Essay

Infertility and the Promise of Parenthood

If you have wanted children for years and they have not come, your questions may go far beyond infertility. If children are central to Heavenly Father’s plan, where does that leave me? Is parenthood still part of my eternal future? What happens to the family I have wanted so deeply but have not been able to have?

Those are important questions. The restored gospel gives you real reason to hope. Infertility does not remove you from Heavenly Father’s plan for families. We lived before this life as spirit sons and daughters of Heavenly Parents. Family relationships continue after death. Children will be born and raised during the Millennium. And prophets have promised that righteous desires for marriage and family that cannot be fulfilled now will not be lost.

This life is important, but it is not the whole story.

God’s Plan for Children Began Before This Life

The Family: A Proclamation to the World teaches that before coming to earth, we lived as “spirit sons and daughters” of heavenly parents. We accepted Heavenly Father’s plan to receive physical bodies, gain mortal experience, and progress toward eternal life.

Every child who comes to earth, then, already has an eternal identity as a son or daughter of God.

Elder Neil L. Andersen taught that when we look into the eyes of a child, we are looking at “a fellow son or daughter of God who stood with us in the premortal life.” He explained that one of the great privileges given to husbands and wives is to provide mortal bodies for God’s spirit children.

Infertility may keep a husband and wife from having children when they hoped to. It does not change the larger plan. God’s children lived before mortality, parenthood belongs to His eternal purposes, and our years on earth are only one part of an eternal life.

Will People Have and Raise Children During the Millennium?

Yes. The Lord has revealed that family life will continue during the Millennium.

In Doctrine and Covenants 45, Jesus Christ describes the time after His Second Coming. He says His people will “multiply and wax strong” and that “their children shall grow up without sin unto salvation.”

That gives us an important glimpse of the future. During the Millennium, people will live on the earth, families will continue, children will be born, and parents will raise them while Christ reigns and Satan is bound.

That matters when infertility makes you feel as though time is running out. Heavenly Father’s plan for parenthood is bigger than the years you can see right now.

Ardeth Kapp Wondered Why Her Prayers Weren’t Being Answered

Ardeth G. Kapp and her husband, Heber, wanted children very much.

Years later, Ardeth said infertility was one of the hardest things they went through together. Her younger sister eventually had eleven children. Ardeth loved hearing her sister’s happy news, but it also brought questions she had been carrying for years: Why aren’t our prayers being answered? What are we not doing?

Ardeth and Heber loved children. Both had gone into education partly because they wanted children to be a meaningful part of their lives. So when well-meaning friends suggested that they should simply adopt or “learn to love children,” it hurt. Loving children had never been the problem.

They kept praying. They kept seeking the Lord’s direction. Ardeth remembered asking her father what she should do, and he encouraged her to stay united with Heber and keep seeking revelation together. They trusted that when the Lord wanted them to know what to do, He would help them know.

Years later, Ardeth began feeling that the Lord was preparing her for another demanding assignment. Just before general conference, she and Heber were asked to meet with President Gordon B. Hinckley. Ardeth was called to serve as the general president of the Young Women organization.

Even then, infertility was part of her experience. She later learned that some people had wondered whether a married woman without children be the right role model for the young women of the Church.

Then came a promise she never forgot.

When President Hinckley set her apart, he told her, “You will raise your children during the Millennium when Satan is bound.”

Ardeth later said she remembered thinking how much easier the previous thirty years might have been if she had known that earlier. But those years had also taught her to trust God when she could not see the answer.

When she later spoke about what she had learned, her counsel was simple: “Keep an eternal perspective.”

Her promise was deeply personal, but it fits within the larger truths God has revealed about family life, the Millennium, and blessings that reach beyond mortality.

What Have Prophets Promised About Parenthood?

President Boyd K. Packer once spoke about a young couple who had just learned that they would not be able to have children. They were heartbroken.

He taught them to look at their lives within the larger plan of salvation and gave this promise:

“In the eternal scheme of things—not always in mortality—righteous yearning and longing will be fulfilled.”

That promise matters when you sincerely want children.

Heavenly Father knows the desires of your heart. He knows the difference between choosing not to follow His plan and wanting to follow it when circumstances make something impossible.

Infertility does not make a righteous desire less meaningful.

President Russell M. Nelson has similarly taught that “no blessing will be withheld from His faithful Saints.”

That gives you something solid to hold onto. Circumstances outside your control do not remove eternal blessings from your future.

What About Children Who Die Young?

For parents who have had a child and then lost that child, restored doctrine gives especially tender hope.

The Lord revealed to Joseph Smith that “all children who die before they arrive at the years of accountability are saved in the celestial kingdom of heaven” (Doctrine and Covenants 137:10).

President Joseph F. Smith taught that little children who die are redeemed through Jesus Christ and are safe with Heavenly Father. President Wilford Woodruff taught that children who die in infancy go to the spirit world and will be restored to their families in the Resurrection.

Prophets have also taught that children who die young will rise in the Resurrection as children.

President Joseph F. Smith preserved a teaching from the Prophet Joseph Smith that has brought comfort to generations of grieving parents. He taught that a mother would have “the joy, the pleasure, and satisfaction of nurturing this child” after the Resurrection until the child reached maturity.

There is something beautiful in that teaching. The Resurrection is not only a promise that a parent will see a child again. It points to family life continuing—to nurturing, growing, loving, and being together.

What If Infertility Has Included Miscarriage?

For some couples, infertility includes pregnancies that began with great hope and then ended too soon.

Miscarriage can bring a kind of grief other people do not always understand. You may already have imagined a due date, a name, a nursery, or simply what it would feel like to hold that child. The loss can be very real even when other people never had the opportunity to know the baby.

The restored gospel gives you reason to place that child and that loss in Heavenly Father’s hands. His plan for families reaches beyond mortality, and Jesus Christ has power over death.

You do not need to hurry through grief in order to prove that you have faith. Jesus wept at Lazarus’s tomb even though He knew Lazarus would soon live again.

The promise of resurrection gives grief somewhere hopeful to look.

When Infertility Starts Changing How You See Yourself

Infertility can gradually affect more than plans for having a baby. It can begin changing the way you see yourself.

You may watch friends announce pregnancies and wonder why it seems so easy for them. Mother’s Day or Father’s Day may become harder than you expected. A Church lesson about children can leave you wondering whether everyone else is moving forward while you are standing still.

Because wanting children is a good desire, the pain around infertility can become an easy place for discouraging thoughts to grow: Maybe God is disappointed in me. Maybe I am less faithful. Maybe I don’t fit as naturally into His plan.

Those thoughts do not come from the doctrine God has revealed.

You are still a son or daughter of Heavenly Parents. If you are married, your covenant marriage has eternal meaning now. You can keep becoming more like Christ, strengthening your marriage, serving, loving people, developing your gifts, and preparing for the family blessings still ahead.

Your life with God is still moving forward.

What Research Suggests About Faith and Infertility

None of this removes the disappointment of infertility. But faith, prayer, the support of people who love you, and a relationship with God are real strength while you wait, and they are strength you can reach for today.

There Is More Ahead Than You Can See

Infertility can bring difficult decisions about treatment, adoption, or whether to keep trying to have children. Those decisions deserve prayer, good medical information, unity between husband and wife, and careful attention to the Lord.

Well-meaning people may have plenty of suggestions. You do not have to let other people decide what faithful hope should look like for you. Adoption can be a beautiful way to build a family, but it is not a simple answer to infertility. Loving nieces, nephews, students, or Primary children can bring great joy, but those relationships do not make the desire for your own children disappear.

Ardeth Kapp understood that. She spent decades without the answer she wanted. Eventually, she learned that the Lord had been seeing a much larger future than she could see.

That is what she meant by keeping an eternal perspective.

A Few Questions Worth Thinking About

• Have I started measuring my place in God’s plan by whether I can have children right now?
• Am I treating an unanswered prayer as though it were a final answer?
• What changes when I remember that parenthood and family life continue beyond mortality?
• What would “keep an eternal perspective” look like in my life right now?

What Can You Do This Week?

Read Doctrine and Covenants 45:56–59 and notice what the Savior teaches about children and family life during the Millennium. Then read Doctrine and Covenants 137:10 and the teachings of Joseph F. Smith about little children and the Resurrection.

If you are married, talk with your spouse about more than the next appointment or treatment. Ask how infertility has affected each of you and what you want your marriage to become during this part of your life. Keep caring for the covenant relationship you already have.

If you have lost a child, take the promises of resurrection and eternal family to the temple. Let those promises become part of the way you think about the future, not only the loss behind you.

And remember Ardeth Kapp’s counsel: keep an eternal perspective. She did not mean that the present did not hurt. She meant that the present was not all there was.

Jesus Christ is Lord of the Resurrection, the Millennium, and eternity. The family He is building is larger than the part you can see today. If children have not come when you hoped, you have not been left behind in Heavenly Father’s plan.

Keep your covenants, care for the relationships God has already given you, and keep following Christ. There is more family life ahead.