“The press using weasel wording to make it sound like Francis said something completely different.”
Afraid we can’t blame the press this time. Pope Francis specifically referred to an entirely different situation, i.e., nuns who were in danger of being raped, and were, therefore, permitted to take birth control pills. There was no intent on the nuns’ part to pervert the true end of a normal, moral act of intercourse. Women are not in danger of being “raped” by their husbands, so using contraception to avoid getting pregnant with a baby infected by a virus would be no different than using contraception to prevent getting pregnant with a baby who had, say, Down Syndrome.
This Pope is a dangerous dope.
Until we have seen the full quotation in context and had competent people deal with the original language version of it, I think that your second paragraph is somewhat premature.
He may simply have been saying that women have good grounds to tell their husbands no for a very long time.
As to your third paragraph, I think that the Pope is a sucker for bad science, which puts him in the same category of 98% of the western world. Here is a good link on the Zika virus http://fivethirtyeight.com/features/why-its-so-hard-to-prove-zika-is-causing-birth-defects/
That said, he either is smart enough not to use, or not smart enough to use, the key portions of his teaching authority in spouting this stuff off. However, as most people don’t know the difference, it is dangerous.