No gift from God?

Selma Hooge

"Jacob became angry with her and said, `Am I in the place of God, who has kept you from having children?' " (Genesis 30:1-2).

Obviously there was nothing wrong with Jacob's sperm count. His other wife Leah, Rachel's older sister, had born him four sons, and he didn't even love her.

Rachel, whom Jacob loved, was barren. She was so desperate to get pregnant that she gave Leah extra sleeping-with-Jacob privileges in return for mandrakes which Leah's oldest son had brought from the field. Mandrakes were considered aphrodisiacs and an aid to barren women. When the mandrakes didn't help, Rachel resorted to surrogate motherhood. Even that didn't satisfy her longing to carry a baby in her own womb. When nothing else worked, she must have prayed.

Genesis 30:22 says, "Then God remembered Rachel; He listened to her and opened her womb. She became pregnant and gave birth to a son and said, `God has taken away my disgrace.' She named him Joseph, and said, `May the LORD add to me another son.' " Some time later, the Lord heard that prayer too, but that cost Rachel her life.

Today when a woman discovers that she has trouble conceiving, or that every pregnancy ends in a miscarriage, she has all the same feelings and thoughts that Rachel had: disappointment, anger, frustration, emotional pain, jealousy of sisters who have children.

In Old Testament days, if God didn't open the womb of a barren woman like Rachel, she probably wouldn't have children. Today's infertile women have modern~ technology to help them. However, although artificial insemination, in vitro fertilization, frozen embryos, sperm banks and genetic engineering are now available, this does not necessarily mean that Christian couples should avail themselves of every form of modern technology. Some methods for impregnating infertile women are out of the question for Christians.

Selma Hooge is a member of Central Heights MB Church in Abbotsford, B.C.

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