There are all sorts of more or less harmful contraceptive products on the market; but the worst form of contraception is the one that has taken root in the human mind.
Satan’s greatest success in the last century was to implant in our minds a contraceptive attitude toward life. For thousands of years, children were seen as a gift of unquestionable value, and infertility a tragedy—a source of shame even. Today we pay money to be sterilized, while children are seen as an unnecessary burden. Only consider for a moment what the term “safe sex” means. Surely, it should mean sex that incurs no danger (i.e. sex enjoyed in an atmosphere of love and trust and openness to life). But the term is generally understood to mean “safeguarding against having a child,” as if the child were a great danger against which we and our family need to be protected. Is this normal? Bear in mind that widespread behavior does not mean normal behavior.
When God created the human race, He blessed it with the gift of fertility, i.e. the capability of transmitting life: “God created man in his own image, in the image of God he created him; male and female he created them. And God blessed them, and God said to them, ‘Be fruitful and multiply, and fill the earth and subdue it’” (Gen. 1:27-28). Did God create two men or two women and tell them to generate their offspring in a test tube? Did God supply Adam and Eve with an assortment of contraceptive products so as to spare them the trouble of feeding a large family? Clearly, in creating man and woman, God had in mind more than the having of sex and certainly more than the mass-production of human beings. Had He so desired, He could easily have created a great multitude of people as He did with animals, birds, fish, and plants (see Gen. 1:11-25). The uniqueness of human beings lay in the fact that, through the gift of their fertility, they could realize mutual love and partake in God’s creative act. It was as if God suspended His work of creation in order to enable Adam and Eve to complete the work in collaboration with Him.
Instead, what do we do? We need only look at the number of abortions. In the past ten years in the European Union 13 million children suffered death by abortion with the full sanction of the law. One third of the population of Poland! In Russia the official number is 4 million abortions annually; the actual number may be as high as 12 million a year— this while scarcely 1.7 million children are born that country. Is this how God’s plan and the task entrusted to humanity were to be realized?
What we need to understand is that the killing of children in the mother’s womb springs directly from the contraceptive mindset. Hard numbers bear this out: e.g. in Spain, in the years 1997-2007, the number of women using contraception rose from 49.1% to 79.9%. You might expect, especially in the light of media propaganda, the number of abortions in this period to have dropped sharply, since twice as many women began to “safeguard” themselves against pregnancy. But the number of abortions actually rose—and this also by twice as much: from 5.52 to 11.49 abortions for every 1000 women.
This should come as no surprise to anyone who followed the teachings of Blessed John Paul II and took them to heart. The Holy Father wrote in his encyclical The Gospel of Life: “It is frequently claimed that contraception, if made safe and available to all, is the most effective remedy against abortion. The Catholic Church is then accused of actually promoting abortion, because she obstinately continues to teach the moral unlawfulness of contraception. When considered carefully, the objection is clearly unfounded. It may be that many people use contraception with a view to excluding the subsequent temptation of abortion. But the negative values inherent in the ‘contraceptive mentality’ (which is very different from responsible parenthood, lived in respect for the full truth of the conjugal act) are such that they in fact strengthen this temptation when an unwanted life is conceived. Indeed, the pro-abortion culture is especially strong precisely where the Church’s teaching on contraception is rejected. Certainly, from the moral point of view contraception and abortion are specifically different evils: the former contradicts the full truth of the sexual act as the proper expression of conjugal love, while the latter destroys the life of a human being; the former is opposed to the virtue of chastity in marriage, the latter is opposed to the virtue of justice and directly violates the divine commandment ‘You shall not kill.’
“But despite their differences of nature and moral gravity, contraception and abortion are often closely linked, as fruits of the same tree. It is true that in many cases contraception and even abortion are practiced under the pressure of real-life difficulties, which nonetheless can never exonerate one from striving to observe God’s law fully. Still, in very many other instances such practices are rooted in a hedonistic mentality unwilling to accept responsibility in matters of sexuality, and they imply a self-centered notion of freedom, which regards procreation as an obstacle to personal fulfillment. The life that could result from a sexual encounter thus becomes an enemy to be avoided at all costs, and abortion becomes the only possible decisive response to failed contraception.
“The close connection that exists in mentality between the practice of contraception and that of abortion is becoming increasingly obvious. It is being demonstrated in an alarming way by the development of chemical products, intrauterine devices, and vaccines which, distributed with the same ease as contraceptives, act as abortifacients in the very early stages of the development of the life of the new human being” (Evangelium vitae, 13).
The contraceptive mentality is “a sign of the refusal that man gives to God’s love” (Familiaris consortio, 6). When we refuse God’s love, we commit sin, for what is sin if not a turning away from God? “Thus an anti-life mentality is born” (FC, 30), which leads directly to the breaking of God’s commandments and, ultimately—when the sin goes unrepented—to everlasting death. It is not a just matter here of resorting to chemical or mechanical contraceptive products, or of killing the child with corrosive substances, or tearing into pieces their defenseless bodies with surgical implements. For, in each such instance, our sin is preceded by a turning away from the love of God, by yielding assent to the beguiling Lie of Satan the Tempter: “Did God say that…” (cf. Gen. 3:1). The moment we take our eyes off God, the Giver of Life and Source of Authentic Love, there insinuates into our hearts the contraceptive mindset opposed to life.
Alas, this also occurs among our married couples who make use of Natural Family Planning methods. They treat these methods as a form of “ecological contraception” and resort to them exclusively as a means of avoiding pregnancy. But these natural methods should only be a tool by which we can develop true conjugal love based on the love of God the Creator. Knowledge and observation of their fertility should enable the couple to take responsible action based on a mutual love, which they wish to share with their children—human beings whom they have called into existence in cooperation with God the Giver of Life. God created man out of love and for love; and man, fostering “God’s image” within himself, ought to act in kind: by being open to life in the loving act of the couple’s gesture of mutual self-giving so that their children may also experience the fullness of their parents’ and God’s love.
As Blessed John Paul II taught: “The family has a special role to play throughout the life of its members, from birth to death. It is truly ‘the sanctuary of life’: the place in which life—the gift of God—can be properly welcomed and protected against the many attacks to which it is exposed” (EV, 92). It is not a place where the child is to be destroyed or conception thwarted by artificial or ecological methods. The family is the place where life arises thanks to God’s love for man—man and woman becoming “one flesh” (Gen. 2:24).
Let us purify our minds of thinking in opposition to the mind of God, negating His love and His wondrous gift of fertility. “Do not be conformed to this world but be transformed by the renewal of your mind, that you may prove what is the will of God, what is good and acceptable and perfect” (Rom. 12:2).