How Full Is Your Quiver?

It's hardly a typical scene from the suburbs. The Bortel home outside San Antonio, Tex., counts 12 members—parents David and Suzanne and their 10 children, ranging from 13 months to 15 (the 20-year-old married and moved away)—all crammed into a four-bedroom house that trembles constantly with activity. Everything revolves around the home: Dad works there, the kids are schooled there, the youngest three were born there. The family uses a 15-passenger van to get around, and at night, the kids climb into multiple sets of bunk beds. David and Suzanne hear the same questions repeatedly. So for the record: No, they're not Catholic. Yes, they've heard of birth control. And no, they're not crazy. In fact, they'd happily welcome a twelfth child. "It's about obedience to God," says David, 38. "The Bible says that God is the only opener and closer of the womb."

The Bortels form part of the "quiverfull" movement, a small but growing conservative Protestant group that eschews all forms of birth control and believes that family planning is exclusively God's domain. The term derives from Psalm 127:

Behold, children are a heritage from the Lord,
The fruit of the womb is a reward.
Like arrows in the hand of a warrior,
So are the children of one's youth.
Happy is the man who has his quiver full of them.

Back in 1995, when the quiverfull.com Web site was founded, it had only 12 subscribers; today, the site, which is administered by the Bortels, has more than 2,600. Many followers have abandoned mainstream churches in favor of smaller nondenominational congregations of like-minded families. A cottage industry has sprung up in support of them. There are books like "A Full Quiver," by Rick and Jan Hess; Web sites like blessedarrows.com, which raises funds for couples to have reverse vasectomies or reverse tubal ligations; and scholarly treatises like "The Natural Family: A Manifesto," put out  by the Rockford, Ill.,-based Howard Center for Family, Religion & Society and the Sutherland Institute, a Mormon think tank.  "We're still on the fringes," says Jan Hess. "But it is much more embraced than it was before."

Quiverfull beliefs are absolutist. Purists don't permit even natural family planning methods, such as tracking fertility cycles (the only form of birth control condoned by the Roman Catholic Church). Also taboo: any form of artificial fertility treatment. "The point is to have a welcoming heart," says Mary Pride, a mother of nine whose 1985 book, "The Way Home," celebrated a return to traditional gender roles. It has sold about 80,000 copies and has inspired many quiverfull families. "You shouldn't be unnatural in going to a fertility clinic or in trying to avoid having children by regulating when to have sex with your husband," says Pride.

Beyond such purists, the anti-birth control message appears to be gaining ground among some evangelicals. Albert Mohler, president of the Southern Baptist Theological Seminary, has become one of its most prominent advocates. "If a couple sees children as an imposition, as something to be vaccinated against, like an illness, that betrays a deeply erroneous understanding of marriage and children," says Mohler. "Children should be seen as good by default." His stance isn't as extreme as that of quiverfull followers; for instance, he condones the use of condoms for married couples in extreme circumstances, like illness. Still, Mohler's views are considered "an oddity" in mainstream Baptist circles, according to Richard Land, president of the Southern Baptist Convention's Ethics and Religious Liberty Commission. Land admits, however, that Mohler has certainly expanded his following. "He is seen as the popularizer of a position that is still very marginal, but 15 years ago, it wouldn't have even been discussed," says Land, adding that he knows of at least two former students who had reverse vasectomies after hearing Mohler's arguments.