Christian leaders were unanimous in speaking out against artificial birth control for almost 2,000 years. In fact, all Christians were united in their position that contraception was a violation of God’s will until the 20th century. As late as 1920, the Lambeth Conference of the Anglican Church stated its uncompromising rejection of all forms of artificial birth control.
All of that changed in 1930 when the Lambeth Conference of 1930 passed a groundbreaking resolution that allowed the use of contraception. Soon after, other Protestant churches followed suit, and now almost all have no objection to using contraception within marriage.
The Catholic Church has continued to stand apart. Besides “freeing up” our sexuality, the Pill was seen as a development that would reduce abortions by reducing unwanted pregnancies. In 1973, the year abortion was legalized in the U.S. and statistics were first gathered, there were approximately 615,000 abortions performed (Centers for Disease Control and Prevention Abortion Surveillance statistics). That annual number has increased substantially since then, reaching a peak in 1990 at 1.4 million.
The ascendancy of pornography, which is filtering into mainstream media, is an assault on the well-being of women. From a very young age, girls are subjected to the pressure of conforming to the “norm” of no-strings sex and promiscuous behavior as projected in the movies, TV shows, and magazines all around them. All this has helped to solidify the image of women as sex objects.
Current statistics on the number of single mothers living in poverty contradict the belief that women’s lives would improve substantially with the advent of artificial birth control. From 1960 to 2000, the proportion of children in single-parent families headed by females has more than tripled in Europe and North America, and many studies have shown that coming from single-parent families plays a major role in the persistence of poverty.
More importantly, ghe birth control pill increases the risk of breast cancer by over 40% if it is taken before a woman delivers her first baby. This risk increases by 70% if the Pill is used for four or more years before the woman’s first child is born.
Ask yourself just how moral is any of this? Thank you, Dr. Sivana, for including me on your ping to this thread.
The morality of making birth control available to people who view themselves as both moral and Christian is that it is available to people who view themselves as moral Christians.
Further, contraception is transparently available to the segment of the population that engages in behavior that results in abortions.
There are laws that govern the sale of products to the under aged. If they can’t buy a can of spray paint, they can’t buy contraception w/o parental permission.
The practical and economic appeal goes far beyond a narrow philosophy that is maintained buy the most erudite religious thinkers.