The media brouhaha over the McCaughey septuplets has died down. Perhaps now is the time for more thoughtful consideration of the issues at stake. At the time of the multiple birth, the McCaugheys were criticized for using fertility drugs, refusing selective abortion, and encouraging others (by the successful delivery of all seven babies) to take the same risks. But perhaps most controversial was the McCaugheys' exclamation that it was through God's will that the babies were safely delivered, expressions echoed by their doctor and minister.

Let's start with the question of "God's will." Ultimately, of course, we cannot know of any particular event whether or not it is God's will. Clearly not everything that happens is God's will — or else God becomes responsible for the Inquisition, African slavery, and the Holocaust, as well as for all the good things in human history. Virtually everything that happens has, as part of its chain of causation, the exercise of human will. Even the happenings of nature today are affected by human activity, as in global warming or species extinction. At an objective level, then, it is exceedingly difficult to separate human will from God's will.

But this objective approach is not a religious view. Rationality is useful in correcting and refocusing religious views, but it should not replace a faith perspective. People of faith believe they experience divine presence in their lives. Sometimes the experience of God comes amid tragedy, when we feel God's comfort in the face of death or disaster. Sometimes we know God through divine silence in the face of our failure or guilt. At other times, we experience God as the creative energy which enhances our relationships, deepens our insight, and supports our success. Miracles, understood in biblical terms as extraordinary occurrences attributed to God, are a part of the Christian tradition. Biblically, miracles don't have to be contrary to science, or unexplainable, but they do have to demonstrate some quality of God, such as a preference for life over death.

Is it not part of a righteous God/human relationship that in moments of great success, we know that success not as ours, but as God in us? Once these children were conceived and chosen by their parents, who could possibly believe that it was not God's will that they survive? When our children are sick, or otherwise threatened, do we not suppose that God's basic predisposition is for their life, not death?

I will not deny the troubling aspects of this birth. But it is difficult to find a point at which the McCaugheys contravened a moral consensus. They had one child, and they wanted a second. Even in view of the world's — and the U.S.'s — overpopulation, there is currently no serious proposal by any group to limit American families to one child, though there may eventually be. Furthermore, there is no consensus against the use of fertility drugs. Fertility drugs have become standard treatment for infertile women. As for selective abortion, there remains a significant minority in the nation who think that all abortion should be legally banned as murder. There is certainly no consensus on abortion as morally obligatory in any circumstance. Unless the McCaugheys knew how many ova had been or were about to be released when they decided to have intercourse, they are no more morally culpable for the huge medical bills the septuplets and mother incurred than any couple who encounters complications in childbirth. The McCaugheys' insurer is paying all claims, and Bobbi had a tubal ligation immediately after the delivery of the last child. They seem to fulfill the ordinary requirements of responsible parenthood.

I know a lot of women who, like myself, have unsatisfied maternal desires. I do not know the roots of such desire, but there is something in me that responds to pregnant women and babies, that aches to hold and nurse another child. That more sentimental part of me wars with my rational side, which knows that I could not have handled any more children, and that the health and survival of the biosphere require control of such desires. We cannot all have eight children. Almost none of us can have eight children if future generations are to live too. But then relatively few couples conceive seven children in a second pregnancy. And if and when the U.S. does reach the consensus that responsible family size is one or two children, how many parents are really going to envy couples like the McCaugheys and want to imitate them?

I can remember the acute discomfort of the last month of pregnancy with my 9 pound, 14 ounce son. I can only imagine what it must have been like to carry almost 20 pounds of babies, to be confined to bed for over four months, to have all that weight pressing on one's lungs, intestines, kidneys, and bladder. I have some admiration for a woman who is ready to endure all that out of what appears to be heartfelt conviction. And even I, who get misty watching any newborn at all, shudder to think of what lies ahead for this couple: the sleep deprivation, the lack of time for each other, the lack of private time for themselves, not to mention the horrors of seven-fold adolescence or the inevitable parental guilt at not giving enough individual time and attention to each child.

I know it is easy to underestimate the judgment of people, especially when publicity is involved. Maybe there are people who simply covet all the attention the McCaugheys got. Evidently, media people think this is a risk, and judging from what we see on TV, they do seem to know a huge number of citizens with low IQs, poor judgment, and no sense of dignity. But that is not the fault of ordinary couples like the McCaugheys.

Christine Gudorf teaches at Florida International University and is the author, with Regina Wolfe, of Crosscultural Ethics: A Casebook in World Religions, due out later this year from Orbis Books.