The Planned Parenthood Association has publicized alarming figures clearly designed to discourage childbearing. According to their highly suspect statistics it’s supposed to cost from $70,000 to $107,000 to raise a child from diapers to college diploma. The larger figure includes lost earning power of the mother sacrificing her career in order to be “just a housewife.”
Although such figures overlook young people working their way through college and in general are patently absurd -a statement 1 make as the father of five who are being raised satisfactorily even though the Lord has not supplied the $350,000 to $535,000 the Zero Population Growth people maintain we need to rear them—many couples have swallowed the anti-child propaganda poison and are so intimidated that they feel even having one child would demand unbelievable financial sacrifices and interfere too much with their modern American materialistic and pleasure-mad lifestyle.
How sad to hear in premarital counseling even our Lutheran youth claiming they can’t afford to think of having children for 
several years and then to see them drive off in expensive cars to luxuriously appointed apartments with color TV and stere01 Have we parents, pastors, and teachers perhaps become too mired in materialism ourselves that we can’t convince our offspring that receiving children as precious gifts of God and bringing them up in the nurture and admonition of the Lord is much more satisfying and God-pleasing than piling up property and possessions which so soon rot and rust away?
Wisconsin Synod couples, blessed with fertility, need not feel guilty about bringing children into a world allegedly threatened by the specter of overpopulation, not if they are truly Christian parents and give this sin-corrupted world what it needs most youngsters properly trained to live their Christian faith, to talk about their Savior, to witness by word and deed to the Gospel of the crucified and risen Lord Jesus.
Christian parents, who seek first the kingdom of God and His righteousness, will surely receive, as Jesus promised (Matt. 6:33), the material things needed to adequately provide for their children from diapers to (high school and/or college) diploma.
Reuel J. Schulz
The above article is from the November 28, 1977 Christian News.