"The Church's stand on birth control is the most absolutely spiritual of all her stands and with all of us being materialists at heart, there is little wonder that it causes unease. I wish various fathers would quit trying to defend it by saying that the world can support 40 billion. I will rejoice in the day when they say: This is right, whether we all rot on top of each other or not, dear children, as we certainly may. Either practice restraint or be prepared for crowding..." (The Habit of Being, 338).
I was thinking about birth control already, after reading an article in The Economist about the impact of the one-child policy in China, and the preference for boys in both China and India. I wrote a post called 100 Million Baby Girls Who Never Lived for the Park Forum. An excerpt from that post:
Christians can attest that every human life is a valuable one. And yet it is worth considering whether Christians have contributed to the problem [of sex-selection]. Protestants have accepted the role of contraception for most of the past century, and contraception lends itself to the idea that human beings decide when and where to have babies. How much of a leap is it from deciding where and when to deciding which ones and how many?
What do you think? Is birth control an act of stewardship? Do most Protestant couples understand it this way? What impact does it have on families? On society? What relationship exists between the sexual permissiveness of our culture and birth control? What role did Protestant churches play in creating this relationship?
I don't pretend to have all the answers, but I am certain that support of birth control must be coupled with support of families and divorced from assumptions that it is God's will that we do what we want, when we want, with our bodies. I am reminded of 1 Corinthians 6:19-20: Do you not know that your body is a temple of the Holy Spirit, who is in you, whom you have received from God? You are not your own; you were bought at a price. Therefore honor God with your body.
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4 comments:
Tough one and a question we think about often having moved from NFP to barrier method after our first baby was born. We had some very clearly articulated reasons for NFP that we still think are valid, we just aren't sure what to do with that fact that parenting is an overwhelming experience and that we felt like our psychological health would be in jeopardy if I found my very fertile self pregnant with a three month old. So in a box, the single and childless box from which Flannery and the bishops write, yes.
Is it a leap, yes. But how far a leap? I'm cautious of slippery slope ethics but my concern runneth over as Protestants have turned sexual ethics into a free for all a la genetic engineering, selective reduction, IUI, IVF, etc without a second look. That there is no discourse, no pointing to the limits on our "right unto death" to bear children is my primary concern. No doubt highly effective forms of birth control are somewhere in the mix.
At the same time I am well aware that NFP is also a form of control. We still decide if we will or will not have intercourse when "the gift is available." How much control is too much control? On my most introspective days I feel the strangeness of getting to decide at all whether a life is created. Yet my body is equipped with all the tools I need to make this choice. It's a conundrum.
At the end of the day we fall back on hospitality. I don't put anything in my body that would prohibit a fertilized egg from implanting (eg The Pill). I try to avoid BPA and harmful chemicals. I stay up on prenatal vitamins. And all these little things remind me that my life is always open to the possibility of new life.
This is getting long so I'll stop for now!
Thanks so much for sharing your thoughts. What do you think it would take for Protestants to articulate a more clear ethic? I'm with you on the Protestant free for all and not sure how to sort it all through.
I also wonder whether adoption and orphans factor into these musings.
Feel free to say more, and thanks again.
If I figured it out I'd be working on it right now! I think Protestants have several major issues when it comes to sexual ethics. Just to name a few: 1) its enmeshed in so many other things we don't want to touch like economics, individualism, self-sufficiency, the cult of the fetus, 2)being scared of Catholic sexual ethics, 3) compartmentalizing human sexuality. Bleh.
When I read Perelandra by C.S. Lewis, I wondered if birth control was one of our fixed lands. Did not move beyond that to being convicted about it, but I still wonder sometimes.
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