Part 1: Birth Control and the Purpose of Marriage

A Protestant view.

Oct 11, 2024

Introduction and Some Qualifiers

It took me a slow three years to reach the position I am about to put forth. It now burns heavy on my heart. I do not expect the following to be an easy pill to swallow (pun fully intended) but I do hope to challenge readers in love. I believe this is an urgent and necessary topic for us everyday churchgoers. I believe we as Evangelicals and Protestants have done much to damage our view of marriage, children, and subsequently, the Gospel, by unconditionally accepting birth control and the culture surrounding it.

For those currently on hormonal contraceptives, or who have used these in the past, I humbly request a patient ear. I am in no way intending to judge or demean. What I am about to posit is unfamiliar to most, though not unfamiliar to Scripture and church history. I hope readers walk away from my words with a deeper understanding of the dignity of the body, marriage, and their collective relationship to the Gospel.

For those struggling with infertility, my discussion of “the birth dearth” and the derogatory attitude of some toward children, excludes you. Please hear me loud and clear: You are not part of this problem. Infertility is a tragedy. Those who long to have children and cannot are not those contributing to the cultural apathy towards childbearing and rearing. I mourn with you. And so does Jesus.

This is a long essay, originally about 16 pages. I plan on breaking it up into several parts to make it less tiresome to read. That said, please don’t give up after one or two parts. Each part corresponds to the whole and it will be difficult to understand the argument I am presenting without reading these in subsequent order. Please stick with me and hear me out!

With those qualifiers in place, let’s get into it.

Biographical Introduction

I grew up in Southern California as the oldest of four siblings. In the suburbia that we inhabited this was considered quite large. My public school friends, church friends, and later private school friends all had families of, at most, three children. Our extra number made us stand out somewhat and I can remember a few well-meaning mom friends asking my own mother “How did you manage it all?” She managed very well and replied with a smile that she had taken us one at a time and we were not all that much trouble. (She was truthful, I am sure, but I am also sure that we were somewhat more trouble than admitted in our hearing.) The largest family I remember encountering in California was about eight children. I had befriended a Mormon girl at the running club I was a part of. They lived in a very large house in a very wealthy Orange County neighborhood. Though we were similar in some ways, the difference in theology and their obvious wealth made their choice to have such a large family seem out of reach and out of touch to a teenage evangelical. Since then, I have met several large families with followers of Jesus as parents. They were anomalies in my thinking, but good ones. These families, while their houses were messy and their hands somewhat full, were joyful and… rational. This was clearly a choice they had made and desired.

Exceptions to the Falling Birthrate

Why do these families of more than three stand out so much? We now live in an age where even families of three children are beginning to become less normal. Perhaps, if you, like me, socialize primarily in a religious subculture, this may be less immediately obvious, though religious communities are not immune from the falling birthrate. And the birthrate has fallen. Worldwide. Author and economist Catherine Pakaluk records:

“The year 2020 marked the lowest general fertility rate ever recorded – 56 births per 1000 women aged fifteen to forty-four – and the lowest fertility rate ever recorded: 1.64 projected lifetime births per woman” (Pakaluk 27).

This statistic, while varying slightly country by country, does not vary significantly in Western and Asian nations. There has been a clear decades-long downward trend in live births since the advent of the birth control pill. Though the fertility rate declined from 7 to 3.5 from 1800-1900, some surmise due to a decreasing child mortality rate, this new trend seems to be separate from that of the 19^th century (Pakaluk 20). Pakaluk’s work Hannah’s Children is extremely insightful regarding this trend. Her book is a compilation of interviews with college-educated women who went on to have five or more children. The book is unique in that it explores the “birth dearth” not from the question of “why aren’t women having children” but “why are women having children?” The result is extremely moving.

Pakaluk, in the early chapters of the book states,

“Our subjects had more children because they valued them more. More than their careers, their passions, and getting a good night’s sleep. They valued them so much that when they sized up their own capacities and found them lacking – in strength, or money, or health – they often prayed to be able to have more children, and their prayers were answered” (Pakaluk 51).

While feminism and the advent of the birth control pill may have been revolutionary in a world full of busy mothers, the attitude of Pakaluk’s interviewees, in an era of falling birthrates, is truly astounding. And why? Here are women voluntarily giving up their time, hobbies, comfort, and careers for the sake of their children because they valued them more than these things. For the Christian family, this sacrifice recalls the words of Jesus:

“Whoever finds his life will lose it, and whoever loses his life for my sake will find it” (Matthew 10:39).

This runs against the current stream. In a world of birth control, one is told they can put their fertility on pause that they might “find” themselves in any number of activities – a trip, a degree, a career, a relationship, etc. Pakaluk is again insightful:

“In a contraceptive age, children will not come unless the capacity for childbearing is switched ‘on’. Their existence is dependent on our willingness to let them in, on our motives and desires” (Pakaluk 9).

What happens in a world in which children are no longer desirable? For children do invite one into a life of “losing” oneself – or put another way, dying to oneself. Why have Christians bought into the culture of finding oneself? For that is indeed the culture of birth control. With its introduction to the Church, it invited Christians not to die to self but to “find self”. C.S. Lewis states:

Give up yourself, and you will find your real self. Lose your life and you will save it. Submit to death, death of your ambitions and favorite wishes every day and death of your whole body in the end: submit with every fibre of your being, and you will find eternal life. Keep back nothing. Nothing that you have not given away will be really yours. Nothing in you that has not died will ever be raised from the dead (Lewis 227).

If letting go of one’s life is an essential component of the Christian life, why do modern-day Christians reject the Biblical narrative of children as a blessing? Why has the narrative of birth control, of personal autonomy, won?

Last section for today - I promise!

I was on the birth control pill very briefly. This prescription by my dermatologist was part of the “birth control as a band-aid” approach to womanly ills. At fifteen I suffered from chronic acne and birth control was the first step in working towards a more aggressive acne pill. After several nights sitting by the toilet waiting for terrible nausea to pass, my mom and I decided that this route was not for me. Looking back, I am grateful we ended this prescription so quickly. The birth control pill is known to contribute to blood clotting and, if the clotting is left untreated, myocardial infarction. I have a mild clotting disorder in one leg, and I shudder to consider the damage the pill could have done. At the time, however, neither my mother nor I had considered the theological ramifications of birth control. She had taken the pill herself for several years. It was a private joke between the two of us that my future husband and I would probably have a very large family. When I did get engaged four years later, she was shocked and somewhat concerned at my insistence on using Natural Family Planning. (She has since completely changed her mind on these issues and now deeply regrets the use of contraceptives earlier in her marriage.) The method of Natural Family Planning, or NFP, involves tracking bodily symptoms to predict ovulation and practicing abstinence or using protection during the six-day ovulatory window. More precisely:

“The method makes possible the consideration of individual peculiarities of the preovulatory phase including the possibility of ovulation prediction” (Roetzer).

This method also works for planning conception and thus is practical for many women and is customizable for their individual bodies.

NFP worked well for my husband and me for about six months of our marriage until youthful, wedded bliss led to negligence. In reflection, this negligence was somewhat willful and most definitely contained suppressed knowledge of… consequences. When we saw our first positive pregnancy test, the first sign that heralded our daughter’s arrival in the world, there was a frightened sort of delight. Marriage really did lead to babies. Who knew?

When we went together to my first midwife appointment at the local hospital we were stumped at the question, “Was this a planned pregnancy?” As I have mentioned, we were well aware of the consequences of our actions (even if we did not quite believe in them yet) and so while we were not technically avoiding a baby, we had not truly been trying for one either. Out of ease, we answered, laughingly, “No,” but have remained quite confused on how to answer this question as inquisitive coworkers, onlookers, and relatives have asked in both of my pregnancies.

I learned much about the modern Evangelical attitude toward children in my first pregnancy. The summer of my third trimester was an interesting one in terms of people-watching. I was met with interesting mixtures of curiosity from some as a twenty-one-year-old married, pregnant woman, as well as offers for babysitting that often felt more like a southern “bless your heart.” The strangest reception I remember was an offer of congratulations from one mother, who, shortly thereafter, told her daughter “Please don’t have children anytime soon!” I know, for a fact, this woman will love her grandchildren, whenever they come. Still, her offhand comment reveals an interesting attitude Evangelicals hold. Children are a blessing… for later. For the “right time.” These comments and awkward curiosity were a strange contrast with the overwhelming excitement we received from our Southern Baptist church community. From them, we received genuine joy, offers of help that were not merely excuses to see the baby, counsel, and later a meal train that lasted well after I began to feel like myself again. Somehow these two attitudes exist side by side within the American church.

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I would love for this to be a discussion, not merely me imposing my ideas. Please share your thoughts and questions below! The next part will include the biblical and historical approaches to birth control within Protestantism as well as the modern view. Between these, I’ll be posting a life update soon with an update my substack friends may not have heard yet! But who am I kidding, I know most of you in real life!