(This article courtesy of CRISIS, America's fastest growing Catholic magazine.)
Heather, age 28, was raised in a “faithful, conservative evangelical” home, as she describes it. She married Bill, a “nominal Catholic who didn’t even think abortion was wrong, so [he] definitely didn’t have problems with contraception,” she says.
Neither did Heather and Bill hold much stock with natural family planning, the spacing of births by avoiding sex during ovulation that the Catholic Church approves. Heather says that she and her husband had both been taught that natural family planning was “totally ridiculous and ineffective.” But after Heather discovered that the birth control pill caused her physical problems, “the Lord brought three evangelical couples into our lives who had at least ten kids apiece—all saying that they had given their fertility over to the Lord.” Encountering the fervent faith and the deep trust in God that these six parents exhibited, Heather realized for the first time that there could be a religious dimension as well as a health dimension to rejecting the pill.
Evangelicals who choose to say no to birth control are out of step with just about every church but the Catholic Church. Tim and Beverly LaHaye, the evangelical authors of The Art of Marriage (Tim LaHaye is also coauthor of the best-selling “Left Behind” series of Christian fiction), advise newlywed brides to get themselves on the pill pronto. Some evangelical writers who dissent with this prevailing contraceptive ethos report their inability to place articles raising questions about artificial birth control in conservative, otherwise pro-life Christian magazines.
But many evangelicals are starting to question their churches’ wholesale acceptance of the contraceptive mentality. Patricia, 30, remembers that when she was a child, she spent time with her friends, “as most girls do nowadays…talking about how many children I wanted when I grew up. The number was always three.” She married a man who also liked the moderate sound of that number, and they dutifully had three well-spaced kids. “God,” however, “changed our hearts,” says Patricia. She and her husband read a book about natural family planning, studied Scripture, and prayed. Natural family planning is tricky to implement, and two months after the birth of their third child, Patricia was pregnant again.
The birth of Jordan proved to be a Thanksgiving miracle for Patricia and her husband. “Never with any pregnancy did I have the peace that I had with this one,” she says. But that wasn’t how her evangelical friends felt, she says. “When I became pregnant with our fourth, we got a great deal of ‘You know, there are ways to prevent that’ and ‘Was he planned or an accident?’”
Many evangelicals who have rejected artificial birth control cite a book called The Way Home, by Mary Pride, a mother active in the home-schooling movement who preaches against birth control. Pride cites a biblical text to support her position: “Yet woman will be saved through bearing children if she continues in faith and love and holiness with modesty” (1 Timothy 2:15).
Evangelicals who have rejected artificial birth control have a convert’s enthusiasm for their new stance. Dawn, 33, who has three children under age four, says, “I don’t think children should be a choice that we make. God desires to bless us with children, and I feel that it is a sin for us to tell him how many or when. Once we stop viewing them as objects that we have chosen to acquire and start viewing them as precious gifts from God, our entire attitude toward them changes.”
Joseph Stanford, a former president of the American Academy of Natural Family Planning, recently noted, “I would say that starting ten years ago we were probably talking about 80 to 90 percent [of couples learning natural family planning] were Catholics and now it is closer to 60 percent.”
As for Heather and Bill, their rejection of artificial contraception led them both to a deeper understanding of Catholicism. Heather, a nurse, eventually converted to the Catholic Church and now heads the office of family planning for the Archdiocese of Washington, D.C. Bill, the fallen-away Catholic, recovered his faith. Today he is director of religious education for the archdiocese.
