My Husband Believes He Doesn't Get A Say In How Many Babies I Make

Stickers on the back of a car, showing a stick-figure family with a dad, mom, and 3 children. Image source.

Wrote this when I was 33 weeks pregnant

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I thought I would like being pregnant, but I don't. It really sucks. It's so much harder than I expected. Nausea, heartburn, weird pains in all different places, having to pee all the time, gaining weight, and so on and so on.

And I'm like "well I always thought I wanted to have 3 kids... but... I am making just the first one right now and it's already so hard. Am I really going to be able to make 3?"

And my husband, Hendrix, told me it's my decision. If I decide we are only having 1 kid because pregnancy is too hard, he is fine with that.

And I feel quite confused. Because, I never thought it should be 100% my decision. I never thought I had that right. I'm the one with a uterus, I'm the one who has to endure the whole pregnancy, I'm the one whose body changes- but does that mean it should be all me and he doesn't have a say at all?

What's a healthy, feminist, pro-choice view on this?

(I'm using the term "pro-choice" but I'm not actually talking about abortion here; I'm talking about my right to make a decision about how many pregnancies to go through. Yes, abortion can be a part of that, but more importantly is just not having unprotected sex in the first place. I think the term "pro-choice" should be about people's right to make decisions about their own bodies in many different contexts, not just about "I have the right to have an abortion." For example, it's very important that pregnant people all have access to good health care, so that if they want to keep the pregnancy, they can make that choice. People shouldn't feel like they are forced to have an abortion because prenatal health care is too expensive.)

I always thought that, before getting married, a couple should talk about how many kids they want (and if they even want kids at all). And yes, Hendrix and I did that. We want maybe like 2 or 3 kids, somewhere thereabouts. We agreed. But now I'm finding out that pregnancy sucks. I still want several kids, but wow it seems so much more daunting and unrealistic than it did back when we were just throwing ideas around and we didn't know anything.

In other words, what if a couple agrees on how many kids they want, when neither of them knows a single thing about pregnancy, and then the person with a uterus changes their mind after actually experiencing pregnancy and childbirth? Seems like that can quite easily happen.

Hendrix doesn't have a uterus- does that mean he gets no say in this? And, more generally, does it mean EVERYONE who doesn't have a uterus doesn't have the right to have offspring? The only way they can get offspring is to convince a person with a uterus to make a baby. There are no circumstances where they have the right to tell a person with a uterus "you HAVE TO make a baby." Is that... true? Even in marriage, they don't have that right?

In my case, one HUGELY IMPORTANT aspect of this situation is that my husband is Chinese. He has lived his entire life in China. His generation is the one affected by the one-child policy. For him, it's completely normal and expected that a family only has 1 child. He doesn't have brothers or sisters. Most people he knows (that are around his age) don't have brothers or sisters. (There are some exceptions, like twins, or if your family is rich enough to pay the fine for having multiple kids, or if you live in the middle of nowhere and nobody from the government comes to check, or if you're an ethnic minority, etc.)

And even though the one-child policy ended in 2016 and now people can have 2 kids, the economics of raising kids in China now entirely revolve around the one-child concept. Everything for kids has gotten so expensive, especially education, because when families only have 1 kid, they end up pouring all their money and resources into that one kid. And now they feel like they have to do that, in order to compete with the other 1 billion people in China. Yes, the government says you can have 2 kids now, but for most families that's just financially UNIMAGINABLE.

So Hendrix is like, "yeah sure we can just have 1 kid, I'm Chinese, it's normal for me." But I would imagine that, in general, people who don't have a uterus won't necessarily be so agreeable when their uterus-bearing partner suddenly changes their mind about how many babies they're willing to make.

I thought since we discussed it before marriage, then that's the deal and it's not fair to change the deal now. I never ever thought that it's "my body my choice" in marriage- but apparently my husband does. ... Should it be "my body my choice" in marriage? Or do I owe him babies because I already agreed to it back when I knew nothing about pregnancy?

And, actually, this isn't just about pregnancy. If you have two people who are young and inexperienced, who have never been married before, and they're in premarital counseling talking about their plan for how the whole rest of their life is going to go ... well obviously there could be lots of topics where they actually don't have a clue and will end up changing their minds later. How does a couple navigate that? I always thought they discuss it and if they both agree, they can change the plan... but if they don't agree, then no, the partner who changed their mind doesn't have the right to decide not to follow the plan.

But maybe the reality is you marry a person, not a plan.

And maybe that's what Hendrix thinks too... maybe he would like to have several kids, but he sees me suffering every day of this pregnancy, and he loves me so much that he would never ever want to force me to do this if it wasn't what I wanted. He loves me, and that's more important than our "plan."

Maybe that's how love and marriage are supposed to work- rather than the way I always imagined when I believed in "purity"... In purity land, a relationship is based on a checklist of requirements. Based on whether or not two people match "on paper", not based on their actual experience of being in a relationship with each other. No, in purity culture, experience is bad. Experience makes you "impure."

And if our relationship is based on our "checklists" matching, then how could it possibly be okay for me to change something on my checklist?

So I'm very confused that my husband is okay with only having one child. Should I have expected from the beginning that this is my choice, that he doesn't have the right to make me go through pregnancy again? I never ever thought that; that's why I'm so surprised. I thought in marriage, my body belongs to him. (And his body belongs to me, but in practical terms when would I ever have an opportunity to have exercise that right? It's not like he can get pregnant. And conservative Christians think women don't want sex.)

I'm pro-choice, but I'm just realizing that maybe I was only pro-choice for unmarried women. Is this what it means to be truly pro-choice- for my husband to tell me he's okay with it if I never want to get pregnant again?

And a lot of women say that after your baby is born, you end up forgetting how much you hated pregnancy and childbirth, and you convince yourself to have another baby. So who knows how I'll feel a year from now. And maybe Hendrix will suddenly want a second baby, after he experiences the first. Who knows?

But right now, my husband says I have way more bodily autonomy than I ever thought a wife could have, and I don't know how to feel about it. Just one more reason I'm so glad I married him instead of the hypothetical perfect godly man I always imagined.

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Related:

What Pregnancy Taught Me About Being Pro-Choice 

He Just Loves Me (a post about Sex, Pregnancy, and My "Wifely Duty")