Thank you Google Books! This saved me a bit of work and sums up the traditional Missouri stand quite nicely.
I inherited the book mentioned "For Better, Not For Worse" written by Walter A. Maier I from my grandfather. WAM1 was a faculty member at the St. Louis Seminary (his son WAM2 and grandson WAM3 teach at the seminary here). When I was unpacking and inventorying my books the summer I stumbled onto it. Curious what would be said, specifically how little or much in reference to today's silence on matrimonial and birth issues, I was shocked and surprised to find a startling frankness.
The heritage of our Missouri Lutheran church is not one of wishy-washy inability to speak on important issues in the church. WAM1 gives a deliberate and serious consideration to many issues including but not limited to: the test and demonstration of Christian Matrimonial morality, marriage blessings, purification of marriage by Christ, Word, Sacrament, and prayer; attacks on marriage by sociology, communism, campus attacks, psychology, cultic zealots, modernism, literature, "moronic motion-pictures", and new age; eugenics (fascinating discussion pre-WWII and Hitler, while still being practiced in the states), courtship and engagement, the menaces of birth control and divorce, and elements of wedded happiness. Yes it is quite a long book clocking in at nearly 600 pages. Even so it is quite the treasure trove of good 1930's-era Christian morality.
What is most curious is the issues he tackles, some of which I have mentioned remain and are as "divisive and schismatic" as they were 70 years ago. He undoubtedly will come across strong minded but in context I think is spot on, giving reasonable responses to commonly voiced birth control propaganda and brainwashing. Read to the end as he addresses those who have not been able to have bear children of their own. The section following his take on the church deals directly with adoption. I'll leave you with this quote from his section "The Blight of Birth Control", specifically "The Church's Position."
THE CHURCH'S POSITION.
In the face of the deplorable concessions to this theory of family limitation the Church must maintain its emphatic avowal of Christian marriage as God's institution for the propagation of the human race. It must insist that, whenever the divine blessing "Be fruitful and multiply" is willfully evaded for selfish purposes and through the employment of means and methods suggested by birth control, divine displeasure is invoked and the far-reaching nemesis of God's retributive justice ultimately metes out its measure of inevitable judgment.
This does not mean, however, that the Church establishes an orthodox minimum and insists upon families of ten or twelve children. It has no doctrine of human mass production, nor does it champion the Canadian "$500,000 maternity marathon," started by the extraordinary will of bachelor Charles Vance Millar, Toronto brewer and horseman, which offered a half million to the mother in his city bearing the most children within a decade. Neither does the Church declare that children must follow in rapid succession without appropriate and sufficient interims for maternal recuperation and infant care. Nor is the health of the mother to be disregarded in the establishment of the family. Her constitution must not be ruined and her body broken by incessant motherhood. In all of these considerations the Christian principles of love and forbearance must be the actuating impulse.
Young couples sincerely concerned about the practical issues that touch upon their own family life and marital relations and disquieted by the thought of abnormally large families and the resultant inability to provide adequate means and cultural growth of their children, should not permit themselves to be disturbed by the alarmist literature of birth-control propaganda. Instead let them consider these five fundamental facts: —
First of all, the specter of a prodigal nature that spawns out children and that almost mechanically brings babies year after year in uninterrupted succession is not the picture of nature as it exerts its influences in the present affairs of our lives. There are bounds and limits to fertility, which are regulated by subtle and sometimes indiscernible factors. The mere physical chances of extraordinarily large families in the average home to-day (an age that has notable natural trends toward an increase of sterility) are small, particularly in view of the prevalence of late marriages. In England, Double-day, Pell, Sutherland, and others have presented strong evidence to show that human fertility is lessened as prosperity, comfort, and intellectuality increase.
Then it dare not be overlooked that "children are an heritage of the Lord," the gift of His rich and undeserved mercy. Thousands of Christian couples have learned by sad and personal experience that this heritage has not been theirs, and in spite of the most intense desire and the most fervent prayer they have been denied the rich blessings from which other shortsighted couples flee in aversion. No child is born without the will and direction of God, and every child that is born into a Christian home is under all circumstances the embodiment of a rich and divine benediction.
In the third place, it should be emphasized that there may be certain unobjectionable, if not infallible, means that will help regulate the size of a family. Christian physicians can offer sound and helpful advice to young couples in this respect who entirely spurn the artificial methods of birth control. The Church has never protested against the employment of those means, which the course of nature itself seems to provide, unless their employment is a selfish attempt to evade the responsibilities of parenthood.
The Church also calls attention to the practice and development of continence, self-denial, and restraint. And while this imposes a task of Herculean struggle on those who scorn the spiritual forces of Christianity, those who take recourse to the power of effective prayer find a sustaining ally in the strength of their faith.
Finally, the Church says that in the infrequent and exceptional conflicts between childbirth and maternal health the Christian con-science must seek pastoral advice and the counsel of a Christian physician.
With all this, unusual consideration must be extended to those who have not received the heritage of the Lord from their heavenly Father. No finger of scorn should be pointed at them, no whispers of suspicion raised behind their backs. They should receive the sympathy, which Scripture extends to its Hannahs and Sarahs. And in their own lives there should be no diminution of heart-deep prayer to the Father above, who "doeth all things well," that the happy blessing of parenthood may be theirs. If this blessing is permanently withheld from them, they may find solace when, beholding a helpless infant, orphaned and deprived of parental love and the full opportunities of an unfolding life, they look beyond to see the great Friend of children as He lifts His arms in benediction and tells them: "Whoso shall receive one such little child in My name receiveth Me" (Matt. 18, 5).
