Questions for Discussion
- The church has for almost all its history opposed contraception. Do you agree with this view and why/why not ?
- Look at the 3 comments opposing contraception – what argument do they advance and what are their strengths and weaknesses ?
- Is the Protestant attitude summed up in the last passage an acceptable one in the light of the earlier critique of contraception or should this be more of an issue in our churches and Christian discipleship
Luther Calvin Mosier Nuechterlein Grenz
Martin Luther, Lectures on Genesis 4.304-5.
How great, therefore, the wickedness of human nature is ! How many girls there are who prevent conception and kill and expel tender fetuses, although procreation is the work of God ! Indeed, some spouses who marry and live together in a respectable manner have various ends in mind, but rarely children.
John Calvin, Commentaries on First Book of Moses [Gen 38.9,10].
Onan…preferred his semen to putrefy on the ground…The voluntary spilling of semen outside of intercourse…is a monstrous thing. Deliberately to withdraw…in order that semen may fall on the ground is doubly monstrous. For this is to extinguish the hope of the race and to kill before is born the hoped-for offspring…If any woman ejects a foetus from her womb by drugs, it is reckoned a crime incapable of expiation, and deservedly Onan incurred upon himself the same kind of punishment, infecting the earth by his semen in order that Tamar might not conceive a future human being as an inhabitant of the earth.
Alicia Mosier in "Contraception: A Symposium", First Things Dec 1998,
What is wrong is contraception itself: the deliberate will, the choice, to subvert the life-giving order and meaning of the conjugal act…Paul VI…states, [conjugal acts] "must remain open to the transmission of life" to serve the good of procreation. But he goes on to say that without that openness, sex doesn't advance the unitive good of marriage either. A sexual union in which contraception takes place and thus in which the procreative good is actively thwarted, he implies, is not a one flesh union at all. Husband and wife are not fully giving themselves to each other; there is a barrier between them, and it is as much spiritual as physical. The acts of intercourse performed by married people in such a context may be sexual, but they are not marital…
Some argue that as long as a marriage is open to life "in principle," contraception is acceptable and licit. They make the point precisely: the only way contraceptive intercourse can possibly be morally justifiable is if the good of procreation is thought of as a "principle" rather than as something to be worked toward in the reality of our physical world. By definition, not excluding procreation in principle implies not excluding it in reality.
When Paul VI states that every act of intercourse "must remain open to the transmission of life," he is reasoning from the principle that everything is ordered by God to an end, and that to perform an action that willfully changes the course of something that is moving toward its given end is to act in contradiction to God's design. It is to commandeer what God has inscribed in His universe, rerouting it toward an end one prefers; it is not to be responsible to God in tending His gifts. In strictly biological terms, the simple physical act of intercourse is directed to the conception of a child: This man and this woman come together, these organs and cells meet, and if the timing is right a new life begins. The Church perceives this as an example of an act ordered to an end, and ordered that way by the Creator. In other words, it is a manifestation of the natural law by which all things, physical and spiritual, are divinely ordered.
But conjugal acts are meant for more than having children. As Paul VI himself states, there is another end-unity-to which they are ordained. If a couple decides they ought not procreate for a time, the need remains for them to seek union with each other; the most obvious way to do so is through sexual intercourse. But how, in such a circumstance, can both divinely given ends of intercourse be preserved? According to Catholic teaching, they can-if the couple does not contracept. Paul VI writes that "every action [is illicit] . . . which proposes, either as an end or as a means, to render procreation impossible." Proposing to render procreation impossible means, simply put, willing directly against the order of intercourse and consequently against new life.
Couples who contracept introduce a countermeasure into an act known beforehand to be potentially causative of a new life, a countermeasure whose sole purpose is to make it impossible for a new life to come to be. Contraception is an act that can only express the will that any baby that might result from this sexual encounter not be conceived. It actively subverts the progress of intercourse toward its end; it completely detaches the unitive and procreative goods. Moreover, it manifests a will aimed directly against new life.
James Nuechterlein, "Catholics, Protestants, and Contraception", First Things April 1999
Conservative Protestants may share Pope Paul VI's concerns in Humanae Vitae (1968) about the overall negative effects of ready access to birth control on sexual morality. But virtually none of them…is ready to go along with the Catholic Church's insistence that each and every conjugal act must be open to procreation…among Protestants, it is not simply that the overwhelming majority of them come down on the same side of the issue, but that for most of them there is no real issue here at all…
Permit me a personal elaboration. When my wife and I married, we assumed as a matter of course that we would have children…We did not want children immediately—I was still in graduate school—but if she had become pregnant, we would not for a moment have considered abortion. But neither for a moment did we morally hesitate to practice contraception. (The only extended discussion was over the method.) It was not a matter of carefully weighing the pros and cons and struggling to a decision. We no more debated whether we would use contraception than we debated whether we would, in the fullness of time, have children. Of course we would someday, God willing, have children; of course, in the meantime, we would practice (non–abortifacient) contraception. This was not, for us, a matter of presuming on God's providence. It seemed rather a right use of reason in fulfilling the various goods of our marriage.
It is important to emphasize, further, that at no time did contraception create a moral or emotional barrier between us. (We have recently discussed this at some length.) We always reached agreement on when we would use it and when not, and during the times we did, it was never, logistics occasionally aside, in any way a difficulty. Whatever problems arose in our marriage, contraception was never among them. Contraception did not, contrary to the warnings of HumanaeVitae on this point, lead me to lose respect for my wife, nor lead her to feel used. If someone had told us…that we were "withholding our fertility from one another," he would have met with blank incomprehension. We intended both the unitive and procreative goods of marriage, but not necessarily both in every act of love.
Stanley Grenz, Sexual Ethics: A Biblical Perspective, pp91-2, 152-3.
To elevate procreation as the central meaning of the sex act…results in a truncated and therefore potentially damaging understanding of its meaning within marriage…within the marriage bond sexual activity can carry other equally significant meanings. These other aspects…may all exist apart from the procreative intent…
Within marriage, sexual intercourse can be a beautiful statement of the covenant between husband and wife…can serve as an expression of the mutual submission of the marriage partners...may be an expression of openness beyond the marital bond. Only in this third dimension does a close connection between the sex act and the procreative possibilities entailed in it become visible. Because sexual intercourse includes these several meanings, it is too much to demand that the unitive and procreative meanings always be kept together…
Birth control is a valid option for married couples on the basis of the importance of responsible family planning in the midst of the contemporary situation. In a world in which the population is increasing rapidly and the cost of providing for children is escalating, it is not surprising that many couples are deciding to limit the size of their families. Birth control is an important way in which they can continue to give expression to their covenant, to mutual submission, and to their openness to new life, while seeking to accept responsibility in the matter of family size.
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