Pregnancy Prevention
Biblical Basis
Technical & Medical Basis
Pastoral Application
“The union of husband and wife in heart, body and mind was ordained by God: for the procreation of children and their nurture in the knowledge and love of the Lord; for their mutual joy, and for the help and comfort given one to another in prosperity and adversity; and to maintain purity, so that husbands and wives, with all the household of God, might serve as holy and undefiled members of the body of Christ; and for the upbuilding of his kingdom in family, church, and society, to the praise of his holy name.”
—The book of Common Prayer (2019) 201-202
Understanding Pregnancy Prevention Through Scripture
Biblical Basis
The Bible doesn’t have a lot to say about family planning – indeed, the term “family planning” itself is a relatively new one and does not even become popular until the late 1930s, with the widespread adoption of birth control, the advent of the Pill, and the subsequent sexual revolution. The Bible does, however, have a lot to say about marriage and sex: namely, that they are good gifts given by God, that they are for particular people and particular purposes, and that they are to be bound within certain covenants. And it is from this understanding of the purpose of marriage and sex that we can glean some insight into a Christian approach to family formation, which is a more Christian way of thinking about marriage, sex, and procreation than meticulous “family planning.”
The phrase “family planning” came about in the mid-1930s as an alternative to the more controversial phrase at the time: “birth control.” In fact, Margaret Sanger, the mother of the birth control movement, coined the phrase herself, and was arrested for using it in 1914; nevertheless, her advocacy continued, and she founded the American Birth Control League (ABCL) in 1921 to promote contraception worldwide. Notably, the ABCL later adopted the less-controversial messaging of “family planning,” since it “emphasized the family more than women’s health or sexuality” (Encyclopedia of Chicago). In 1938, Sanger and the ABCL announced that it was “launching a nationwide campaign to raise a large fund to expand its activities” (New York Times). The name of this initiative would eventually become the ABCL’s rebrand and is still plastered across clinics and foundations all across the United States and the world today: Planned Parenthood.
As Sanger intended, the phrase “family planning” and its sister phrase “planned parenthood” evokes a sense of responsibility for arranging one’s offspring in an orderly way. And this idea has thoroughly penetrated the American consciousness with regard to family formation, mainly through the mechanism of contraception, but also through abortion and embryo creation. Our culture now considers it irresponsible, for example, to carry a disabled child to term. And as our technology advances, this notion of family curation is enabled down to the microscopic level of our preborn children’s very DNA.¹
While the idea of family planning permeated through American culture, it found little resistance in the American church. Alongside the invention of hormonal birth control and the sexual revolution, Christians began, perhaps for the first time, referring to the family as something to be “stewarded.” Where passages about responsible stewarding used to be applied to the notion of gifts and talents, it began also being applied to the notion of the family and children. Children weren’t necessarily disregarded as gifts that were given from God – any Christian would say that children are certainly a gift and a heritage from the Lord – but for the first time they became regarded as a thing to be managed “responsibly,” or potentially even altogether optional. This isn’t to say that attempting to influence the number or spacing of children in one’s family is inherently wrong, but to note that the ability to reliably do so has shifted even Christians’ underlying assumptions about sex and marriage, and ultimately, about children.
Reliable birth control has rendered a society in which children have become unnecessary, or else managed to the point of objectification or even commodification. But Christians believe that children are necessary to sex and marriage, and that they are not products to be managed or sold. Children – even those at the earliest stages of embryonic development – are human lives to be welcomed, protected, and treated with dignity.
It is no coincidence that the popularization of birth control percolated alongside Malthusian fears of overpopulation in the mid-20th century, resulting in a societal attempt at engineering the human family. But Christians are called not to anxiety about tomorrow, but to cast all our fears upon God; to love God and neighbor; to trust in God’s good design and good gifts for our lives. Marriage, sex, and babies are three such gifts, despite the fact that they’re not always viewed as such in our current culture.
The Biblical Basis for Family Formation
As Anglicans have long believed,
“The union of husband and wife in heart, body and mind was ordained by God: for the procreation of children and their nurture in the knowledge and love of the Lord; for their mutual joy, and for the help and comfort given one to another in prosperity and adversity; and to maintain purity, so that husbands and wives, with all the household of God, might serve as holy and undefiled members of the body of Christ; and for the upbuilding of his kingdom in family, church, and society, to the praise of his holy name.”
Book of Common Prayer (2019), 201-202
While the wording of this 2019 version of the institution of marriage is a newer semantic formulation, its content and much of the language is virtually the same as it was in Thomas Cranmer’s original marriage service in the first Book of Common Prayer of 1549. Then, the purpose of marriage was generally regarded in three categories: the procreation of children, mutual help, and the prevention of sin (namely sexual sin). Today, these three categories are maintained in our Book of Common Prayer, though in common parlance they are usually simplified into two: procreation and unity (“prevention of sin” and “mutual help” being combined under the heading of the latter).
The Book of Common Prayer has always been explicitly grounded in Scripture and patristic practice. There are many passages that the Anglican marriage rite rests upon. First and foremost is God’s very first command to mankind in Genesis 1 to “be fruitful and increase in number; fill the earth and subdue it.” Likewise, the metaphor in Ephesians 5 shows forth the marriage of husband and wife as mirroring that of Christ and the Church. The Church itself is to be fruitful as well, to “go and make disciples of all nations, baptizing them in the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit.” Which is to say that all marriages, physical or spiritual, are to be fruitful, and that all marriages, fertile or infertile, are able to be fruitful.
The means by which God has given man the ability to be physically fruitful is sex, and there are a number of Biblical passages that reveal God’s intended purpose of sex. Clearly, in Genesis 1, sex is given to Adam and Eve as the means by which to perpetuate the human race. In Genesis 38, Onan is killed by God for “spill[ing] his semen on the ground to keep from providing offspring for his brother.”² In the Ten Commandments, sex is given guardrails: it is not to be had outside of marriage; adultery is forbidden. In the Song of Solomon, we see that sex is good and a special joy for a husband and wife to enjoy. And in the New Testament, Jesus forbids all forms of sexual immorality, extending the law of the Old Testament even to the unseen thoughts in our minds.
From these passages, Christians have long considered sex to have a dual purpose, similar to that of marriage: procreation and unity. The question, then, is whether it is ever licit for a Christian to intentionally block one of God’s intended aims for the marital sexual act. Intentionally subverting the unitive aspect of the marital act seems to be more obviously wrong to the orthodox Christian: masturbation and pornography are explicitly forbidden, as are rape, fornication, and adultery. All have negative impacts on the unity meant to be shared between a husband and wife during the marital act.
Blocking the potential for procreation, though, has become less obviously wrong to the believer, as methods for pregnancy prevention have become more advanced, reliable, and widespread. It was not always so. Contraception was widely assumed to be sinful by Christians – Catholic and Protestant alike – until the 1930s, when Margaret Sanger’s planned parenthood / birth control campaign began taking off in America. Today, the Guttmacher Institute estimates that 99% of evangelical couples use some form of birth control, and the most common methods are hormonal (such as the Pill or IUD, among others) and sterilization (such as vasectomies and tubal ligation).
All the same, orthodox believers maintain (for now) that homosexual sex is wrong because God intended marriage to be between one man and one woman, though many Protestant denominations, including our own, have schismed over it.³ Many orthodox believers seem to forget, however, that the reason marriage is designed for one man and one woman is because marriage is meant to be procreative. Homosexual sex is necessarily sterile – it has no potential for procreation – and as such it subverts one of God’s intended ends for sex. Why is it licit, then, for married men and women to render their own marital sex sterile?
99%
of evangelical couples use some form of birth control according to the the Guttmacher Institute.
Protestant views
Few Protestant theologians have taken up the question. Catholics, on the other hand, have maintained the historic Christian prohibition on contraception even amidst the 20th century’s rapid advance in contraceptive technologies, such as widespread access to condoms due to the invention of latex in the 1920s, and the subsequent invention of hormonal birth control and the IUD in the 1960s. Their basic position, which even Protestant reformers Martin Luther and John Calvin maintained, is that it is sinful to engage in the marital act and intentionally block the procreative potential of that act. On that historic Christian view, both ends of sex, the unitive and the procreative, must always be present. The fact that every sexual act will not yield a pregnancy is of no consequence; the intentional blocking of the procreative potential is a subversion of God’s purpose for sex.
The one Protestant theologian who has engaged with the Catholic prohibition on contraception is Oliver O’Donovan, in his important work, Begotten or Made?, in which he provides a theological critique of artificial interventions in human reproduction. Much of that book focuses on embryo creation through IVF and even “transsexual” surgeries (which, for 1984, was quite prescient). But he makes a short reference to contraception in which he critiques the atomistic “strict-act analysis” of the Catholic Church and makes the case that a married couple’s respect for the unitive and procreative ends of sex should be judged over the course of the entire marriage, rather than being expressed equally with every sexual encounter. In other words, a married couple can intend to block procreation during some encounters, so long as they don’t intend to block procreation for the entirety of the marriage. It is unclear whether O’Donovan would say that the unitive aspect could ever be intentionally subverted, so long as most of a couple’s encounters were unitive in nature.
Once again, it would seem more obviously wrong to ever intentionally subvert the unitive aspect of sex (who would say it’s okay to cheat on your wife so long as the majority of your sexual encounters are with her?), which seems to imply that our comfort with intentionally subverting the other end of sex, procreation, is at least partially due to desensitization – a theory that holds up given the tectonic shift in social norms as a result of the sexual revolution. Plus, to subvert the unitive act is to risk being caught – adultery, pornography use, or in extremely violent cases, rape, are naturally more subject to social scrutiny and thus consequence than a couple’s use of a condom, pill, or device to prevent pregnancy. In subverting the procreative end of sex, the only people who may ever know are the woman, the man, the doctor, and of course, God.
The chief inadequacy of O’Donovan’s critique, however, is that he dismisses strict-act analysis but never contends with why intentionally blocking the procreative potential for sex should be considered licit. It’s a question no Protestant theologian has taken on, not even at the Lambeth Conference of 1930 which officially broke with the historic Christian teaching on contraception when it allowed for married Christian couples to use barrier methods to block pregnancy.
Despite the fact that the Lambeth Conference of 1930 broke the contraceptive dam within Protestantism, it did place much more limitation on the use of contraception than Anglicans (or Protestants more broadly) seem to abide by today. Resolutions 13 through 15 regard marriage and contraception, and while Resolution 15 does allow for the use of contraception for the first time, it severely restricts its use.
The “twice-provisional limited permission” granted in Resolution 15 says another method of pregnancy prevention may be used only (1) where there is such a clearly felt moral obligation to limit or avoid parenthood, and (2) where there is a morally sound reason for avoiding complete abstinence. The expectation, then, was still that couples would practice abstinence during times when they felt the need to avoid pregnancy, unless those two provisions were met. What exactly constituted meeting those provisions would be, presumably, left to the pastor and his parishioners to decide. And given that the only methods in existence at the time were withdrawal and barrier methods, Resolution 15 does not grant permission for the use of hormonal birth control, which would be invented later.
If Anglicans still abided by Resolution 15 of Lambeth 1930, they would look much closer in practice to the teaching of the Catholic Church, which allows for the use of Natural Family Planning in addition to abstinence to avoid or space pregnancies.
The separation of sex from procreation through the use of contraception is only one side of the coin, however. The separation of sex and procreation may also be found in the process of embryo-creation via in vitro fertilization, or IVF. Contraception removes procreation from sex; IVF removes sex from procreation. But God created sex and procreation to go together, and when we separate them, we risk abusing God’s good gifts to us. Marriage, sex, and children were always meant to go together.
Technical & Medical Basis
Understanding How the Various Methods of Birth Control Work
Hormonal Methods
If Guttmacher’s survey data is correct, then Anglicans, like all Protestants in the United States, use birth control at near-universal rates. But perhaps most concerning about the data is that the most common methods of birth control are hormonal methods and sterilization. Unfortunately, all forms of hormonal birth control have the potential to cause an abortion, but that fact is intentionally obscured by leading medical association groups such as the American College of Obstetricians and Gynecologists (ACOG) and the American Society for Reproductive Medicine (ASRM).
Hormonal methods of birth control include, according to their common names, the Pill, intrauterine device (IUD), the patch, the shot, the implant, the vaginal ring, and Plan B (or the morning after pill). While each method works slightly differently, all use hormones to alter the body’s reproductive system to prevent pregnancy. This is accomplished in three ways: by preventing the ovaries from releasing an egg (ovulation), by thickening cervical mucus to prevent sperm from reaching an egg, and by thinning the lining of the uterus to prevent the implantation of a fertilized egg.
Sometimes, the first two mechanisms fail, and an egg is released. This is called “breakthrough ovulation,” and if the egg is fertilized, then a new life exists. However, if the thinned-out uterus prevents the implantation of this new life, then it causes an abortion. Some methods are more or less likely to allow breakthrough ovulation, but all hormonal methods of birth control have the potential for breakthrough ovulation, which means if the user is sexually active, all hormonal methods have the ability to cause an abortion. Despite this, hormonal birth control is explicitly marketed as being non-abortifacient, which raises serious questions about informed consent. (While the Copper IUD is a non-hormonal, so-called “natural” method of birth control, which works by killing sperm, it also thins the lining of the uterus to prevent the implantation of a fertilized egg).
Birth control is able to be classified and marketed as non-abortifacient because of an intentional redefinition of the term “pregnancy.” Medical associations altered the definition of “pregnancy” in 1965 to begin at the moment of implantation in the uterus, rather than at fertilization (or conception), which happens around 10 to 14 days before. The FDA has accepted this redefinition of pregnancy, and continues to allow for birth control to be classified as non-abortifacient. The truth is, though, that hormonal birth control has the capacity to end human life at its earliest stage of development. Whether or not a woman knows the life existed before it passes does not change the fact that it did.
Ending a human life, intentionally or unintentionally, is a breaking of the sixth commandment, “thou shalt not kill.” Christians should never cause the intentional or unintentional death of a human life, unless there is a serious medical reason to do so, such as in the case of ectopic pregnancies.
In addition to hormonal birth control’s ability to cause abortion there are a number of short- and long-term side effects. including mood swings, nausea, decreased libido, weight gain, or even blood clots, high blood pressure, cardiovascular events, or ovarian cysts. Some research shows that altering the body’s hormones can affect the type of person you’re attracted to.4 Hormonal birth control may also raise the risk of certain types of cancer, such as breast and cervical cancer, even as it may lower the risk to other types of cancer, such as uterine or ovarian cancer – though more research is needed. Additionally, there are no limits on the age at which girls can be prescribed hormonal birth control, and girls are increasingly prescribed birth control for any number of maladies, from painful periods to pubescent acne. There are few studies on the long-term effects of hormonal birth control on adolescent women, though the ones that do exist show reductions in bone mass and density, which are concerning given women’s high predisposition to osteoporosis. Long-term effects of hormonal birth control on the adolescent brain and cardiovascular system are unknown, though animal studies show persistent effects on the female brain and behavior.
Hormonal birth control is also the primary way doctors treat young women with painful periods, which is one indicator of an underlying fertility issue such as endometriosis or polycystic ovarian syndrome (PCOS), among other things. While hormonal birth control may be able to curb some of the symptoms of these conditions, they do not treat them, instead allowing them to progress silently, usually to be discovered only when the woman tries and fails to become pregnant. It can take a woman up to ten years to receive a diagnosis for endometriosis, and two or more for PCOS, delays that are confounded by the use of hormonal birth control, which masks symptoms.
Notably, some research suggests that birth control – which is designed to prevent “unintended pregnancies” – may actually cause them. Those using birth control, especially hormonal methods, expect them to work. But all methods of birth control, even those labeled “highly effective,” have a failure rate. Some fail due to drug interactions, like those of antibiotics or GLP-1s, and others fail due to breakthrough ovulation, when the body does what it was designed to do, despite the drug’s interference. Either way, 95% of abortions are for unintended pregnancies, and about half of unintended pregnancies occur while on a method of birth control. Even with perfect use, 5% of birth control users’ methods fail, resulting in pregnancy.
In sum, hormonal methods of birth control have the potential to cause abortion, and they are unhealthy for women. Thankfully, there are alternatives to hormonal birth control that honor both the potential for new human life as well as the female body.
Sterilization
While hysterectomies have the same effect as sterilization – rendering a woman’s body unable to conceive – hysterectomies are almost always done out of medical necessity rather than elective preference or an intent not to conceive. Hysterectomies performed to preserve life or quality of life in a woman who is suffering are usually morally licit because of the intent, even though the effect is the same as in tubal ligation or vasectomy.5
Despite the popularity of sterilization, it cuts against the purpose of medicine, which is to restore the body’s natural function, or alleviate suffering where it cannot. Sterilization involves cutting into an otherwise healthy human body to destroy a natural function, which in earlier times would have been considered bodily mutilation. In vasectomy and tubal ligation, a doctor cuts, ties, or burns a portion of the reproductive system in order to block its procreative potential. In contrast to hormonal methods of birth control, however, sterilization does not cause unintended abortions. However, it does completely subvert one of the two ends of sex, and is a sign that a couple is no longer open to God’s gift of life. It also makes a permanent decision for tomorrow, when Scripture teaches us to worry about today.
Behavioral Methods
The least invasive forms of birth control are broadly called “behavioral methods,” which include abstinence, withdrawal, barrier methods (such as condoms), and Fertility Awareness Methods (FAM), which are also called Natural Family Planning (NFP). While withdrawal and barrier methods include an intentional blocking of the procreative potential, abstinence and Fertility Awareness Methods do not. Natural methods also have the added benefit of contributing to the overall health and wellness of those who use them.
There are a number of natural methods of fertility awareness. When used to avoid pregnancy, natural methods use various “biomarkers” – such as body temperature, cervical mucus, or hormone tests – to chart a woman’s cycle to identify her “fertile window.” The fertile window is the time each month that a woman could conceive if sexually active. While ovulation only occurs for 12-24 hours each month, sperm can live inside of the female body for up to five days, making the fertile window about five days out of each month. Cycle charting to identify this fertile window allows couples to avoid sexual intercourse during that time if they do not wish to conceive.
Today’s most popular fertility awareness methods – the Creighton Method, the Billings Ovulation Method, the Marquette Model, and the Sympto-Thermal Method, to name a few – are much more accurate and advanced than earlier forms of Natural Family Planning, such as the rhythm method, which operates on the assumption that ovulation always occurs during a fixed window of a woman’s cycle, leaving little room for women whose cycles fall outside the average norm, nor for women with high-variation cycles. Today, there are a host of fertility-tracking companies with devices (sometimes called “wearables”) that incorporate the principles of these methods into personalized algorithms to allow women to track their unique cycles with their phones. While each device differs in effectiveness (as well as price), the most popular fertility-tracking companies include Natural Cycles, FEMM, Tempdrop, Ava, Mira, and Oura, among others. Some of the methods are up to 99% effective at parenting pregnancy, which is more than some methods of hormonal birth control. There are many resources for learning more about the various cycle-tracking methods and devices available.
Fertility Awareness Methods can be used for more than just avoiding pregnancy, however: they can be used to achieve pregnancy, as well as to better understand one’s own body or even identify other health concerns. They can enable early-detection of some underlying health conditions, such as polycystic ovarian syndrome, endometriosis, thyroid or ovulation issues, or sometimes even cancer. This means that Fertility Awareness Methods can even help combat infertility, since they can sometimes detect reproductive issues earlier, allowing women to pursue treatment sooner.
Fertility Awareness Methods are a hormone- and side-effect-free way of tracking fertility while also promoting body-literacy. Some studies even show that couples who practice Natural Family Planning have lower levels of divorce. Some attribute this to a husband and wife being better in-tune with their own bodies and especially that of the wife’s, as they seek to love and serve one another in their life-giving union or their practice of self-control in abstinence thereof.
That is to say: Fertility Awareness Methods are not only for women during their reproductive years, but can be beneficial at all ages and stages of a woman’s life, from menarche (the start of menstruation) to menopause, as well as to her marriage and children.
Pastoral Application
As Carl Trueman has written, our culture today is in a “battle for the body.” We cannot rightly understand our relationship as human beings to God, if we misunderstand fundamentally what it means to be a human being. That is why issues of bioethics, and advances in biotechnology, are so important. Our technology should serve the rightly-ordered, rightly-conceived good of the human person. If it does not, we risk misunderstanding ourselves, and as such, misunderstanding the God who became human and perfected the human form Himself.
The rapid advance in reproductive technologies has outpaced our ability to morally reckon with them. But as our biotechnology continues apace, it is imperative that Christians do the necessary work of contending with their moral implications, seeking to ensure our technology always reflects a true understanding of the human person, serving rather than degrading mankind.
While the Catholic Church’s magisterium has ruled strongly against contraception in every case except the use of natural methods paired with abstinence, Protestants have no such ironclad teaching against it. For Anglicans, this does not mean leaving pregnancy prevention as a “conscience issue,” if by “conscience issue” we mean “doing whatever is right in our own eyes.” Instead, Anglicans should seek to form well the consciences of its parishioners, thinking deeply about the Biblical grounding for and purposes of marriage and sex, as well as the modern mechanisms of pregnancy prevention, so that Christians can think and act in accordance with God’s design for the family: marriage, sex, and children were meant to go together.
Anglican theologians should seriously consider contending directly with the Catholic arguments against contraception if we continue to allow for the use of non-abortifacient forms of birth control in some cases. Anglican priests will be ill-equipped to shape the consciences of their parishioners on birth control if they continue to ignore the historic Christian teaching against it. This is not to say that the historic Christian teaching is necessarily right – only that theologians should clearly articulate why they continue to allow their own churches to break with it. The Lambeth Conference of 1930 did not do this work, as it made no moral arguments for or against the use of birth control.
But some see the lack of an ironclad magisterium within Protestantism is something of a feature rather than a bug. As it stands, the Lambeth resolutions of 1930 do allow for pastoral guidance on contraception in extraordinary circumstances, where the Catholic Church allows none. For example, when a husband or wife is diagnosed with a disease, such as cancer, and needs chemotherapy (which is severely deformative or even deadly to a baby in utero), this couple, if Catholic, would need to abstain from sex or else use an extremely restrictive natural method (and even then risk pregnancy) for the duration of the treatment, which could last years. If unity and procreative potential are equally important, this would seem to be an extraordinary ask. Lambeth would allow for couples, in consultation with their priest, to use a non-abortifacient method in this case. But again, Protestants have made no clear, theologically- and biblically-grounded argument in favor of intentionally blocking the procreative potential for sex, rather than simply abstaining from it. And most couples’ situations are not this extreme.
While the topic of sex can be difficult for a priest to broach given the wide age-range of most congregations, there are prudent ways to address it, perhaps in small-group or counseling settings, or most obviously (and importantly) in pre-marital or ongoing marital counseling sessions. For teens and young adults, Sexual Risk Avoidance (SRA) education programs that emphasize abstinence before marriage and promote the success sequence could be helpful guides for addressing the social science behind God’s design for sex with a younger audience, when
Key takeaways:
God designed marriage, sex, and children as a package deal.
Marriage and sex are for procreation and unity, and God commanded His people to be fruitful and multiply. Children are not an optional add-on to a Christian marriage, but one of the purposes of it. This means couples cannot and should not seek to avoid parenthood altogether.
Infertility is a tragic result of the Fall.
Couples can seek fertility care, ideally from doctors trained in NaPro Technology, which seeks to find and treat the root causes of infertility so that couples can conceive naturally. Yet where biological procreation is impossible, infertile couples are still called to “be fruitful and multiply,” even if their fruitfulness comes about in different ways (such as adoption, or spiritual motherhood/fatherhood).
There are healthy, God-honoring ways to attempt to achieve or avoid pregnancy.
Natural methods of family planning, such as the Creighton or Marquette Methods, or a number of fertility-tracking devices, help couples identify a woman’s fertile window, so they can time intercourse or abstinence based on their goals for that month. Natural methods help men and women honor the God-given nature of the female body, which promotes intimacy between the couple, strengthening the marriage. Natural methods help couples maintain openness to life.
Self-control and chastity are virtues to be had within marriage, as well as outside it.
A marriage license is not a license for sex on demand. There are bounds for what a God-honoring sex life should look like within marriage, which means certain acts are off the table. Every act should promote unity between husband and wife, and maintain openness to procreation (unless, according to Lambeth, there are serious reasons to avoid procreation and abstinence). No one needs sex, and everyone has access to self-control, which is a fruit of the spirit. Couples should maintain open lines of communication about their desires and/or ability to pursue physical intimacy, abstaining for times as needed, and coming together again “by mutual consent after a time” (1 Cor. 7:5).
Christians should honor human life, no matter what stage.
This means more than a simple prohibition on killing, it means also working to protect the most vulnerable. Science has proven that human life at its earliest stage begins at the very moment of fertilization. Unfortunately, all hormonal methods of birth control have the propensity to take human life, and as such, should be avoided. Couples should also be aware of the harms of IVF before entering marriage.
The way we talk about family and children matters.
Christians should be mindful that talk of “family planning,” or “unplanned pregnancies,” or “responsible sex,” or “being done” having children are rooted in the same secular, eugenic, anti-family movement that produced abortion and abortion-conglomerate Planned Parenthood. Christians are called to think differently about family formation and the gift of children. The Psalms tell us that children are a “blessing” and “a heritage from the Lord” (Ps. 127:3). And despite our best-laid plans (and technology), achieving or avoiding pregnancy are surprisingly elusive endeavors. Ultimately, God alone is the author of life. Christians should seek to be open to and protective of all human life, no matter the stage or location.
Key Citations and References
Comprehensive Reference List
Citations
- Noninvasive prenatal testing (NIPT) has long allowed for certain diseases to be diagnosed in utero. In fact, the nation of Iceland prides itself on having eradicated Down Syndrome using NIPT – by which it means it has and continues to abort every baby that tests positive for Down Syndrome within his or her mother’s womb. But new technology – whole genome embryo screening (WGES) – screens for the likelihood of potential diseases or traits in embryos, allowing parents the boutique experience of ranking and selecting embryo(s) based on whatever criteria they like (sex, height, IQ, eye color, potential for cancer, etc.).
- While modern interpretations of Genesis 38 emphasize Onan’s primary sin as being his unwillingness to uphold his brotherly duty to Tamar in giving her a child, older interpretations were much more concerned with the act of spilling seed itself. This fact is evident in the meaning of the word “onanism”: onanism is not a failure to uphold a duty to a family member, but the spilling of seed through withdrawal, masturbation, or contracepted sex
- “Orthodox” here qualifies “believers” to distinguish between believers who would maintain that homosexuality is a sin (the orthodox Christian teaching) and those who call themselves “believers” in denominations that have broken with the historic Christian teaching on sexuality – namely, The Episcopal Church, The United Church of Christ, The Evangelical Lutheran Church in America, The Presbyterian Church (USA), and the United Methodist Church, among others.
- https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC5050240/.
- Here we apply the doctrine of double effect, in which intention becomes a key consideration of the morality of an act.