BBN / JUNE 2020
Finding a different path to fruitfulness By Jenny Brinkworth, first published in the Southern Cross, Archdiocese of Adelaide
With one in six Australian couples experiencing infertility, a new book by Debra Vermeer will be a welcome resource for Catholic couples. When Catholic convert and respected journalist Debra Vermeer was grappling with the reality that she and her husband Tony could not conceive a child, she found the shelves of bookshops devoid of helpful literature. There was a plethora of material on parenting and different fertility methods and technologies, but very little to support couples living with infertility.
A former Canberra political reporter and media adviser to the Australian Catholic Bishops Conference, Debra “heard God whisper” that maybe she could write a book about infertility in a faith context. As well as putting into words her personal experience and deepest thoughts, she interviewed six other couples who have “walked their own path through infertility” and she has shared these stories in her recently published book Life to the Full. As the title suggests, it is a book of hope. But that doesn’t diminish the pain and anguish experienced by couples whose faith is based on the divine command of ‘be fruitful and multiply’ (Genesis 1:28) and the Catholic teaching that 28 /
children are ‘the supreme gift of marriage’ (Gaudiem et Spes, 161). In the introduction, Debra unpacks biblical references to infertility and the fact that they almost always go hand in hand with God intervening. “I found little solace in these stories of God blessing infertile (and often downright elderly) couples with a baby as a reward for their faithfulness,” she writes. “If God could do that for women like Sarah, Rachel and Hannah in the Old Testament and Mary’s cousin Elizabeth in the New Testament, then why wouldn’t He do it for us?” But through her discussions with bishop friends and her spiritual adviser, she came to the understanding that these Scripture stories are part of a bigger narrative of God’s “unfailing, liberating love” and it is “in our barrenness and in our suffering that God’s blessing will come”. Revealing her devastation at not falling pregnant after marrying fellow journalist Tony Vermeer, a widower with two teenage children at the time, Debra writes of crying at shopping centres because she’d seen a random baby and sometimes breaking down for no apparent reason at all. “I now recognise it as profound grief. The future that I had dreamed of and yearned for was swept away and it was like I was incapable of reimagining a future,” she writes. But her faith, which has led her to becoming a Benedictine oblate (a vowed associate of the order) and frequent visitor to the Sisters’ Jamberoo Abbey, was a constant source of solace.
