“The Pill has changed more lives more radically than the printing press, the steam engine, the assembly line, or the atomic bomb,” writes Peter J. Kreeft. As a catalyst for the Sexual Revolution, it has changed ours souls, our mindset, and our bodies: it has changed how we view something once considered sacred and a great gift from God; it seeks to divorce sex from babies—and to even something more radical, as we will see below. Some favor this change, and others oppose the change.
In its most popular form, artificial birth control is often known as “the Pill.” For more than 50 years, it has been taken by millions of woman in order to prevent birth; one estimate says 100 million women worldwide and 12 million women in the U.S. use it. The Pill is an oral, chemical contraception: contra- means against, and conception means with child or conceiving a child. Thus, the purpose of the Pill is to prevent babies: birth control means birth prevention. Contraception, then, “is the demand to have sex without having babies” (Kreeft). It aims to separate something nature put together: sex and babies.
The Pill would become popular in American culture during the Sexual Revolution (1965-75), a revolution of “The Sixties.” “[T]he sexual revolution is more radical than any merely political revolution,” says Kreeft. “Because it has already overcome the strongest instinct in nature, a mother’s instinct to protect her children”—via abortion, i.e, backup birth control. More than 60 million abortions have taken place in the U.S. since the Sexual Revolution.
Why do some Christians oppose artificial birth control? Before the Sexual Revolution, most Christians opposed artificial birth control in contrast to natural birth control, such as Natural Family Planning, which differs from the rhythm method. Christianity supports life and considers children a great blessing from God—in contrast to being “protected” from them by chemicals, or considering pregnancy a “disease.” A Christian marriage welcomes children: children are a result of love, of a sacred expression of love between a man and a woman united in holy matrimony. Unselfish love, by definition, welcomes children.
Those who oppose artificial birth control (ABC) often make these ten points:
(1) “Too many children? That’s like saying, ‘Too many flowers.’”
(2) ABC kills women. Some 200 women have been killed by products such as Yaz and the NuvaRing. More than a billion dollars has been paid by drug companies in reparations. One heartbroken mother whose daughter died held up a box and exclaimed: “This needs to have a big o’ label on the front, like cigarettes say: ‘This can kill you.’”
(3) ABC harms women. Chemical contraception is a toxic, man-made drug that poisons women in many ways: e.g., blood clots, blurred vision, nausea, cramping, irregular menstrual bleeding, weight gain, headaches, breast cancer, strokes, and heart attacks. For more details on the dangers 9 to women, see Sweetening the Pill by Holly Grigg-Spall.
(4) ABC causes abortions. “Physicians across America—and around the world—are now confirming that the Pill, IUDs, Depo-Provera and Norplant cause early abortions.”
(5) Protestants historically have opposed contraception. They only began to accept it in 1930 when the Anglican bishops met at their Lambeth Conference. Martin Luther and John Calvin—the most significant voices of the Protestant Reformation—strongly opposed ABC in thunderous language, as did virtually every single other Reformer.
(6) Overpopulation is a great myth, as Dr. Jacqueline Kasun documents in The War Against Population: The Economics and Ideology of World Population Control.
(7) ABC violates real love. Real love means giving yourself totally to another person rather than holding something back—and holding something back is what artificial birth control does during sex. “Body language matters.” The body says, “I love you” and “I give myself to you,” and “Let there be life.” But these are lies if something cuts off conception.
(8) ABC is a sin. Love and sex are to go together, and love welcomes the creation of children, for children should be loved into existence. God created sex and babies to go together, but modern man has tried to rip these apart. ABC is a sin against nature, i.e., God’s design.
(9) Natural birth control is not a sin. Natural Family Planning (NFP) is one natural way to plan pregnancy without drugs. NFP is far better than “the rhythm method.” More information on a woman’s cycle is available at www.naprotechnology.com.
(10) Birth control is neither. As G. K. Chesterton writes, “They insist on talking about Birth Control when they mean less birth and no control.”
Therefore, in accord with these points above, this anti-ABC view says: “Sex is intended for three things: as a way to unify a husband and wife in love, for pleasure, and for children. Christians should support all three of these like an unbreakable trinity, and not cut one or two out.”
In his address “Christian Anthropology versus the Sexual Revolution” (print version and audio version), Kreeft offers a summary:
We moderns think sex is for us; it isn’t; it’s for our children. We moderns think we’re so enlightened because we’re not legalists any more, we’re personalists, we’re about people, not about laws or rules or commandments. We think of the people who make sex, and we want those people to have fun and be happy. Which is fine, but we’re so fixated on the fact that people make sex that we’ve ignored the fact that sex makes people. But we’ve redesigned it so that it doesn’t make people any more. We’ve contracepted it. But since it is God’s way of creating, we’ve contracepted God. . . . The Pill was a nuclear bomb. It split the atom of the family by splitting the atom of sex, splitting its pleasure from its fruit, its unitive from its procreative end, splitting sex from life.
Historians note that the Pill was a catalyst for the Sexual Revolution, an ongoing revolution in behavior and thought. The anti-ABC view claims that the Sexual Revolution’s overall philosophy of sex and its worldview of sexual ethics not only harms our physical bodies, but our minds—and thus our very souls. To learn more about the moral, medical, and theological reasons to avoid artificial birth control, try Patrick Coffin’s The Contraception Deception (2018).
