Ethics and the influence of religious systems

The ethics of birth control has always been a topic of debate. All of the world’s major religions endorse responsible parenthood, but when it comes to methods the consensus often dissolves. Hindu and Buddhist teachings are linked by a belief in reincarnation, but this has not been extended to an obligation to achieve maximum fertility. The Buddhist religion requires abstinence from any form of killing, and strict Buddhist groups have interpreted this requirement as support for opposition to contraception. At the same time, Buddhist scripture contains the phrase “Many children make you poor,” and the few prevailing constraints against birth control have been interpreted as affecting individuals, not state policy.

In the Muslim religion, the Prophet Muhammad endorsed the use of al-azl (coitus interruptus) for socioeconomic reasons and to safeguard the health of women. The Qurʾān instructs, “Mothers shall give suck to their offspring for two whole years if they desire to complete their term” (II,233). In general, modern methods of family planning have been accepted by Islamic religious leaders, although sterilization is resisted as mutilation. Some fundamentalist Islamic groups, most notably in Iran in the 1980s, have opposed family planning in general.

The Judeo-Christian tradition has been more divided in its approach to birth control; and Europe and North America have had a disproportionate role in medical research and practice. Until the Industrial Revolution in the West, artificial methods of birth control seemed irrelevant or even antagonistic to reproduction and to the spiritual goals of marriage. Christendom was very slow to recognize new medical knowledge and new social needs, thereby retarding the development of birth control methods and diffusion of services. For example, in part because of religious objections, the U.S. National Institutes of Health were explicitly barred from research on contraception until 1961.

Historically, Jewish doctrines on marriage and procreation were related to the national struggle for survival and the traditions of a close-knit monotheistic community in which the individual was perpetuated through family. Judaism imposes an obligation to have children, although love and companionship are deemed an equally important goal of marriage. Orthodox sections of Judaism permit women to use certain methods of birth control, especially when necessary to protect the mother’s health. Reformed and Conservative branches urge proper education in all methods of birth control as enhancing the spiritual life of the couple and the welfare of humankind. Many Jewish physicians and leaders, such as Alan Guttmacher, joined in the advocating of birth control.

The early Christian church reacted against the hedonism of the later Roman Empire and, believing that the Second Coming of Christ preempted the need for procreation, held celibacy superior to marriage. Early Christians opposed the Gnostic movement that viewed the world as the creation of evil and procreation as the perpetuation of that evil. Instead they supported the Stoic argument that sexual passions distracted man from the contemplation of the One, the True, the Good, and the Beautiful. It was a short step for the 2nd-century theologian Clement of Alexandria to associate sexual intercourse with guilt and argue that it could only be justified by the obvious need to reproduce. Clement even argued that the human soul fled the body during a sexual climax. Augustine (354–430 ce), in his writings, especially in Marriage and Concupiscence (418 ce), laid the intellectual foundation for more than 1,000 years of Christian teaching on birth control. He concluded that the male semen both contained the new life and transmitted Adam’s original sin from generation to generation.

Among the practices Augustine condemned were not only coitus interruptus (onanism) but also what today would be called natural family planning. Not surprisingly the explicit justification of periodic abstinence by the modern church continues to come into conflict with remnants of Augustine’s more pessimistic identification of sex with sin.

An important challenge to traditional Roman Catholic teaching arose in 1853 when the church’s Sacred Penitentiary ruled that couples using periodic abstinence were “not to be disturbed.” Among all Christian denominations, however, change was halting. In 1920 the Anglican Lambeth Conference condemned “any deliberate cultivation of sexual activity as an end in itself,” although by 1930 the Conference had taken some steps toward the moral justification of birth control. By 1958 its members concluded that “implicit within the bond of husband and wife is the relationship of love with its sacramental expression in physical union.”

The Roman Catholic viewpoint developed even more slowly. The conservative theologian Arthur Vermeersch drafted much of Pope Pius XI’s encyclical Casti Connubii (1930), condemning all methods of birth control except periodic abstinence as “grave sin.” This teaching was reaffirmed by Pius XII in 1951. The Second Vatican Council (1962–65), however, described marriage as a “community of love” and the council’s Constitution on the Church and the Modern World (Gaudium et Spes) exhorts parents to “thoughtfully take into account both their own welfare and that of their children, those already born and those which may be foreseen.” Once the dual purposes of sexual relations to procreate and to express love had been accepted by the Second Vatican Council, however, some theologians and a great many Roman Catholic couples examined their own consciences and found it increasingly difficult to distinguish between intercourse during intervals of infertility brought about by the use of hormonal contraceptives and intercourse during the infertile intervals of the menstrual cycle. John Rock, who helped to develop the contraceptive pill and was himself a Roman Catholic, argued for just such a reassessment in his book The Time Has Come (1963). Gathering pressure led to the establishment of the Commission for the Study of Population and Family Life. It submitted its report to Pope Paul in 1966. Among the commission’s members, the medical experts recommended by a vote of 60 to four, and the cardinals by nine to six, to liberalize Roman Catholic teaching on birth control.

In 1968, however, Pope Paul restated the traditional teaching of Casti Connubii in his landmark encyclical Humanae Vitae, using papal authority to assert that “every conjugal act [has] to be open to the transmission of life.” Humanae Vitae came as a surprise to most church leaders and left many of the laity in a painful conflict between obedience and conscience. Six hundred Roman Catholic scholars signed a statement challenging Humanae Vitae, many episcopates attempted to soften the harsher aspects of the encyclical, a flood of priests left the church, and the number of U.S. Catholics attending mass weekly fell from 70 percent before the issuing of the encyclical to 44 percent a few years afterward. The total marital fertility (the number of children in a completed family) of U.S. Catholics (2.27 in 1975) became virtually the same as that of non-Catholics (2.17). At the same time a new movement began within the Roman Catholic Church, taking strength and inspiration from Humanae Vitae. Among lay organizations, the International Federation for Family Life Promotion was founded in 1974 and the Family of the Americas Foundation (formerly World Organization of the Ovulation Method—Billings; WOOMB) was founded in 1977.

The Eastern Orthodox Church maintains that parenthood is a duty. While it considers the use of contraception to be a failure in spiritual focus, the church has not sought to hinder the distribution of birth control information or services.

Birth control, like other technologies, can be misused. In the 19th century vasectomy was used for men judged to be compulsive masturbators, and a century later, during the state of emergency declared in India in 1975, the Indian government supported forcible sterilization of low-caste men as part of a population control program. In the not too distant past unmarried women in the Western world who became pregnant faced such hostility from society in general that the majority felt they had no choice but illegal abortion, while in China today women are subject to intense social pressure to legally abort a second or subsequent pregnancy inside marriage. In contemporary Western society conventional restraints on sexual experience prior to marriage are in turmoil. Vigorous debate centres on the question of whether the availability of birth control to young people encourages premarital sexual relations or avoids unplanned pregnancies that otherwise might occur. Certainly, similar patterns of availability of contraceptives may be observed in markedly different social settings with high and low incidence of premarital sex (for example, the United States and China, respectively). There is no evidence that the availability of birth control either encourages or discourages particular patterns of sexual behaviour.

The debate over the ethics of induced abortion can arouse deep divisions even in otherwise homogeneous groups. At one extreme abortion is considered to be the moral equivalent of murder and the life of the fetus is held to take precedence over that of the pregnant woman. At the other extreme it is argued that a woman has an absolute right over the pregnancy within her body. Surveys of opinion show that most people find abortion to be a sad and complex topic. The majority would prefer not to experience abortion but nevertheless feels that abortion is justified in certain cases, such as when tests show evidence of congenital abnormality, when pregnancy results from sexual crimes, or when the parents live in extreme poverty. The embryological discoveries of the past century cannot solve the metaphysical questions posed in the past. The U.S. Supreme Court decision on abortion in 1973 concluded “We need not resolve the difficult question of when life begins. When those trained in the respective disciplines of medicine, philosophy, and theology are unable to arrive at any consensus, the judiciary, at this point in the development of man’s knowledge, is not in a position to speculate as to the answer.” In short, the definition individuals give to the beginning of life determines their judgment about the acceptability or licitness of abortion, and those definitions remain in the sphere of wholly human judgment.