanna have an unmanageable large number of children. There's a huge physical strain on the body for having multiple births, a lot of long-term health complications from, you know, losing bone density, anemia, pelvic issues, higher rates of maternal mortality.

For groups that give health advice based on the available science. Like the World Health Organization, for example, they recommend that women go at least two to three years between each baby, just so that her body can somewhat recover and lessen these impacts.

But often that's not something that's respected in these groups, even though it would be much healthier for the woman. There's a huge psychological burden to constant caregiving. It can lead to depression, loss of personal identity, you know, being someone outside of just being a mom and chronic exhaustion.

It causes vulnerability to abuse because the more children you have, the logistically harder it might be to leave an abusive marriage and continue to care for your children. Women also may be told that their children will be taken from them if they leave the marriage, which keeps them potentially in a really bad situation.

There's also a huge impact on the families themselves, the strain on resources. Having a large family often means. Serious financial struggles and emotional struggles because each child, by definition receives less attention, potentially less education, less care and love, and that really does add up. It's really not possible for people.

Pass a certain point to spend quality time with each of their children. And what happens functionally, as we know if we're in cultures where there are very large families, is that. Young children are functionally raised by their older sisters rather than by adult parents, and that has such an impact both on those younger children who I mean to be raised by a child instead of an adult.

Children are not equipped emotionally and heck, a lot of adults aren't equipped emotionally to raise children, but a child raising a child. Leaves a lot of of gaps and a lot of potential trauma there. Plus it is taking the childhood of the older daughters when they are pressed immediately into household service and, and parenting duties.

Anyway, we've all seen and felt the impacts that this push for having more and more children within these religious communities has on us and has on society as a whole. There's definitely a lot of hypocrisy. Even if you think about from a religious perspective where we're saying trust in God. Trust that God will help you to care for however many children you end up having, but they need strict control of. Every other area of my life like God can't handle if I wear a tank top.

But if I have the 12 to 15 children that my body will naturally bear if I just marry young and have 'em without any control, like that should be totally fine. It's just really, it's weird to be just completely blase about this one area of very high significance and to insist that we can trust God.

 There's also inconsistency in hypocrisy within individual denominations. And because I used to be Catholic, I can speak to that for Catholics, when we get married, we have to go through a course on, they call it natural family planning, and It's a form of tracking the woman's signs of fertility and then.

So then you just are supposed to not have sex when she's fertile when you don't wanna have babies.

When I took that class, when I was engaged, the instructors of the course were two women who both had eight plus children each. So it's not entirely clear if they knew how the system worked. And it struck me even at that moment how incredibly hypocritical it was to say. We have to use this natural system because we have to subject ourselves to God's will.

But at the same time, we promise this system works at like 90 whatever percent accuracy. And it's like you can't have it both ways. If you're claiming it works at like 90, whatever what they said, like 99% accuracy, spoiler alert, I am pretty sure that's not true, but.

Let's say that that's true, it's 99% accurate, then aren't you just subverting God's will doing it that way? Like how is that any different than using something that the scientists say is 99% accurate? Just asking, it's just very suspicious. That's all I'm saying. It also tends to be such a gendered, double standard where men's worth isn't tied to the number of children that they produce or raise.

It's not their only purpose in life under these religious systems, there's also a contradiction with the teachings on financial prudence in a lot of these religions, you're taught to be responsible, save up, buy things in cash, you know, stewardship of resources, but completely unplanned, unlimited family growth without regard for how to care for these humans that you're bringing into the world is.

Realistically completely in contradiction to that. Like what? Don't use a credit card have 20 kids. Like what? That just doesn't make sense. And we also see cultural hypocrisy sometimes where some leaders who might advocate for large families may themselves be in a totally different situation where they're either very wealthy or maybe they don't even have kids.

Like in the case of Catholic priests. They're not allowed to marry, they're not allowed to have children, and the church is going to care for them for the rest of their lives no matter what.

So for them to say, I'm sure you'll figure it out how to provide food and housing and education and healthcare for all of these children without having any understanding of what it actually feels like in this country to do that is completely insensitive and hypocritical. Just saying. Anyway, so here are some.

Alternative viewpoints that you may choose to take on if you are seeing that you just don't believe in completely uncontrolled reproduction anymore? I'll say that I believe that women should have agency. We should choose the number of children that we wanna have or not have any at all. And I think that consciously considering that and making the best decision.

For you and with a partner, if you have one that reflects moral maturity, and I think it's very important to consider how we would care for any children that came into the world. And it's important to consider what we can provide to the world that's not. Just having children, we have so much to offer, and by definition, if we choose to spend time raising children, that's taking time away from something else, we could potentially do some other gift.

We could offer the world. I'm not saying they're mutually exclusive, but it's certainly a reasonable consideration. How you choose to show up in society, how you choose to live your life is your own choice.

I did not consider whether or not to have children before I started having children immediately at a young age, as so many of us have. But now I know that I'm gonna try to do my part to end generational trauma by working to heal my own baggage and pass as little of my baggage onto my children as possible.

It's amazing if you can support your children in deciding their own path, not passing on this pressure. If you've previously joked a bunch about wanting grandkids or pressuring them to have children, you could go back and say, Hey, you know, I know we've talked about this before, but I just wanna make it really clear that I completely support what you wanna do in terms of having children, not having children living your life.

I want you to be happy. I want you to live your best life. I know I raised you in this. Culture and I just don't believe in that anymore and I don't want that pressure to exist between us.

Anyway, as always, your choice about all these things, but they're just some things to consider about. Breaking this generational trauma, how do we not pass the baton on all of the bullshit that harmed us? How do we support our kids in doing something else, and even free ourselves too, because we're in on this, uh, freedom.

I used to think I'm getting my kids out of this, this like, this dies with me. and then I realized, you know what, actually I could free myself too. Like I, I'm not a lost cause I'm still here. Like I'm still doing this. So, and I bet a lot of you are too. And I just love that so much. Like, yes, we're getting our kids out and we're getting ourselves out.

So there, okay. So a couple of reflections to end this topic. When did you first learn that? A good woman should have many children. How did that belief shape your sense of worth or identity, your actions, and how might redefining fruitfulness or service in non-biological terms change your understanding of purpose and even spirituality if you choose?

Do you believe in our mission here at Brainwash be gone? Then please leave us a review on your podcast app. It helps other women find us so we can keep on busting more sisters out. 

Topics: Religious trauma, spiritual abuse, deconstruction, exmormon, exmo, exvangelical, recovering catholic, excatholic, former jehovah's witness, women's empowerment, feminism, leaving religion, self-worth, high demand religions, high control groups, high control religion, cult, cult recovery, brainwashed, high demand religion, spiritual trauma, church abuse