The Quiverfull movement saddles women with a life of submission and near-constant pregnancies. One mother explains how she embraced the extreme Christian lifestyle — and why she left.
Accepting every pregnancy as a unilateral blessing meant some radical leaps of faith, however. Put into physical practice, Vyckie Garrison says the lesson of leaders like Nancy Campbell, editor of the fundamentalist women’s magazine Above Rubies and author of movement books like “Be Fruitful and Multiply,” “was, if pregnancy can kill you, think of the missionaries who go off to foreign lands and put their lives on the line. It’s no different if you’re risking your own body or life.” Indeed, Mary Pride referred to her mothers as “maternal missionaries.”
Garrison complied. She’d had her first three children by cesarean section, but after coming to the Quiverfull conviction, she was swayed by the movement’s emphasis on natural (even unassisted home) birth. During one delivery, she suffered a partial uterine rupture and “felt like I’d been in a major battle with Satan, and he’d just about left me dead.” The doctor who treated Garrison lectured her for an hour not to conceive again, but she felt that stopping on her own would be rebellion. When she turned to her leaders for inspiration, she received a bleak message: that if she died doing her maternal duty, God would care for her family. For six months, she couldn’t look at the baby without crying. Read all.
