1. It contradicts God’s plan for love, marriage and sexuality.
God has a plan for love, marriage and sexuality. In that plan, the marriage act is meant to be exclusively a marriage act. That means that such an action outside of marriage is intrinsically dishonest, pretending to be what it cannot be. The Bible calls such actions fornication and adultery.
In God’s plan, the marriage act within marriage is intended to be a renewal of the marriage covenant the couple freely entered. It ought to affirm and renew the self-giving love and the for-better-and-for-worse commitment of the marriage vows. But the body language of contraceptive behaviors say, “I take you for better but positively not for the imagined ‘worse’ of possible pregnancy.” They contradict the marriage covenant and are thus dishonest and immoral.
2. Some forms of birth control contradict God’s plan for taking care of our health.
Good health is a great gift from God, and we are obliged to take reasonable efforts to take care of it. The birth control pill increases a woman’s risks of suffering breast cancer. Compared to women who never use the Pill, a woman who uses the Pill increases her risk of breast cancer by 44% if she ever uses it, and it increases her risks by 52% if she uses it for four or more years before her first full-term pregnancy. (C. Kahlenborn, FM Modugno, and others, “Oral contraceptive use as a risk factor for premenopausal breast cancer: a meta-analysis,” Mayo Clinic Proceedings, 2006:81(10):1290-1302.) The WHO has labeled the birth control chemicals as a Group 1 carcinogen—the most dangerous classification. Who is anti-woman—the people who want to foist this carcinogen on unsuspecting teenagers or the Church which teaches its people not to use contraception?
3. Contraception contradicts what Jesus teaches us about marriage.
Jesus clearly teaches us in Scripture and in his Church that God has created the state of marriage. When questioned about divorce, Jesus put it very simply: “What God has put together, let no one take apart.” That also applies to the marriage act.
Who put together the procreative and the unitive aspects of the marriage act? Every believer has to say, “God Himself put together these two aspects in the marriage act.”
What is contraception except the effort to take apart what God Himself has joined in the marriage act? There’s no getting around it—that’s what contraception is all about.
What’s the moral and healthy and effective alternative?
Natural family planning.
1. Systematic NFP can be used at the 99% level of effectiveness for postponing pregnancy. Among less-fertile couples it can be very helpful for achieving pregnancy.
2. Ecological breastfeeding naturally spaces babies—on average about two years apart.
St. Lawrence parish regularly conducts NFP courses so that you can have the positive and healthy alternatives to unnatural forms of birth control. For more information, see www.nfpandmore.org.
Our pastor, Fr. Mark Watkins, asked John Kippley to write this for his church bulletin. This insert appeared in the April 4, 2012 St. Lawrence Church Sunday bulletin.