The patristic condemnation of the gnostic and Manichean sects who believed that engendering offspring is sinful (because it imprisons souls in the material world) hardly applies to the Orthodox approach to family planning. No spiritual father would bless a couple to remain childless throughout their entire marriage unless the woman suffered from a condition which would endanger her life were she to become pregnant.
We Orthodox judge not the individual conjugal act, but the totality of conjugal relations between husband and wife, for obedience to the divine command to be fruitful and multiply (though St. John Chrysostom himself did address the question of the world already being well-populated by our kind, suggesting that marriage now serves chastity more than procreation).
As FormerLib has pointed out, this topic is a distraction to the orginal point of the thread, so I will not now post further on the subject.
I would be glad to discuss it further, but only if you have read Fr. John Meyendorff's Marriage: an Orthodox Perspective first. That will save me having to get the copy out of our mission library and typing the patristic quote from his discussion of this issue.
to FormerLib:
See what I mean about the futility of discussing this with Latins?
When my wife and I were to be married in the Orthodox Church, one of the questions our priest asked us was if we were going to try to have children at some point. When we told him that we were (quite honestly), he informed us that we would not have been able to perform the wedding if we had said no. Odd, but that just doesn't sound like a Church which has "caved" on the issue to me.