What a good topic and yet..Where to start? I can say that I was a teen when I was recruited and I thought I'd like to have one child who I would raise like a friend and love and protect. I was very immature and clueless when it came to my ideas of parenting.
Once in the COG, there were several aspects of how women were treated that affected me greatly. While I love all my children dearly and do not regret having had any of them, I know that at the time I resented feeling like a baby manufacturing plant. There was the demand to have sex by first my "mate" (This term reminds me of animals in a zoo). He used to throw that up to me all the time about how Berg said a woman should give it up whenever her husband demanded and he had a big appetite. There was no romance with it. Just sex in a "wham, bam, [but no] thank-you-ma'am."

I already had a low self esteem when I met the Family. So I learn I am nothing, Jesus is everything. I am the hole. He is the donut. Whatever I do is no good. What I do good is only Jesus.

As a now "mated" COG, my "mate" was a provisioner and sometimes I would just see him when he dropped off food to the colony. He get his some-some and then leave. It was extremely depressing. He used to quote these verses about having children.."happy is the man with his quiver full of them" and then when I was pregnant with the second one he made angry comments about it even though he insisted on sex, sometimes multiple times a day. Even while pregnant.

I got reported shortly after having the first child, to leadership just for having requested that he hold the baby. I lived in a nursery full of doo doo diapers and everyone else's babies plus mine. That was depressing too. AND that is when I got pregnant with number two.

I went to a foreign field and remember Mother Eve telling me that some woman had lost a baby when having a natural childbirth and I better have the "faith" to have it. She said this in front of that mother. My second was born in a hospital in Spain thanks to some priests where we were.

As a woman Berg promoted heaven as women who were pregnant "and tonight we're eating ice-cream". Then there were horrible letters where he even said that if a woman were to die after having lots of babies the man could get a new one and keep producing. I never read that letter until after I left the Family but it was the one that was usually read to couples before they were betrothed. Was it Revolutionary Sex?

Anyway, later as the FFing started, my "mate" was gone and I became the receptacle for horny brothers when I could not avoid it. Berg went on to make children be no longer the responsiblity of any of the men in the Family. Now they were Jesus's babies.

Wasn't Berg the one who said "What's everybody's business is nobody's business?" That is exactly what happened as so many children were being left behind.

Luckily I did not get pregnant during that time. I had already had a third by my mate who left when I was pregnant. Actually before he realized I was and before FFing started.

My children were all from the same father. The father who chose not to be in their lives except in a hurtful way and then he died. This happened after we had both left and were divorced.

All I can say is that Berg's "Law of Love" and "One Wife" were extremely destructive and I am sure I was not harmed as bad by it as women who had children by many different fathers not knowing who they were or had a lot more children than I did.

Whew. Nuff said for now. This is a hot topic. How did it affect you?
> In the COG we were encouraged, sometimes
> ordered and often expected to have as many
> children as possible. So we did. Let's talk
> about it. What do you think now? I know we
> love them all, but how has it affected you?
> Jesus babies? ??????????? What are some of
> your questions on the subject?