Question: I would like to ask your opinion about a long-term chaste marriage (a mutual agreement between my spouse and me) and about planning to approach conception only prayerfully, with minimal focus on pleasure and solely for procreation throughout our lives, given a very difficult situation and living in a very strict, not particularly child-friendly East Asian city in the future.
My spouse has had late-stage cancer for almost five years. He still has cancer, and no one knows when he will recover. His medication can cause miscarriage and severe birth defects if we do not abstain. He is now approaching his mid-40s, and we have accumulated debt because of his illness. We already had a child before he developed cancer.
We have lived in complete marital abstinence for almost seven years (we also abstained during pregnancy), and I conceived our son prayerfully. God blessed this child and allowed him to be born on a feast day of our local Orthodox Church. We live in a city with extremely strict and expensive child-related regulations, stricter than those in many other countries, and many people live in apartments of only 200–350 square feet.
We have mutually agreed to continue complete abstinence for probably ten more years from now, though there is a possibility it could become lifelong. My spouse also accepts this. Even though we have shared marital intimacy only three times during our eight-year marriage, our relationship has gradually become stronger and better. I will continue to do my best to remain chaste and guard myself against temptation and sin. Our church members and friends support us.
I have read that the saints of Mount Athos taught that married couples should refrain from marital relations during fasting periods, holy days, pregnancy, breastfeeding years, before and after Communion, during a woman's monthly cycle, and that some stricter Elders also spoke about abstinence after childbearing years. No form of birth control is allowed. Saints also speak about dispassionate conception and teach about prayer during conception, and some teach that abstinence during pregnancy can protect future children.
Many women and some men lose the ability for physical intimacy later in life, and many women experience pain or discomfort during intimacy after menopause because of hormonal changes. After our own experiences, and after learning that Orthodox and Catholic traditions before the 1980s opposed all forms of birth control, including natural family planning, I sometimes wonder whether, ideally, intimacy within marriage should be only for procreation and not for pleasure (to avoid attachment or addiction in the future), and whether couples should pray before, during, and after conception.
Many of us, because of serious health problems and difficult life circumstances, cannot have 10–20 children. We are happy to have a chaste marriage, but if this were considered the ideal, many people might experience marital intimacy for procreative purposes only a few times during an entire 30–40+ year marriage and then live in lifelong abstinence. There are also a few women who have conceived naturally after sterilization and even after menopause, after age 50.
I know a traditional Catholic woman from Britain who shared marital intimacy only 14 times in nearly a 20-year marriage and has six children. They never used NFP or any other non-abortive form of birth control. They now plan to live in lifelong abstinence because she has reached menopause.
No matter what, we need to continue a long-term chaste marriage until our situation improves significantly. Before my husband's cancer, we had also planned to abstain for five or six years or more after having children.
I also do not know about having more children after age 45, especially since my husband is twelve years older and would be close to sixty by then. Birth control methods are not always effective. I was conceived despite one form of birth control, and many children are conceived despite all birth control methods. I even read about a 54-year-old woman becoming pregnant naturally and unexpectedly after officially reaching menopause.
The answer of Fr. Andrew Lemeshonok to the question:
I feel sorry for the world, and for the sheer madness of people. People lose who they are; they become mass-produced, conditioned by endless laws and decrees. The world plans everything, even the family, which is a gift from God to mankind.
As a matter of fact, I have watched programmes about your native city, and there is a great deal there. But here things are better in every way. Lukashenko [the President of Belarus] says, “Give birth to two, and the third is mine” — here, we do things the other way round. Space is tight over there, so they worry and scheme about how to survive on a tiny patch of land. Come to us! Have ten children if you like. You may even receive the Mother Heroine award.
Perhaps if a baby comes, the illness will pass too. We are all sick. If we speak only about illness and keep groaning over it, then we may as well stop living altogether. I think it gets worse because of cramped conditions, because of this atmosphere of fear. It comes from the way the country is set up, from certain laws. And in such a state, the body finds it hard to fight illness.
