These are quotes from the last chapter of Five Perspectives on Sex, Life, and Love in Defense of Humanae Vitae. I don't know if I want to read the whole book, but this chapter was pretty important. I'll bold what seems most important.
Illicit abortions by wives seeking to cover up adultery were also frequent. The fetus had no legal standing.
I think this is talking about Rome before Christianity.
Infanticide appears to have been common. Legal under pater potestas (paternal power), male babies with imperfect form and girls were its usual victims. The destruction of baby girls was so common that for every 100 females in A.D. 100 Rome, there were 131 men; out in the provinces, 140.
Didache, a manual on church life and discipline now reliably dated to the late first century.
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Condemnations of theft, murder, and magic appear together with clear denunciations of fornication, adultery, sodomy, infanticide, and abortion.
This is important because the Bible doesn't really seem to mention abortion. It does mention child sacrifice though, tearing pregnant women apart, and Exodus 21:22-23 mentions violence against pregnant women and preborn kids.
The earliest challenge to the life ethic of the young Christian Church came from the Gnostics, beginning in the first century.
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Regarding family and sexual questions, Gnostics shared two views: they scorned marriage and they detested procreation. Beyond those common beliefs, one strand of Gnosticism emphasized total sexual license.
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Horrifically, these rituals included perversions of the holy Eucharist, involving menstrual blood and the flesh of aborted babies.
Important quote. Antinatalism and abortion are incompatible with Christianity. Antinatalism isn't Christian. It's Gnostic I guess.
A second Gnostic strand rejected all sexuality... According to the Church Father Irenaeus, “they attacked marriage as corruption and fornication.”
This matters because I know a Christian who told me Jesus didn't have sex after I told him I believe he was married to Mary Magdelene and other women. His idea seems to be that there's something wrong with marriage or sex. That's a Gnostic idea.
In 1 Timothy 4, St. Paul reports that “some will depart from the faith by giving heed to deceitful spirits and doctrines of demons . . . who forbid marriage.”
Important because it shows Gnosticism is not Christianity which matters because it's against marriage and birth.
When the possibility for conception is taken away, Augustine continues, “husbands are the shameful lovers, wives are harlots, wedding beds are stews” and “the bridal chamber a brothel.”
The question is does this go far enough? Some women might give up contraception but also give up sex. Are childless wives also "harlots?" The analogy seems weak because harlots have sex.
Martin Luther deemed marriage ... “a natural and necessary thing, that whatever is a man must have a woman and whatever is a woman must have a man.” He called procreation “the greatest work of God.” In his commentary on Genesis, Luther wrote: “Truly in all nature there was no activity more excellent and more admirable than procreation.”
Is procreation really a work of a God though? It seems more like a work of man. Obviously it's people's choice whether they reproduce or not.
John Calvin concurred, "When a woman in some way drives away the seed out the womb, through aids, then this is rightly seen as an unforgivable crime.”
Prevailing American laws in 1900 conflating and criminalizing contraceptives, abortifacients, and pornography were uniformly the product of Evangelical Protestant fervor, centered on the person of Anthony Comstock, executive secretary of the New York Society for the Suppression of Vice and special agent of the US Postal Service. “Comstock laws” suppressing these matters were on the books in forty-six states, four territories, and at the federal level.
If Christians criminalized contraception, how can that be wrong? If these laws were so common, why can't we have them now?
Taking his place, somewhat by default, was the Catholic ethicist John A. Ryan. In an important 1916 essay, he reaffirmed the Roman Church’s historic condemnation of “all positive means of birth prevention.”
During the 1950s, denominations cheerfully took hold of a phrase developed by the Planned Parenthood Federation of America (as the Birth Control League was now called): “Responsible Parenthood.
Conservative Evangelicals in America turned this same way during the 1960s. The prominent evangelist Billy Graham showed the path when in 1959 he told The New York Times that “there is nothing morally wrong in the practice of birth control” as a means of controlling the “population explosion.”
Jointly sponsored by the lead Evangelical journal Christianity Today and the Christian Medical Society, it pulled together a “Who’s Who” of Evangelical theologians and leaders. Not only did the group affirm free access to contraceptives; it also endorsed abortion and sterilization.
Now I know CT isn't based.
Back in 1930, Pope Pius XI had responded to the Anglican approval of contraception within marriage by issuing the encyclical Casti Connubii, which reaffirmed the historic Christian consensus: “Since . . . the conjugal act is destined primarily by nature for the begetting of children, those who in exercising it deliberately frustrate its natural power and purpose, sin against nature and commit a deed which is shameful and intrinsically vicious.”
The whole opposition to contraception actually doesn't go far enough. It's not enough to ban contraception. Some people will just have less sex.
The [Humanae Vitae] encyclical also contained certain prophecies: • Widespread use of contraception would “lead to conjugal infidelity and the general lowering of morality.”
• The contracepting “man” would lose respect for “the woman” and no longer look to “her physical and psychological equilibrium,” even viewing her “as a mere instrument of selfish enjoyment.”
• Using a large American sample, a 2015 study on the relationship between divorce and the use of oral contraceptives, sterilization, and abortion, found that these practices “increased the likelihood of divorce—up to two times,” when compared to couples using Natural Family Planning.
This is an extremely important fact.
• In an article that sent shockwaves when it appeared in 1996, Nobel laureate in economics George Akerlof and his wife, future Federal Reserve chair Janet Yellen, joined with Michael Katz to show that legalized contraception and abortion were the primary causes of a surge in out-of-wedlock childbearing in the United States. In this new era, the “shotgun wedding” of a pregnant young woman to her lover disappeared. Men could now assume that a new sexual partner was on the pill; if not, the law gave her the sole choice to have an abortion. In practice, men were freed from age-old obligations.
This seems contradictory. I don't understand. I might try to research this later.
Pill users, for example, are less attracted to masculine men. Men find pill-using women significantly less attractive, as well.
The abstract of this source says, "recent evidence suggests that men prefer ovulating women to others." I don't really think it matters, but I guess it's not surprising women who don't want to make children are deemed less attractive because men do want children. The study probably uses other logic.
As Pope St. John Paul II wrote in his 1981 apostolic exhortation Familiaris Consortio, “society must be structured in such a way that wives and mothers are not in practice compelled to work outside the home.”
[The pill] has discouraged early marriage, encouraged young women to invest in careers rather than in family formation, and substantially reduced their lifetime fertility.
The researchers conclude: “[Contraception] has also led to fewer or later marriages, more divorce, low sexual desire, and depression. For those whose religion proscribes the use of contraceptives, it has often led to diminished religious practice.”
This is interesting, but I don't really follow how it causes depression or diminishes religious practice.
