A bitter pill: Why Christians are rethinking contraception

My perception of Christian attitudes towards contraception was once straightforward. Protestants either see nothing wrong with it or are convinced that it is a good thing for married couples, especially women, because it enables planning for a family and career. The only opposition I was aware of came from the Catholic Church, which I thought was a peculiar edict that most Catholics ignored and only a small number of faithful followers struggled to adhere to. 

So I was astonished to discover that until the 20th century, the Christian Church in all its expressions was uniformly against contraception.

As a woman with a career, who has only known a world in which the contraceptive pill is widely available, it is difficult for me to imagine how this attitude could ever have been considered morally correct. It’s hard to imagine that for women through the ages, the choice was either celibacy or an uncontrollable number of children. 

Critiquing contraception 

Women’s wellbeing and the pill appear intertwined and symbiotic. So why have some secular feminists started to question this dogma?

One concern is medical: that the side effects of hormonal birth control have been downplayed. “Contrary to cultural myth, the birth-control pill impacts every organ and function of the body, and yet most women do not even think of it as a drug,” says Holly Grigg-Spall’s Pill: Or how we got hooked on hormonal birth control (Zero Books). “Depression, anxiety, paranoia, rage, panic attacks – just a few of the effects of the Pill on half of the over 80 per cent of women who pop these tablets during their lifetimes.”

Journalist Mary Harrington argues that hormonal contraception has affected not just our biology, but also our sexual appetites – even the popularity of sado-masochism – as well as our choice of partners, our mental health and our attitudes. “I was on it briefly and I stopped in my early 20s because I just realised it was making me fat and sexless and it’s low-key insane,” she told the ‘Triggernometry’ podcast last year. “We need to give sex back the seriousness that it has, and this for me means the feminist case against the pill.”

She argues that women mostly do not and did not want the now-widespread, promiscuous “hook-up culture” that has become entrenched since the 1960s sexual revolution. The pill contributes to this by permitting uncommitted sex, she says. “If you’re in a situation where there’s a meaningful risk of pregnancy, you know that’s a pretty solid motivation for saying no,” she told the podcast. “We have historically taken sex seriously because there’s the potential of creating another human, and once you take that out of the picture, something strange happens to the entire field of sexuality.”

Louise Perry, in The Case Against the Sexual Revolution (Polity), makes a powerful argument that the sexual revolution of the 1960s was liberating only for men who want to be promiscuous. For women, who usually prefer committed relationships, according to research, and for whom pregnancy is a possibility even when on the pill, these social changes have been a disaster. “There is an inherent asymmetry between the sexes that will never be overcome, despite the existence of modern contraception that offers a brittle illusion of sameness,” she wrote in The Boston Globe. 

“In other words, most women are just not very interested in enjoying our sexual freedoms, due to innate differences between the sexes, and yet we must bear (literally) all of the costs of this freedom.

“We must accept the fact that men and women are different and that we need social norms in place to protect the physically weaker sex against the stronger one. Chivalry is good. Restraint is good. We were foolish to think that we could do without these supposedly old-fashioned virtues.”

At the same time as these reappraisals of women’s needs, the ‘natalism’ movement reflects increased concerns about the declining birthrate, which fell to 1.49 children per woman in England and Wales in 2022, according to the Office for National Statistics. “The falling birthrate threatens a disaster so costly no politician dares think about it,” screamed the headline of a column by Sonia Sodha in The Observer in June. “What awaits us could make today’s financial headaches seem barely perceptible in comparison,” she wrote. “Global birthrates are declining: women on average had 4.7 children each in 1950; by 2100 this is projected to fall to 1.7…The result is that we are facing the prospect of shrinking, ageing societies in which there will be fewer working-age people for every retired person. This means fewer taxpayers to meet the growing costs of state pensions, healthcare and social care.”

The pill impacts every organ and function of the body

These movements are having an influence, at least on younger generations. “For more and more Gen Z women, there’s an intuitive sense that hormonal birth control might be messing with us, and our brains,” writes Rikki Schlott in the New York Post. More couples are choosing condoms, diaphragms or ‘natural family planning’ (NFP), where intercourse is avoided at the most fertile time in a woman’s cycle – or rethinking their sexual behaviour altogether, leading to the new ‘puriteen’ label for the younger generation, who are having less sex with fewer partners. 

Church and contraception

Today, the Protestant Church is almost entirely in favour of contraception. Christian feminist, the late Rachel Held Evans, wrote a typical liberal argument in favour of contraception on her blog, arguing that contraception allows married women to space pregnancy, treat medical conditions and manage their careers. She went on to say: “the most effective way to curb the abortion rate in this country is to make birth control more affordable and accessible”. (A claim that is disputed, as we shall see.)

At the opposite end of the theological and political spectrum, conservative evangelical ministry Desiring God assured its followers that it has no position on contraception, and that Calvinist pastor John Piper allows non-abortive birth control. “The Bible nowhere forbids birth control, either explicitly or implicitly, and we should not add universal rules that are not in Scripture” the blog advises, although it adds: “Any attitude which fails to see that children are a good gift from the Lord is wrong.” 

However, Christians were unanimously against artificial birth control until the 20th century, especially in the early Church. “If we marry, it is only so that we may bring up children,” wrote Justin Martyr in First Apologia around AD 160. Similar sentiments were expressed by Athenagoras, Irenaeus, Clement of Alexandria and Lactantius. Hippolytus condemned women who “resorted to drugs for producing sterility” in his Refutation of All Heresies, written in the third century. 

Luther and Calvin both condemned sex without procreation in their commentaries on Genesis. Calvin wrote: “When a woman in some way drives away the seed out the womb, through aids, then this is rightly seen as an unforgivable crime.” One of Luther’s criticisms of Catholicism was its encouragement of celibacy through monasticism and therefore its relegation of marriage and procreation in spiritual hierarchies. 

In the Anglican Church, the 1908 Lambeth Conference expressed its “alarm” at the “growing practice of the artificial restriction of the family”. In 1920, it gave “an emphatic warning against the use of unnatural means for the avoidance of conception, together with the grave dangers – physical, moral and religious – thereby incurred, and against the evils with which the extension of such use threatens the race”.

A change in direction

But in 1930, a radical change of mind occurred. The conference declared “the sexual instinct is a holy thing” and that contraception and restricting the size of the family was acceptable so long as “Christian principles” were followed. This included complete abstinence through a “life of discipline and self-control lived in the power of the Holy Spirit”, and periods of abstinence, where there was a “morally sound” reason, though not “motives of selfishness, luxury, or mere convenience”. Yet by 1958, it progressed to saying that planning the size of families was “right and important”. 

The justification for this change is often perceived as positive. Writing in the journal Theology, Peter Sedgwick credits it to a: “much greater emphasis on the joy of romantic love, the enjoyment of sexual relationships, and an understanding of marriage as being ‘unitive’: that is, bringing a couple together in a union that transcends their individual selves.” 

When Pope Paul VI bucked the trend in 1968, it was a surprise. His encyclical, Humanae Vitae argued there was an “inseparable connection” between the procreative and unitive act of sex, adding that arguments for limiting family size must be made with “respect for the order established by God”. 

A remnant of Protestants also continued to disapprove of contraception, including the late missionary Elisabeth Elliot (1926-2015), or more recently, US online commentator Allie Beth Stuckey. The fundamentalist “Quiverfull movement” that gained ground in the 1980s taught against contraception and encouraged large families, not least as a missionary strategy, but it tends to be viewed as odd at best and sinister at worst. It is named after Psalm 127’s “Blessed is the man whose quiver is full of [children]” (v5), but other biblical justifications seem somewhat tenuous: the condemnation of Onan in Genesis 38 for avoiding procreation through coitus interruptus, which was “wicked in the Lord’s sight;” and God’s instruction to Adam and Eve in Genesis 1:28 to “be fruitful and increase in number”. 

However, in The Christian Case Against Contraception (Wipf & Stock), pastor Brian Hodge argues that the historic case against birth control associated it with very serious sins: murder, sexual immorality and “rebellious acts of idolatry”. 

“If someone desires to make the argument that this subject is not important, he or she will have to answer the question: Which one of the sins listed above is not important if one’s eternal destiny is on the line?” he writes.

While the subject has been debated by fringe conservatives ever since the pill became widely available in the 1960s, most Protestants today barely give the issue a second thought. Even an international survey of Catholics found that 78 per cent supported the use of artificial birth control.  

The consequences of our actions? 

One good reason to reassess the belief that contraception is ethically permissible is a survey of the changes to family life, marriage and sexual behaviour that have occurred in the past 50 years. In his 1968 encyclical, Pope Paul VI warned that contraception would make infidelity easier and lead to a “general lowering of morality”. Men would “lose respect” for women, he argued, and: “no longer caring for her physical and psychological equilibrium, may come to the point of considering her as a mere instrument of selfish enjoyment, and no longer as his respected and beloved companion”. 

It does seem somewhat prophetic. “Each of his predictions has come true,” says Dr Mehmet Çiftçi of the Anscombe Bioethics Centre. “It has been excellent to see that several secular feminists have written about the harmful effects that contraception has had on society and why women should come off the pill. What needs to be revitalised is a mutual discovery, by Catholics and Protestants, of their shared history of being opposed to this.”

The introduction of contraception in a traditional society (as opposed to a sexually permissive one) is associated with more sexual activity and so abortion actually rises. “If you tell people that there is such a thing as safe sex, that as long as they use contraception they will be fine, this encourages people to have sex with multiple partners, to have sex before marriage, to have sex with people that they don’t intend to have a child with,” Dr Calum Miller, a medical doctor and pro-life campaigner, told an International Christian Medical and Dental Association (ICDMA) webinar. “You get an increase in unwanted pregnancies because you have a lot more sex and you have a lot more relationships that are not ready for a child.”

The belief that sex is an end in itself continues to poison our society

“The 50th anniversary of Humanae Vitae has occasioned a certain amount of Roman Catholic triumphalism, at least among the intellectual class, of the ‘We told you so!’ variety,” wrote conservative theologian Professor Carl Trueman on First Things. “In its prediction of the moral and social chaos the sexual revolution would leave in its wake, Paul VI’s most famous encyclical was correct. The belief that sex is an end in itself continues to poison our society, offering an impoverished account of human personhood in which the sexually inactive are at best defective or unfulfilled.”

But he also points out that the widespread use of contraception by Catholics weakens their case: “In Catholic teaching you may have told us so. But in your actions, you have not shown us a better way.” Dr Çiftçi describes this as a “lamentable failure of proper catechesis and preaching” that “has only begun to be repaired in the past few decades”.

A difficult choice

Which brings us back to the realities of the modern world, and the radical changes that would be needed to reverse the worst effects of the sexual revolution. Even if contraception use fell – and there was a corresponding fall in promiscuity – for a married woman, the modern dream of balancing a successful career and a family would shift from difficult to near-impossible. In our current economic situation, single income households are difficult and require a great deal of sacrifice. 

In 1968, well before women’s liberation had really begun, Pope Paul VI acknowledged this challenge, advising that “it would not be practicable without the help of God, who upholds and strengthens”. It would require “ascetical practices” and “continual effort,” he added. “Such discipline bestows upon family life fruits of serenity and peace, and facilitates the solution of other problems; it favours attention for one’s partner, helps both parties to drive out selfishness, the enemy of true love, and deepens their sense of responsibility.”

Yet some couples find the practise of NFP too hard, such as Sam and Bethany Torode, the authors of Open Embrace: A Protestant couple rethinks contraception (Wm B Eerdmans). Their 2002 book, which described the couple’s rejection of contraception and embrace of a large family as an act of surrender and love to one another and God, was briefly popular among some US evangelicals. But it did not end well. A few years later they publicly changed their mind, divorced, and Bethany deconstructed her faith. 

Some are more optimistic about NFP. “The empirical consequences [of widespread contraception use] are indisputably bad,” Dr Miller told Premier Christianity. “The question is, are those the natural endpoints of contraception, or do they arise from a misuse?” He points to NFP as a compromise. “NFP is often ridiculed, but with typical use it’s about as effective as condoms, and with good use it’s about the same effectiveness as the pill. It also helps women understand their bodies and avoids all the problems of hormonal contraception.”

Dr Miller summarises why he believes the Church should debate this controversial topic once again: “Christianity has held for 2000 years that the primary purpose of sex was procreation. As soon as societies started to change this, the Pope warned what would happen. Everyone laughed at him, and then he turned out to be completely correct.”