Contraception is popularly heralded as a great societal advancement while the Catholic Church’s stance against it has been viewed by many as, at best, counter cultural and, at worst, indicative of a Church whose time has passed.
The truth is, however, that the mainstreaming of contraception may be one of the most calamitous events of the past century. While it’s been shown that the availability of contraception has led to increases in illegitimacy, abortion, broken families, and helped to create an epidemic of single motherhood there are other consequences as well. Contraceptives are responsible for an increase in HIV cases in Africa, harming the environment, and bankrupting the worldwide economy.
1) Contraception Kills.
A story reported just this week from CNA shows that contraceptive use in Africa may increase the risk of acquiring HIV in Africa.
HIV-negative women who use hormonal contraception injections have nearly twice the risk of contracting HIV, while the HIV-negative male partners of infected women also face an increased risk.
The study, led by University of Washington researchers, was published in The Lancet Infections Diseases journal…The study could mean that the promotion of hormonal contraception in Africa has inadvertently fueled the HIV/AIDS pandemic.
You probably didn’t read much of that study in the mainstream media. Nor have you likely heard that in 2003, a study out of the University of California, found no evidence of condoms working as a primary HIV-prevention measure in Africa. In fact, one Harvard researcher said that condoms may actually inspire some to riskier sexual behavior and actually promote AIDS.
So remember all those folks who said that the Pope was responsible for all those deaths in Africa because of the Church’s ban on contraception. Remember the cartoon that ran in The Philadelphia Inquirer which depicted the pope callously telling dying Africans in an AIDS ward: “Blessed are the sick, for they have not used condoms.” Well it’s certainly looking increasingly likely that the Pope was right. And the mass push from international organizations for contraception availability in Africa may actually be helping to increase the horrors of HIV in Africa.
2) Contraception is Harming the Environment.
The Pill is polluting the environment, harming sea life, and may be part responsible for male infertility.
One of the consequences of The Pill is that massive amounts of hormones are…shall we say…released into nature through female urine. To what effect?
WND reports:
EPA-funded scientists at the University of Colorado studied fish in a mountain stream near Boulder, Colo… When they netted 123 trout and other fish downstream from the city’s sewer plant, they found 101 were female, 12 were male, and 10 were strange “intersex” fish with male and female features.
It’s “the first thing that I’ve seen as a scientist that really scared me,” university biologist John Woodling told the Denver Post.
The main culprits were found to be estrogens and other steroid hormones from birth-control pills and patches that ultimately ended up in the creek after being excreted in urine into the city’s sewers.
The EPA has ignored that study and others. The UK’s Environment Agency actually went ahead and labeled the Pill as a pollutant but are also turning their heads away from the disaster.
Environmentalists have remained predictably apathetic about this pollutant. We can all figure out the whys on that one.
3) Contraception Bankrupts Economies.
The mainstreaming of contraception has led to a decrease in births nationwide and in many countries around the world. This decrease in births will likely have catastrophic consequences in Europe, Russia, and China in the very near future with America as well.
In many countries, less and less workers will be forced to bear the burden of the unfunded liability arising from an increasing amount of retirees whose life expectancy is increasing.
Zenit reports that a recently published report called “The Sustainable Demographic Dividend: What Do Marriage & Fertility Have To Do With the Economy?” delivers a warning that unless the birth rate rises, the consequences could be catastrophic with fewer workers supporting a greater number of retirees. This will eventually lead to a sharp decline in the global economy which some believe we’re already feeling the effects of now. Things have gotten so bad in Russia already they’re paying people to have babies. Things are almost as bad in Europe but they’re still ignoring the problem while they allow immigrants to make up the demographic shortfall.
These are only some of the catastrophic effects of contraception. Hopefully, some will look into this and wonder if the ol’ Church may have been on to something all along. And hey, if the Church is right about this, you’ve gotta’ wonder what else it may be right about. Hmmm.
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Here here for the unpopular opinion!
Of course this is totally wrong. The richest countries in the world…the US, Europe, Japan, etc., ALL have high rates of contraceptive use. The evidence shows that contraception aids in economic development, liberates women, increases public health, etc. I realize you HAVE to cherry pick the data, but PLEASE don’t be so transparent since your argument is so easily shown to be wrong.
Sorry, Bob, you are the one who is wrong. I heard a talk a couple of years ago by an expert in human resources who teaches at the School of Business of Carleton University in Ottawa. According to her, birth rates in developed countries are now so low that the point of no-return is almost reached, and that means that a number of populations are on the road to extinction. She brought up that fact in a talk about the increasing difficulty to find qualified trades-people in the construction industry. Contraception and abortion are both among the causes of this threatening situation. It seems that our society would like people to simply appear among us all grown up, without having to invest in the care and education of children, but it does not work.
@bob: Short term “aids in economic developement,” women’s liberation and increases in public health will not save the economy, not the global economy, not the enviromental economy, nor the human economy. The fact remains and will not be addressed soon enough, that estrogen in our ground water supply is endemic in all major cities across America and is now being looked at as the cause of arrested development in young men, also known as homosexuality. If the numbers of female fish does not scare you, you probably are already affected by the estrogen in the water supply.
@bob: You have liberated yourself into knowing there is no upside to crimes against the human body.
Hey, Bob. Your comments are rather conclusory. Do you have any data to back them up? Matt’s post at least provided references in support of his statements. Oh, and, to nip your likely response to me in the bud, an ad hominem attack against me doesn’t count as support for your argument.
no need to mention to harm to marriages as that is obvious from the divorce rates
What about breast and uterine cancer! The pill is a main if not the source.
Good job. I’ve known all this stuff for months but people never listen. They are too brainwashed into thinking they are saving the planet and their health by not having kids, neither of which are true. I just read a huge study where even great-grand multiparous women in developed countries were no more at risk than 1st time moms for any major pregnancy/labor complication. Having several children also greatly lowers your risk of many cancers, including breast cancer. You could also mention that contraception in 3rd world countries only serves to impoverish families further, by forcing them to tend their fields alone and have no one to help care for them in old age. In countries with no retirement benefits, this is a big deal! In fact, when they focused on really educating the poor, they noted a drastic increase in quality of life in countries where there was no effort either to make contraception available or educate the public about it. By comparison, in countries where volunteers simply handed out condoms and pushed other contraceptives (not to mention the ones they lied about which were really injectible sterilizers) there was no increase in quality of life. None. As for the economic effects, we are already seeing them here! There are other countries you did not list which are also paying people to have children, Korea is one. I am definitely doing my part to bridge the gap, pregnant with #5 right now in a stable loving home and it has only helped my marriage and my health has never been better!
Bob- as a woman, I am offended that you think the pill has liberated women. Actually, it has shackled them. Women that are on the pill don’t have their natural hormonal fluctuation to indicate an increase in libido during her cycle. She’s on one, flat, mostly-non-raised-to-non-existent-libido all month long. Yet she’s supposed to be sexually ready for a man whenever HE wants it. It’s all about the man and getting sex when HE wants it without fear of of impregnating her. At least for a woman that practices NFP, or doesn’t use hormonal contraception, a man actually has to wait a couple days if a pregnancy wants to be avoided AND the woman can appropriately respond with her own level of sexual arousal.
Too many women are led to believe the pill is great and then they wonder why their sex life has gone to hell. Then too many men are led to believe it’s great and wonderful. If it was so great and wonderful, why isn’t there a BC pill for men? Did you know the history of the development of the pill used both men and women? Did you also know that a couple of men had their testicles shrink during the study so they stopped the study on men. Did you also know that women DIED during the study, yet they continued to use women as guinea pigs. If contraception is so liberating, why is there only two forms of contraception for men, but the rest lies on the woman’s shoulders?
Bravo, Dirtdartwife. Well said.
Beautifully said Dirtdartwife!
And considering the World Health Organization classified the Pill as a C1 carcinogen that CAUSES Breast Cancer. The Medical community put a warning on it for MENOPAUSAL women, but not for younger women, even though the pill has 6 times more hormones than menopausal therapy. It is DEFINITELY NOT a miracle. Ask any women who has had breast cancer what the first question they get asked is, and what the first thing they are told to stay away from is. Here is the WHO press release indicating it causes breast cancer enough to label it the highest level of carcinogen C1;
http://www.chastity.com/misc/pdf/iarc_breast_cancer_and_pill.pdf
Posted by Dirtdartwife on Wednesday, Oct 12, 2011 10:10 AM (EDT):
“At least for a woman that practices NFP, or doesn’t use hormonal contraception, a man actually has to wait a couple days if a pregnancy wants to be avoided AND the woman can appropriately respond with her own level of sexual arousal.”
As I understand the biology, to successfully practice NFP a couple has to avoid intercourse when both are at the peak of their desire. The woman most desires sex when she is fertile, and she gives off pheromones and visual cues that add to the man’s desire. So I would expect oral contraceptives to decrease the desire of both, to some extent. There are sacrifices and trade-offs in either case. Easily reversible sterilization techniques would be the perfect answer.
bob,
“....liberates women.”
Shame on you! It’s breast cancer awareness month. Didn’t you get the memo? Or, are you going to continue giving money to the Susan Komen Foundation to do more “research” and discover what we already know?
I am a big proponent of NFP and the Catholic teachings, but I do have a couple of points of contention with what’s been said:
1) Dirtdartwife - It is not all about the man wanting to have sex without fear of getting the woman pregnant. Women have a natural inclination to want to have sex when they are ovulating. Avoiding this is a sacrifice for her too, not just for him. Women also have sexuality and this should not be dismissed.
2) Mary de Voe - I will not sit here quietly while people make wild accusations about where homosexuality comes from. Gay people existed long before there were estrogen levels in the water. It is not “arrested development” it is a naturally occurring phenomenon. And they require our compassion and respect.
Matt- I wish your next post would include how to change our behavior as Catholics to conform to what we believe about this reality you have so clearly and deftly illuminated in this post. What exactly am I saying? Well- for all our prolife rhetoric, our lifestyles and parishes now cater to the family with two kids three years apart. People look askance at young mothers with toddlers who bring their unruly crew to daily Mass, we are charged per child up to five (five seems to be the standard number of kids that the really wealthy, generous open to life Catholics have) for Catholic school; and every other program we participate in at the parish, etc. And there is a prevailing undercurrent in our subculture that you better not use contraception, but at the same time you better figure out NFP so you never inconvenience the rest of us with any of the challenges you might face by ‘having all those children’.... Walk the talk- for Mercy’s sake.
Interesting commentary. What is scary is that this is not news. In 1999, the International Agency for Research on Cancer, an arm of the World Health Organixation, concluded that “Combined oral contraceptives are carcinogenic to humans (Group 1)”. How’s that for a well kept secret? For reference that is Monograph # 72, and can be read at the IARC website.
Meghan, I didn’t say birth control was all about fear of the man getting a woman pregnant. I was highlighting the extreme fallacy in the idea that birth control is liberating for women when it’s clearly NOT. Being a “big proponent” of NFP and Catholic teaching, I’m left wondering why you have a “point of contention” what what I wrote.
Dirtdartwife - because you stated: “It’s all about the man and getting sex when HE wants it without fear of of impregnating her.” My point of contention was it is not “all about the man.” If a woman is ovulating and wants to have sex, she too has to wait, has to sacrifice, has to pray. Women, too, can have a fear of becoming pregnant if the timing is not ideal. While I do not believe that artificial contraception is the appropriate intervention for this purpose, I also do not believe that people’s motivation to use artificial contraception is just so that man can get it “whenever he wants.” Sometimes it’s so the woman can get it “whenever she wants.” My point is, if we are going to change people’s minds about it, we have to acknowledge the truth about why they are using it. Are some women put under pressure by mates to use it due to sexism? Yes. But that’s not everyone’s situation.
I do not believe that women are liberated by the pill. I believe that NFP is the most liberating tool of all because it encourages healthy communication between partners.
Meghan,
I don’t think Mary DeVoe was making wild accusations. We all know there have long been homosexuals and that they need to be treated with compassion, of course! This however does not mean estrogen in the water is not somehow effecting our boys and should be ignored. It IS causing arrested development, you can argue about how that would manifest, but it IS causing it. Studies are LINKING estrogens to feminizing our boys by which could happen in a variety of ways, including infertility but also our girls, including early puberty. Is it a huge link to think it could effect attraction, NO. The government has alreadly recognized the harm this causes through BPA’s (estrogen in plastics), but has not made the larger leap to the MUCH LARGER runoff from female’s using hormones. Because there is SO MUCH cantanmination from so many women using hormones, there is a variety of outcomes. Dr. Jayne Bryan and Professor John Sumpter at Brunel University for the Environment have warned about the effect of this on humans. If this runoff is “transgendering” our fish and depleting the male fish populations, as studies have confirmed, who knows what it is doing to the human male? It would be hard to quantify since so many women take contraceptives and we have a cocktail of chemical swimming in our drinking water. The Pittsburgh Post-Gazette reports that other study results have shown ambiguous gender in 85 per cent of the catfish caught on the Allegheny, Monongahela and Ohio rivers. Chemicals extracted from 25 randomly sampled fish caused growth of estrogen-sensitive breast cancer cells cultured in a laboratory, eleven of which “produced very aggressive cancer growth”. This is actually very very scary stuff for a variety of reasons from cancer, to infertility, to who knows what else? The question is, why are the Environmentalistsso silent about it? And always, no matter how a person ends up the way they are, they need compassion & prayer. All of us do.
In this article: “I don’t understand that correlation does not necessarily indicate causation” -The Author
@Meghan:“The fact remains and will not be addressed soon enough, that estrogen in our ground water supply is endemic in all major cities across America and is now being looked at as the cause of arrested development in young men, also known as homosexuality.”
The American Psychiatric Association diagnosed homosexuality as “arrested development” until the militant homosexuals forced the psychiatrists to call it “normal”. B4U-ACT, a group of psychiatrists in Baltimore, Md., this past summer is trying to get infant/adult sexual intercourse “normalized” by way of the courts. It is what it is.
I read this whole article laughing and thinking it was satire. Realizing it is not has left me flummoxed.
More to the point, the use of birth control did not cause ANY of these things. What causes unplanned pregnancies and the spread of STIs is a lack of education. People somehow still don’t understand how women get pregnant (hint: jumping up and down after intercourse does nothing) and they don’t understand how to prevent STIs because they don’t REALLY know how they’re transmitted and how they work. This is not the fault of contraception in the least. It’s not a coincidence that in countries with very open and thorough sex education (not the abstinence-only crap in the USA) there are MUCH lower rates of abortions.
If you ACTUALLY cared about the lives of fetuses or of the people in AIDS-stricken countries, you would support comprehensive sex education.
@CGS—thanks for your intelligent comment! That was really good. I do agree completely that the effect of the estrogen contamination in our drinking water must be further studied to see if there is a correlation between that and human development. The EPA definitely needs to step up and address this.
Ms. DeVoe, I am not even going to comment on B4U-Act because that is opening up a whole other discussion. However, I’m not sure what that has to do with homosexuality. That is pedophilia and a completely separate issue. It’s a shame—you must not have any close friends or relatives who are gay, or you might have a better understanding of what they endure.
Cookie, can you site the studies with open and thorough sex education and lower rates of abortion in those countries? I would like to read the studies. I never had a sex education class that told me to jump up and down. I also had sex ed (in Catholic school) that was very clear about Catholic Teaching, yet also comprehensive. I chose Church teaching, because there is ONE WAY to completely prevent pregnancy & STI that is abstinence. I would point out to you though, you are missing the point of the danger of contraception to the environment. IT IS THE FAULT of estrogen contraception that the environment is having havoc wreaked on it. I understand your other point and would like to read up on those studies, but contraception IS DIRECTLY LINKED to destruction of the environment. I find it interesting at the end of your statement that you talk about “fetuses” and accuse people of not caring. That is quite simply a FALSE statement. First of all a fetus is a baby (which you can’t even seem to say) and to say that we do not care is to not know us at all. Please do not jump to unfounded conclusions like that, and be respectful. And to a Catholic contraception is just not a loving way to support a marriage, you may not feel that way, which is your choice, but the church is not aiming for mediocre here, the bar should be set high, after all the church is the messanger of God.
A British Medical Journal Lancet found that sex education programmes have little or no impact on rates of teenage pregnancy or abortion. Sweden’s programmes in sex education, and promotion of contraceptives, have been an admired model - yet total abortion rates there are now higher than those in the UK and the abortion ratio to live births is higher than other countries meaning they have about 18 abortions for every 25 live births. That is pretty horrific to me.
@ Cookie… yes… I will support comprehensive sex education in schools IF those courses include coverage of the Billings and Creighton Models… and teaches both boy and girls about their reproductive ability, cycles… and how to chart fertility rather than to leave them only with information about artificial Birth Control pills and condoms .
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Then, if they don’t want to rely solely on NFP - at least they’ll know something about their fertility and not be mystified that sex makes babies!!!
First and foremost in the case of sex education… teenagers/children should be taught that a properly functioning, healthy human body WILL make babies as a result of intercourse. As opposed to the drivel they’re currently being taught that only unprotected sex makes babies.
THAT is what causes unplanned pregnancies… although it could be argued that there is no such thing as planning pregnancy - it’s not like humans are in control of such things… which in fact IS what causes unwanted babies and unwanted pregnancies…the belief that humans can control it.
All I have to say is….....Pope Paul VI’s Humanae Vitae was absolutely correct. In it he gave many warnings which are unfortunately all coming true. Just think if all our Bishops took heed of what the Pope had said!
Thanks Matthew for another great article!
The article ommits something very basic: IUDs and hormonal contraceptives kill the unborn babies because they fail to prevent conception and work by preventing the implantation in the uterus (i.e. killing the already living baby). Check the scientific sources:
http://www.lifeissues.net/writers/kah/kah_03howpillworks1.html
I just read EWTN host Teresa Tomeo’s new book Extreme Makeover http://teresatomeo.com/books-and-media.html and she covered a lot of these stats. People need to be informed, but they also need to know how to overcome what the culture teaches, which she explains in her book. It seems there is such a conspiracy to withhold the truth when it comes anything having to do with s-x. The media, the drug companies, the abortion industry, etc. all conspire to tell us we can do anything we want without repercussions, but this is not the truth. We ALL need to keep spreading the word about the lies because it takes a LOT to get through to people they are being deceived.
I didn’t mean to imply that sex ed classes will tell you to jump up and down after sex, I was giving an example of some misconceptions that many teens have because they haven’t had proper sex education. You’re right, abstinence IS the only 100% effective method of preventing pregnancy and STIs. That fact should not be absent from sex ed classes. The fact is, not everyone is going to abstain and the teens who aren’t going to abstain need to be better educated about how to prevent these things from happening. All the sex ed I experienced was spending 2 weeks studying it in 9th grade health class in a TX public school. The only birth control methods mentioned were oral contraceptives and condoms and they didn’t tell us how to use them effectively. It was all scare tactics to try and keep us from having sex, but no amount of gross STI pictures are going to kill most teens’ sex drives. I would support teaching models about peak fertility points, but they’re not nearly as effective as condoms and birth control and I think it would cause horny teens would get over confident in when they think they can prevent pregnancy if it were taught outside the context of a Catholic class (ie public school).
Teens and young adults are going to have sex regardless of whether or not you think they should. I think it’s just common sense that if a society accepts that reality and truly teaches them how to prevent it, the number of unplanned pregnancies will inherently fall.
You are correct that I didn’t address anything about the environmental factors, I got all huffy about the first part of the article and didn’t read through the whole thing. My bad.
I looked into the original research from the WND article you linked to and it named shampoos, detergents, pesticides and plastics as major culprits as well. They found that an upgrade in their plant plant cleaned these chemicals out of the water and are no longer experiencing the intersex problems with the fish [http://www.colorado.edu/news/r/a35fc44085a5a8d808969fb660842a52.html]. Low levels of all medications that humans take end up in waste water so I’d be completely supportive of updating water treatment plants to prevent not only estrogen and related hormones from entering the water supply, but a whole host of psychotropic drugs that end up there too. Extrapolating from this article that birth control is “destroying the environment” is a very big stretch.
You missed the connection between the pill and the increase in Breast Cancer. Also the fact that the World Health Orginization has declared hormonal contraceptives Class 1 carcinogens. That is they are PROVEN to cause cancer in humans.
TRS, as a biology teacher, I love you for your comment. It never ceases to frighten me that people (and not just teenagers) can say the words “I don’t know how I/she got pregnant” and actually MEAN it. Yes, they have been taught over and over that only unprotected sex causes babies, not that the whole biological/evolutionary purpose of sex is SEXUAL reproduction. Never mind the failure rate of all types of contraception, “permanent” methods like vasectomies included. It’s not the Catholics who are ignoring biology, ladies and gentlemen.
Not to worry. When the Republicans stop all immigration and end social security, people will have to have more babies.
Things are coming around full circle, and it’s taken only 50 years or so.
Further to Pamela: I agree that things such as fertility cycles and NFP could and should be taught in high school sex education classes AND in physiology classes. At least young people would be equipped to make informed choices, even if many would probably still make the wrong choices.
Nothing in the Bible prohibts birth control. Human beings as individuals and as a community have been very very obedient to God’s command to be be fruitful and multiply. but that command does not mean that women ahve to be brood mare, having child after child, does not mean that women should not have control over their reproduction, should not be using their brains to make healthy reproductive choices. The command does not mean that God wants us to populate the earth to the point that every other creature is pushed out of its envirnoments and/or made extinct.
God made the earth to work as a balanced system (of populations of all of us various creatures, of different environemnts,of weather, tides,seasons, etc). Overpopulating destroys the balance that God has put in place and endgangers all life on the planet.
Bravo to all men and women who make responsible reproductive choices by limiting, via articifical birth control, the numer of children that they have. such choices improves the health of children, the ehalth of women, and the health of the overall population.
Population explosion is a myth. And women can have even better control over their reproduction, as well as over their lives, by using other means than ingesting more chemicals into their bodies. NFP means that a woman can say “no” when it is better for her to abstain, and those horrid feminists (at least in my part of the word) are doing very good work nowadays teaching everyone that “no means no!” even when told to a husband or partner. The way I see it, this is a much better way for a woman to have control over her body than filling herself with ever more chemicals, or using various devices that are not totally effective and interfere with the mutual giving of the marital act… Of course it also means having control over one’s raw impulses and that may be difficult and often painful, but achieving something that is very important is not always the easier road. Oh, and NFP requires real dialogue between spouses, which is a good in itself.
Contraception (along with abortion) will be, and are seen, as one of the greatest advancements in human liberation. Contraceptive technologies are on par with the printing press, harnessing electricity, splitting the atom, and antibiotics that have liberated people, women particularly but men as well, from the biological slavery of reproduction. People can pursue lives of transcendent & existential meaning, rising above the crappy subsistence existence characteristic of yucky large families loaded with unplanned kids. Throw in there prenatal diagnostics that gives us a heads up on downs syndrome and a host of maladies, then you have great tools for people to plan and dictate their lives. My wife and I have one planned daughter (the center of my life). On school teacher salaries, we routinely go to Europe, drive nice cars, can afford opera lessons, private guitar study. . .my wife and I both went back to school to get additional degrees. . .just for the intellectual pursuits.
Those who oppose contraception suffer sour grapes and want everybody else to live like desperate pigs drowning in their own amniotic gulags. I think 7 billion little miracles is plenty.
Well said, Marthe Lepine. ...by the way, isn’t reliance on artificial birth control an admission that you “can’t control yourself” and your urges, and don’t want the responsibility of having to do so? Who said that all couples who practice NFP have only big families, anyway? Certainly not true of my NFP teachers, who had only three, and my parents, who had only two.
Maggie, the WHO says nothing negative about contraception on their web page (http://www.who.int/mediacentre/factsheets/fs351/en/index.html). Yes, the IARC noted the increase in breast cancer with contraception use… It also noted the decrease in endometrial and cervical cancer with contraception use. You’re right, this is not a well-publicized fact about birth control and it should be noted in the side effects and stressed the same as the increased risk of heart attacks and strokes. This doesn’t affect my birth control decision at all personally, but women should definitely be educated and allowed to make their own informed choices. That’s part of what a completely comprehensive sex education class would cover.
@Robert Rodriguez - Wow! So you don’t know a single large family. You only know these hateful things you have been told. We have 7 children, both of us are college educated, continue to be lifelong learners, we don’t feel a need to be conspicuous consumers, and we live a middle class lifestyle without being up to our eyeballs in debt. Sounds like you have become a slave to stuff. I quit that years ago. Quantity of stuff doesn’t equal quality of life. We had stuff, both too tired for each other and our only child (at the time). We had what you have and chose to switch to this one. We haven’t given up plumbing or piano lessons. Where do you people come up with ideas of large families all being poor and suffering, really?
Jo, I think couples who choose to have large families should walk the talk by being able to support them. I have gotten a sense at times that the large families in our parish think that everyone shuold be providing for them because they are living the life God asked them to. But others are living that life as well and perhaps they struggle to afford Catholic education for their 2 kids because one spouse is disabled and one is in a low paying job. My parish parking lot is filled with 15 passenger vans and is very welcoming of large families. And generously offers a fmaily cap for programs. But with having a family comes the parents responsiblity to raise the kids. I am not sure why you think others should pay for your kid’s education. Having a large family is a choice and a responsiblity.
Thank you, Matthew, for following up your great pro-family, pro-fertility piece “You can never afford them” with a Cliffs Notes of recent news & commentary. I know this wasn’t meant to be a comprehensive summary (Although Marc took a good crack at it on Patheos this past week), so I’m not going to go to town on, “Don’t forget about this study, and don’t forget about…”—-although all of those suggestions are important and valid.
What I’m seeing here in the comments is a real concern and conviction about this, which is encouraging. PEOPLE NEED TO DO SOMETHING WITH THIS. If they are already putting their Humanae Vitae/ non-contraception activist hat on—cheers to them.
If not, it’s understandable. There’s so much out there to support with our time and talent. Plus, give the money to the chancery family life stuff, and where does it go? Important questions and concerns. I would encourage people to check out organizations like the Edith Stein Foundation (disclosure: I work for them), the Leaven for Humanae Vitae, ENDOW, the Guiding Star Project and others, and see what they feel called to support. There’s so much work out there—and our organizations need help!
Okay…first of all…you have to be an idiot to indulge in this article…Yes…some it it is true, but it is twisted and warped beyond belief to try to make people think a certain way. Obviously if you take an injection, you are not going to be protected against AIDS. A contraceptive’s main goal is to prevent pregnancy. Contraceptives don’t kill…people who are stupid enough to have sex with random people and not use a condom kills. Also, reading that a pill (taken by a WOMAN) can cause infertility in a MAN is preposterous. That’s like saying that if I eat beans and then have sex with you, you’ll have gas…it’s just stupid! The stuff on the economy is just so moronic that I can’t even comment on it. Our planet is so over populated, it’s not even funny. Fewer births is EXACTLY what we need.
that means, killing human beings ( unborn) will result to decreasing population growth, therefore, decreasing consumers…no people, no business…contraceptives kill. no doubt about it…it will kill you softly..no arguments needed.. to those who are contraceptives lovers, why don’t you try to use it, so that you may see results later
Lisa Kaiser you seemed to have NO understanding of Catholicism.
1. Catholicism is not sola scriptura; we do not look to the Bible as the only source of guidance. We also rely on Sacred Tradition handed down from the Apostles through the ages. Sacred Tradition never contradicts scripture. But for the record here is a list of Bible verses that refer to fertility and attempting to avoid it (http://www.scripturecatholic.com/contraception.html).
2. The Catholic Church also teaches that women are not brood mares, and that each married couple should responsibly discern and pray about if/when they should have more children. For some families this may mean only one or two children, and for others this may mean a dozen or more.
But NFP, when used correctly, is as high of an effective rate as most forms of artificial birth control, especially considering how often artificial birth control fails. The difference is that NFP does not pump women or the environment with dangerous hormones (like birth control pills), does not falsely promote risky sexual behavior as safe (like condoms), does not kill conceived babies (like an IUD), does not mutilate healthy organs (like vasectomy and tubal ligation), and makes us aware that we are not God and we don’t have 100% control over our fertility.
I would like to add here that the media is not telling the world the truth since the world seems to be running today on what media mainly television tells them and believs this to be the truth. yesterday BBC reported that the 7 billionth baby was born to a philipino lady who lives in a majority catholic country, but decided to follow birth control against the teachings of the church - though they did not say whether the method followed was artificial or natural and what the relation was to the birth ! No other channels.
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