review originally published in the YLCF Journal, issue 32

OPEN EMBRACE:
A Protestant Couple Rethinks Contraception

buy from Christian Book Distributors
buy from Amazon.com

“They have done a beautiful job with Open Embrace! Humble, practical, inspiring, down-to-earth, well-written, and easy-to-read, it is a book that every couple should read. Singles will appreciate its message as well. Bethany writes so sweetly of the blessing of motherhood, sharing from her heart. And Sam does a great yet humble job of laying forth their findings about birth control and natural family planning. They don’t force an opinion on you, but leave the reader to draw their own conclusion, encouraging you to pray and study about it for yourselves. This couple has been willing to stand up as a voice for their generation. May they be an inspiration to young and old alike to follow God’s design for love and family!”

-Gretchen Glaser, 2003

Quotable Quotes from Open Embrace

• Evangelicals are known for “engaging the culture.” Contemporary Christian music, for example, often mimics the sound of “secular” music while adding Christian lyrics, as though the music conveys no message of its own. Problems arise when we begin engaging the culture and end up marrying it.
• Some wives and husbands try to sever the procreative dimension from the unitive. They imagine that by refusing the “burden” of children, they can achieve a better partnership, a higher intimacy. The problem here is that their partnership was designed for raising children, and any so-called intimacy which is deliberately closed to new life is merely a collaboration in selfishness.
• Our culture tells us that sex is really about pleasure, not spousal unity and procreation. Thus, in order to stay culturally relevant, many Christians stress that it was God who designed sex to yield pleasure. From this legitimate starting point, however, some Christians end up elevating pleasure above the procreative and unitive aspects of sex. In so doing, they unconsciously buy into our culture’s hedonistic pursuit of pleasure as an end in itself.
• All who fight for life should take the lessons of history to heart. As long as the contraceptive mentality prevails, abortion will follow. One of the most practical steps we can take to combat abortion is to renounce contraception in our homes. Too many people have built their lives around the availability of contraception and, if that fails, abortion.
• Abortion advocates have long known that if you oppose abortion on the grounds that life begins at conception, you must oppose also the Pill, which can prevent the implantation of a fertilized egg — a tiny, genetically complete human being.
• If God gives you children, be a mother with your whole mind, soul, and strength. If he has given you the talents to be an engineer, the same thing applies. But I am dubious that he would ever ask us to be fully both at one time…We cannot expect to juggle all the hats and be the best we can be at all of them. The reality is that if I choose to have a full-time career, my husband and kids will have me only part-time. …It is only by sacrifice that we understand what true love, commitment, and maturity really mean. Being a husband and father, or wife and mother, forces you to look outside yourself to the needs of others.

Related Links

• A Dialogue About Birth Control by Randy Alcorn
• Pro-Life articles at Eternal Perspectives Ministries
• watch for an update post/review from Gretchen next week, “Open Embrace Revisited”

• Share this: