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  • When I was in Lithuania a few years ago, I visited a nursery and I was told, "All these children are unwanted." So I think it is better that that situation be stopped right from the beginning -- birth control. Of course, abortion, from a Buddhist viewpoint, is an act of killing and is negative,generally speaking. But it depends on the circumstances. If the unborn child will be retarded or if the birth will create serious problems for the parent, these are cases where there can be an exception. I think abortion should be approved or disapproved according to each circumstance.
  • A revolution in Christian morals.
    • The Church Times, December 24, 1930. Quoted in, Theresa Notare, A Revolution in Christian Morals: Lambeth 1930 - Resolution #15. History & Reception, (2008), The Catholic University of America, ProQuest, UMI Dissertations Publishing, p. 463. [1] Notare explains the significance of this moral revolution: "In their summary of the year 1930, the editors of the Church Times, an Anglo-Catholic publication, noted that Resolution #15 of the Lambeth Conference had caused 'a revolution in Christian morals.' This was not hyperbole. The tradition of Christianity with regard to sexual morality within marriage, was severed for the first time in almost two-thousand years. The most startling aspect of the break is that it was not accomplished by a hostile group, but by a body of Christian bishops who considered themselves to be 'Catholic.' The effect of the pronouncement was nothing short of an ideological shock wave that would penetrate all aspects of modern life. Indeed, the infamous liberal Anglican Churchman, Dean Inge wrote: 'For good or evil' Resolution #15 'will modify profoundly the whole future of mankind.' [2]
  • It is strange that the conference, while rigidly medieval on the subject of divorce, should loose and lax on the far more dangerous problem of birth control. It has delivered a fatal blow to marriage, motherhood and fatherhood, and paved the way to race suicide. Admitting the principle of artificial birth control is a positive revolution in Christian morality. It is an enormous concession to the spirit, and perhaps the practice of the modern world, which does not mean to be guided in conduct by Christian principles. The conference claims that the practice should be regulated by what it calls Christian principles, which nevertheless are very vaguely and most inadequately enunciated.
  • Although every organized patriarchal religion works overtime to contribute its own brand of misogyny to the myth of woman-hate, woman-fear, and woman-evil, the Roman Catholic Church also carries the immense power of very directly affecting women's lives everywhere by its stand against birth control and abortion, and by its use of skillful and wealthy lobbies to prevent legislative change. It is an obscenity -- an all-male hierarchy, celibate or not, that presumes to rule on the lives and bodies of millions of women.
  • Birth control is woman's problem. The quicker she accepts it as hers and hers alone, the quicker will society respect motherhood. The quicker, too, will the world be made a fit place for her children to live.
    • Margaret Sanger, Woman and the New Race, Chapter 8, "Birth Control; A Parents' Problem or Woman's?"
  • Birth control must lead ultimately to a cleaner race.
  • I see no wider meaning of family planning than control and as for restriction, there are definitely some families throughout the world where there is every indication that restriction should be an order as (well as) an ideal for the betterment of the family and the race.
    • Margaret Sanger to Vera Houghton (1914-2013), May 10, 1955, "protesting a report that argues that Planned Parenthood should 'shift the emphasis from controlling restriction to the fuller and wider meaning of family planning,'" quoted in Margaret Sanger's Eugenic Legacy: The Control of Female Fertility (2005), Angela Franks, McFarland & Co., Jefferson, North Carolina, ISBN 0786420111 ISBN 9780786420117 Introduction: Taking Sanger Seriously, pp. 5, 8. [4][5][6]
  • Birth control and abortion are turning out to be great eugenic advances of our time. If they had been advanced for eugenic reasons, it would have retarded or stopped their acceptance.
  • Another reason birth control appeals to the advanced radical is that it is calculated to undermine the authority of the Christian Churches. I do not expect everyone to agree with this statement, but it is the opinion of many who, like myself, look forward to seeing humanity free some day of the tyranny of priests no less than of capitalism.
    • Walter Adolphe Roberts (1886-1962), "Birth Control and the Revolution," The Birth Control Review, Margaret Sanger, Walter Roberts, eds., vol. 1, No. 4, June 1917, p. 7, [11] "Walter Roberts (1886-1962), Jamaican-born journalist, poet, associate correspondent for the Brooklyn Daily Eagle, editor for the Birth Control Review, and sometime lover of Margaret Sanger." See, Margaret Sanger: Her Life in Her Words (2003), Miriam Reed, Barricade Books, ISBN 569802556 Invalid ISBN ISBN 9781569802557 p. 300. [12] [13]
  • You shall not practice birth control; you shall not murder a child by abortion, nor kill what is begotten.
    • Didache, or Teaching of the Twelve Apostles, as translated by Jesuit Father Mitch Pacwa. Pharmakeia is here translated as "birth control".
  • Moreover He hath hated the weasel also and with good reason. Thou shalt not, saith He, become such as those men of whom we hear as working iniquity with their mouth for uncleanness, neither shalt thou cleave unto impure women who work iniquity with their mouth. For this animal conceiveth with its mouth.
  • Then the angel Raphael said to him: Hear me, and I will shew thee who they are, over whom the devil can prevail. For they who in such manner receive matrimony, as to shut out God from themselves, and from their mind, and to give themselves to their lust, as the horse and mule, which have not understanding, over them the devil hath power. (...) thou shalt take the virgin with the fear of the Lord, moved rather for love of children than for lust, that in the seed of Abraham thou mayst obtain a blessing in children.
    • Douay-Rheims Bible, Tobias 6
  • Now the works of the flesh are manifest, which are fornication, uncleanness, immodesty, luxury, Now the works of the flesh are manifest, which are fornication, uncleanness, immodesty, luxury, idolatry, witchcrafts (pharmakeia), enmities, contentions, emulations, wraths, quarrels, dissensions, sects, envies, murders, drunkenness, revellings, and such like.
    • Douay-Rheims Bible, Galatians 5:20-21.
  • And therefore thou chastisest them that err, by little and little: and admonishest them, and speakest to them, concerning the things wherein they offend: that leaving their wickedness, they may believe in thee, O Lord. For those ancient inhabitants of thy holy land, whom thou didst abhor, Because they did works hateful to thee by their sorceries (pharmakeia), and wicked sacrifices, And those merciless murderers of their own children, and eaters of men's bowels, and devourers of blood from the midst of thy consecration,...
    • Douay-Rheims Bible, Wisdom 12:2-5.
  • And the light of the lamp shall shine no more at all in thee; and the voice of the bridegroom and the bride shall be heard no more at all in thee: for thy merchants were the great men of the earth, for all nations have been deceived by thy enchantments (pharmakeia).
    • Douay-Rheims Bible, Revelation 18:23.


  • History provides fullest evidence (cf. especially the excellent work of Professor John T. Noonan, Contraception, Harvard University Press, 1965) that the answer of the Church has always and everywhere been the same, from the beginning up to the present decade. One can find no period of history, no document of the church, no theological school, scarcely one Catholic theologian, who ever denied that contraception was always seriously evil. The teaching of the Church in this matter is absolutely constant. Until the present century this teaching was peacefully possessed by all other Christians, whether Orthodox or Anglican or Protestant. The Orthodox retain this as common teaching today.
    • Humanae Vitae's Minority Papal Commission Report
  • I am not pleased with the statement in the text that married couples may determine the number of children they are to have. Never has this been heard of in the Church.
    • Cardinal Alfredo Ottaviani on the Humanae Vitae, as quoted in Fr. Ralph M. Wiltgen, S.V.D., The Rhine flows into the Tiber- A History of Vatican II. Tan Books, 1985, p. 269.
  • I am supposing, then, although you are not lying [with your wife] for the sake of procreating offspring, you are not for the sake of lust obstructing their procreation by an evil prayer or an evil deed. Those who do this, although they are called husband and wife, are not; nor do they retain any reality of marriage, but with a respectable name cover a shame. Sometimes this lustful cruelty, or cruel lust, comes to this, that they even procure poisons of sterility [oral contraceptives].
  • The doctrine that the production of children is an evil, directly opposes the next precept, "Thou shall not commit adultery;" for those who believe this doctrine, in order that their wives may not conceive, are led to commit adultery even in marriage. They take wives, as the law declares, for the procreation of children; but from this erroneous fear of polluting the substance of the deity, their intercourse with their wives is not of a lawful character; and the production of children, which is the proper end of marriage, they seek to avoid. As the apostle long ago predicted of thee, thou dost indeed forbid to marry, for thou seekest to destroy the purpose of marriage. Thy doctrine turns marriage into an adulterous connection, and the bed-chamber into a brothel. This false doctrine leads in a similar way to the transgression of the commandment, "Thou shall not kill." For thou dost not give bread to the hungry, from fear of imprisoning in flesh the member of thy God. From fear of fancied murder, thou dost actually commit murder.
    • Saint Augustine, Contra Faustum ( translated Reply to Faustus the Manichean ) Book XV, 7
  • Who is he who cannot warn that no woman may take a potion [an oral contraceptive] so that she is unable to conceive or condemns in herself the nature which God willed to be fecund? As often as she could have conceived or given birth, of that many homicides she will be held guilty, and, unless she undergoes suitable penance, she will be damned by eternal death in hell. If a women does not wish to have children, let her enter into a religious agreement with her husband; for chastity is the sole sterility of a Christian woman.
  • As often as he knows his wife without a desire for children, without a doubt he commits sin.
    • Saint Caesarius of Arles, as quoted by W.A. Jurgens, The Faith of The Early Fathers, Vol. 3 : 2233
  • Marriage in itself merits esteem and the highest approval, for the Lord wished men to “be fruitful and multiply.” He did not tell them, however, to act like libertines, nor did He intend them to surrender themselves to pleasure as though born only to indulge in sexual relations. Let the Educator (Christ) put us to shame with the word Exechiel: “Put away your fornications.” Why, even unreasoning beasts know enough not to mate at certain times. To indulge in intercourse without intending children is to outrage nature, whom should take as our instructor.
  • Therefore, having the hope of eternal life, we despise the things of this life, even to the pleasures of the soul, each of us reckoning her his wife whom he has married according to the laws laid down by us, and that only for the purpose of having children. For as the husbandman throwing the seed into the ground awaits the harvest, not sowing more upon it, so to us the procreation of children is the measure of our indulgence in appetite.
    • Saint Athenagoras of Athens, also known as Saint Athenagoras the Apologist, Father of the Church. A Plea for the Christians, chapter 33.
  • But others drink potions to ensure sterility and are guilty of murdering a human being not yet conceived. Some when they learn they are with child through sin, practice abortion by the use of drugs. Frequently they die themselves and are brought before the rulers of the lower world guilty of three crimes: suicide, adultery against Christ, and murder of an unborn child. These are the women who are accustomed to say: “All things are clean to the clean. The approval of my conscience is enough for me. A pure heart is what God desires. Why should I abstain from foods which God created to be used?” And whenever they wish to appear bright and festive, and have drowned themselves in wine, they say—adding sacrilege to drunkenness: “God forbid that I should abstain from the blood of Christ.” And whenever they see a woman pale and sad, they call her a poor wretch, a nun, and a Manichean: and with reason, for according to their belief fasting is heresy.
    • St. Jerome, Letter 22, to Eustochium 13
  • The whole disgusting [birth control] movement rests on the assumption of man's sameness with the brutes.
    • Episcopalian Bishop Warren Chandler, April 13, 1931.
  • Birth Control, as popularly understood today and involving the use of contraceptives, is one of the most repugnant of modern aberrations, representing a 20th century renewal of pagan bankruptcy.
    • Dr. Walter A. Maier, Concordia Lutheran Theological Seminary, St. Louis, Missouri.
  • The voluntary spilling of semen outside of intercourse between man and woman is a monstrous thing. Deliberately to withdraw from coitus in order that semen may fall on the ground is doubly monstrous. For this is to extinguish the hope of the race and to kill before he is born the hoped-for offspring.
  • But the exceedingly foul deed of Onan, the basest of wretches, follows. Onan must have been a malicious and incorrigible scoundrel. This is a most disgraceful sin. It is far more atrocious than incest and adultery. We call it unchastity, yes a Sodomitic sin. For Onan goes in to her; that is, he lies with her and copulates, and when it comes to the point of insemination, spills the semen, lest the woman conceive. Surely at such a time the order of nature established by God in procreation should be followed. Accordingly, it was a most disgraceful crime to produce semen and excite the woman, and to frustrate her at that very moment.
  • The avowed object of the bishops in dealing with this whole question, marriage, sex, and contraceptives, was to stem the tide of the growing laxity in these matters and "to give guidance to troubled consciences" and "to many who are sorely perplexed as to the legitimacy of the use" (of contraceptives). I voted against this Resolution and against the Report of this Committee being even "received" by the Conference and published, because I was convinced, as I still am, that neither would attain the avowed object of the bishops. Their approval of contraceptives, it is true, is hedged round by "ifs" and "ands" and "buts," and safeguards and conditions, but so far as the "world" is concerned it will not notice, or it will forget, or will not understand the safeguards and conditions, but it will certainly remember the approval. Its "conscience," so far as it exists, will be still more at rest. As for "the faithful in Christ Jesus" and the "troubled consciences," they will be still at a loss to know what the bishops really meant, and will still have to settle this question for themselves. Of those who have been gallantly fighting in their refusal to use these things, the weaker will be encouraged to give up the struggle. Others will still fight on to maintain what they believe is the Christian standard, but greatly disheartened. Of course I voted against this Resolution.
    • Rt. Rev. M. B. Furse, Bishop of St. Albans, on the Lambeth Conference. "Marriage and Birth Control", 1931.
  • But can this instinctive feeling be justified on rational grounds? Justified, yes; but not proved, for I believe no moral judgment can be proved right or wrong merely by pure reason. To me the rational justification for this instinctive feeling that all contraceptives are wrong can be summed up in the words: "That which God hath joined together let no man put asunder."
    • Rt. Rev. M. B. Furse, Bishop of St. Albans, on the Lambeth Conference. "Marriage and Birth Control", 1931.
  • This nation needs a hunger control and removal policy, not a birth control program. Birth control as a national policy will simply marshal sophisticated methods to remove (and control when not remove) the weak, the poor — quite likely the black and other minorities whose relative increase in population threatens the white caste in this nation. Contraceptives will become a form of drug warfare against the helpless in this nation. Those whom we could not get rid of in the rice paddies of Vietnam we now propose to exterminate if necessary, eliminate if possible, in the OB wards and gynecology clinics of our urban hospitals.
    • Rev. Jesse Jackson, statement in, The United States Commission on Population Growth and the American Future (June, 1971), Volume VII (1972) of Commission publications, U.S. Government Printing Office, Washington D.C. p. 165.[14] Full text: HathiTrust [15]
  • That during the battle with Bani Al-Mustaliq they (Muslims) captured some females and intended to have sexual relation with them without impregnating them. So they asked the Prophet about coitus interruptus. The Prophet said, "It is better that you should not do it, for Allah has written whom He is going to create till the Day of Resurrection." Qaza'a said, "I heard Abu Sa'id saying that the Prophet said, 'No soul is ordained to be created but Allah will create it."
    • Muhammad, Sahih al-Bukhari, Volume 9, Book 93, Number 506.
  • Man being led blindly by his wrong belief, has become a prey of desires and craving. Having lost the balance of judgement, man is mad to indulge in pleasure pursuits. Thereby he kills his own soul and also causes injury to other life; because desire in itself is Himsa ( Injury ). Over-indulgence in sexual gratification and the lack of self-control, have created a new problem of over-population and the false means of birth control are being preached. But these are the causes for the degradation of the Society at large.
    • Shri. Kamta Prasad Jain, "Ahimsa: Right Solution of World Problems".
  • Life Member: What is your view on birth control by contraception?

Srila Prabhupada: That is the most sinful activity. Birth control should be done by restraining sex.
LM: That is one way.
Srila Prabhupada: That is the only way approved in the shastra [scriptures]. All other ways are sinful.
LM: But people are committing sinful activities like contraception and abortion. What will happen to them?
Srila Prabhupada: They will suffer. Those who are killing children in the womb will themselves be killed. They will enter into a mother's womb and be killed. They will be punished, tit for tat. But that they do not know. These rascals have no education about the laws of nature. They're acting very independently, but Krishna says in the Bhagavadgita [3.27], ahankara-vimudhatma kartaham iti manyate: Those who think they can act independently of nature are vimudhas, rascals. They will be punished by the laws of nature, just like a thief who defies the laws of the government.

    • Srila Prabhupada, 1971. Published by Back to Godhead magazine in January / February, 2011.


  • Contraception means to make the womb deteriorated so that it no longer is a good place for the soul. That is against the order of God. By the order of God a soul is sent to a particular womb and by this contraceptive, he is denied that womb and has to be placed in another. That is disobedience of the Supreme. Just as a man who is supposed to live in a particular apartment. If the situation there is so disturbed that he cannot enter the apartment then he is put at a great disadvantage. That is illegal interference and is punishable.
    • Srila Prabhupada, "My Dear Dr. Bigelow: @ Allahabad @ 20 Jan, Wed". Srila Prabhupada Letters, 1971. Chapter 1: January 1971. India (43).
  • A little later, when Annie Besant became a member of the Theosophical Society and met Madame Blavatsky in London, “Blavatsky had to explain to Mrs Besant that the Masters were not on her side in her crusade for contraception, and she asked her to discontinue it. Mrs Besant had had in mind poor working women who could bear no addition to their families. Madame Blavatsky said she would not judge a poor woman who availed herself of the means offered, but those means did nothing to reduce the root of the problem, which was that: ‘the abnormal development of the sexual instinct in man – in whom it is far greater and more continuous than in any brute – is due to the mingling with it of the intellectual element, all sexual thoughts, desires and imaginations having created thought-forms, which have been wrought into the human race, giving rise to a continual demand, far beyond nature…’ whereas sexual passion could be ‘trained and purified into a human emotion, which may be used as one of the levers in human progress, one of the factors in human growth.’ It was therefore for men and women ‘to hold this instinct in complete control, to transmute it from passion into tender and self-denying affection’.”
  • Theosophy does not merely discountenance the abuse of sex. It very definitely condemns all malpractice and indulgence. It looks upon procreation as the only legitimate function of sex.
    • w:B.P. Wadia, 1936, foreword to a pamphlet titled Living the Higher Life

Rosy Cross

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  • The Rosicrucian teachings emphasize the fact that like attracts like, and therefore it is a duty upon the part of those who are well developed physically, morally, and mentally to provide an environment for as many incoming Spirits as their physical and financial circumstances will permit. This duty is still more binding upon those who are also spiritually developed, for a high spiritual entity cannot enter into physical existence through a vile parentage. But when a couple has reached the point where it is deemed either dangerous to the health of the mother to bear more children, or where the financial burden would be above their means, then they should live a life of continence, not indulging the passional nature and seeking by artificial means to bar the way for incoming Egos to take advantage of the opportunity for rebirth offered them by the sexual indulgence of such a couple.
    • Max Heindel, The Rosicrucian Philosophy in Questions and Answers, Volume II, "Spiritual Aspects of Birth Control", no. 37.

Non-religious

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  • If there were no childbearing, sexual union would degenerate into debauchery.
    • Nikolai Berdyaev, The Destiny of Man (1931). New York: Harper & Row, 1960, p. 242
  • The sexual revolution - we were not interested in that. The oral contraceptive was made merely for the population explosion. Around 1950, we began to realize there were too many people in the world, and we worked on the oral contraceptive for population control rather than that young people could have a good time. But everything has its side effects. [The younger generation] indulges in too much sexual activity and pays less attention to other activities. I personally feel the pill has rather spoiled young people. It's made them more permisive ... But people will abuse anything.
  • Jack Harkness: There you go! I can taste it! Oestrogen. Definitely oestrogen. Take the pill, flush it away, it enters the water cycle. Feminizes the fish. Goes all the way up into the sky then falls all the way back down onto me. Contraceptives in the rain. Love this planet. Still, at least I won't get pregnant. Never doing that again.
  • The abandonment of the reproductive function is the common feature of all perversions. We actually describe a sexual activity as perverse if it has given up the aim of reproduction and pursues the attainment of pleasure as an aim independent of it. So, as you will see, the breach and turning point in the development of sexual life lies in becoming subordinate to the purpose of reproduction. Everything that happens before this turn of events and equally everything that disregards it and that aims solely at obtaining pleasure is given the uncomplimentary name of "perverse" and as such is proscribed.
    • Sigmund Freud, Introductory Lectures on Psychoanalysis (1915–17), Lecture XX: The Sexual Life of Human Beings
  • Contraceptives are an insult to womanhood. The difference between a prostitute and a woman using contraceptives is only this that the former sells her body to several men, the latter sells it to one man. Man has no right to touch his wife so long as she does not wish to have a child, and the woman should have the will-power to resist even her own husband.
  • The discussion of the pill in mainstream media is bogged in the traditional misogyny found in the history of medical industry. In today's publications we read that depression on the pill is the result of a woman mourning her inability to get pregnant, we see menstruation classed as dangerous and hear a call for the uterus and ovaries to be kept quiet. Doctors defend their choice to not inform women of side effects with the claim that they want to avoid putting ideas into the heads of those women prone to irrational thoughts.
  • We must pay for the pill with the death of erotic love.
    • Max Horkheimer, Die Sehnsucht nach dem ganz Anderen, ein Interview mit Kommentar von Helmut Gumnior (Hamburg: Furche-Verlag, 1970), p. 74
  • Since the Pill was developed over a decade ago, the idea has persisted that it encourages sexual promiscuity, especially among teenagers. After all, the Pill is totally effective. If a teenage girl obtains a supply of pills and takes them correctly, she can use her body for pleasure without fear of pregnancy. A major bar to inchastity has been lowered. This, I believe, is a fear in the minds of many people. Is it justified?
    • Robert Kistner, M.D. (1917-1990), The Pill: Facts and Fallacies about Today's Oral Contraceptives, Dr. Robert William Kistner, Delacorte Press, 1969, Page 234. [17] Dr. Kistner was a "gynecological surgeon, who worked with Pill researchers Dr. John Rock and Dr. Gregory Pincus in 1955."
  • About ten years ago I declared that the Pill would not lead to promiscuity. Well, I was wrong.
    • Robert Kistner, M.D., Family Practice News, Dec. 15, 1977, p.1. Quoted in, Oversight of Family Planning Programs, 1981: Hearing before the Committee on Labor and Human Resources, United States Senate, Ninety-seventh Congress, first session, on Examination on the Role of the Federal Government in Birth Control, Abortion Referral, and Sex Education Programs, March 31, 1981, U.S. Government Printing Office, Washington, D.C., p. 198. [18] [19]
  • For years, I felt the Pill would not lead to promiscuity. But I think it probably has - and so has the IUD (intrauterine device)...Everything is not wonderful with the Pill and the IUD... There is no perfect way of conception control, short of continence and that’s not a practical aspect...We didn't work with the Pill to have a woman take it for 30 or 40 years.
  • The body knows what it needs to do to survive. If it does not have the means to survive, it goes gracefully. The only reason for this organism to exist is to give continuity to the human species. Sex is only for reproduction, but you have turned that into a pleasure movement. What else is sex for than reproduction?
  • The technique of temporary sterilization — so-called birth control — was perhaps the most important to the human race of all the scientific and technical advances that were carried to completion during the nineteenth century. It was the neotechnic answer to that vast, irresponsible spawning of Western mankind that look place during the paleotechnic phase, partly in respose perhaps to the introduction of new staple foods and the extension of new food areas, stimulated and abetted by the fact that copulation was the one art and the one form of recreation which could not be denied to the factory population, however it or they might be brutalized.
  • The condom fosters neither abstinence nor monogamy; rather it does the opposite. Those who stress condom usage only put the seal of approval on active genital sex. The message it communicates is that the condom is a good which converts irresponsible sex into responsible sex, giving it the appearance of acceptability and respectability. It is the old refrain of birth controllers which has only resulted in more and more adolescent pregnancies.
  • Public health does not have the right to decide unilaterally what is best for its public or to impose on the individual or to coerce him to what may be best for society in the abstract, but injurious to the individual in the concrete. With the exception of the control of communicable disease, compulsion or coercion for the so-called greater good of society - or manipulation - is to be decried especially when it is accomplished at the expense of the individual. As a specific example I would cite the promotion of the highly hazardous birth control pill under the mask of safety, deceit and a risk which purveyors of The Pill justify because of the so-called good of population control. The Pill, a powerful synthetic chemical, which baffles nature's defenses against disease, which can kill and maim, which results in over fifty (50) metabolic deviations the long range significances of which we are ignorant can be characterized as chemical warfare against the women of the world by social engineers and population control experts dedicated to their vested interests.
    • Herbert Ratner M.D. (1907-1997), Statement in, Population: Hearings before the Subcommittee on Census and Population of the Committee on Post Office and Civil Service, House of Representatives, Ninety-fourth Congress, First and Second sessions (1976), U.S. Government Printing Office, Washington, D.C., pp. 264-265. Full text: HathiTrust [22] [23]
  • Birth control is the one sin for which the penalty is national death, race death; a sin for which there is no atonement.

Further

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In the latter part of the 20th century, people began to put forward the effect of population control upon the environment as a justification for regulation of fertility, independent of economic concerns.
However, many people would have serious moral objections to plans to use contraception in order to control population.
One objection that isn't covered here is that the real cause of poverty and damage is overconsumption by a few, and that if rich nations stopped consuming far more than their fair share of resources there would be no need for population control to be applied unfairly to poor nations. ~ BBC
 
For centuries, historians paid no attention to ancient accounts that claimed certain plants provided an effective means of birth control. . . . Modern laboratory analysis of various plants [including silphium, asafetida, seeds of Queen Anne's lace, pennyroyal, willow, date palm, pomegranate, inter al.], however, gives us reason to believe that the classical potions were effective, and that women in antiquity had more control over their reproductive lives than previously thought. ~ John M. Riddle
  • Exposure to all forms of violence may influence the choices that women make regarding contraceptive use. Women’s perceptions and experience of loss of reproductive control may affect their decisions to use contraception, lead to decreased conviction to use condoms, or result in partner control over administration and type of contraception used. Gee et al. demonstrated that, because of difficulties imposed by their partners, women with exposure to intimate partner violence were less likely than nonexposed women to use birth control. Compared with women without violence exposure, women with a history of intimate partner violence reported that their male partners were more likely to refuse to use condoms (21% vs 7%; P < .001) and to refuse to allow contraception (5% vs 1%; P < .001). Women exposed to violence were also less likely than their nonexposed peers to ask their partners to wear condoms (35% vs 56%; P < .001). Finally, previous experiences of abuse, particularly those occurring in childhood, might have an impact on contraceptive choices via alternate pathways including depression, substance abuse, and alcohol use.
    In light of these findings, women who experience histories of abuse may benefit from contraceptive methods that are independent of their partners. In this analysis, we sought to estimate the association of childhood, adult, and lifetime exposure to physical, emotional, or sexual abuse with contraceptive method selection and duration of use for both long-acting reversible contraception (LARC; intrauterine devices and hormonal implant) and non–long-acting methods of contraception (non-LARC; birth-control pill, injection, ring, or patch) in the Contraceptive CHOICE Project (CHOICE).
  • In this study of women seeking contraception, almost 1 in 3 women reported a history of sexual abuse or repeated experiences of emotional or physical abuse. Our findings highlight the large proportion of women who have experienced abuse in their lifetimes and the association of abuse with contraceptive method selection and discontinuation. Women with histories of abuse who select non-LARC methods may benefit from enhanced counseling as significant differences in contraceptive continuation existed by 6 months after initiation. Differences in continuation of LARC methods were modest and our data sup-port current recommendations that LARC should be offered as first-line contraceptive methods. A health care provider who identifies a woman with a history of abuse should consider the patient’s ability to maintain ongoing use, discuss LARC methods as the most effective contraceptive options to prevent pregnancy, and provide optimal contraceptive management in a manner that is effective, private, and safe.
  • Contraception is key to reducing abortion rates: 47 percent of the 6.3 million unplanned pregnancies that occur each year in the United States occur among the 7 percent of women who do not practice contraception and are at risk of unintended pregnancy. Even so, contraception does not eliminate women’s need for access to abortions: 54 percent of women who have had abortions reported that theey were using contraceptives during the month they became pregnant. Lack of education about contraceptives and inconsistent or improper use remain major problems, and nonuse is greatest among those who are young, poor, or poorly educated.
  • Although the plaintifs in Eisenstadt specifically disavowed any claim that the right to contraception would lead to a right to abortion, Justice Brennan’s plurality opinion in Eisenstadt clearly pointed in that general direction “If the right of privacy means anything,” Brennan wrote, “it is the right of the “individual”, married or single, to be free from unwarranted governmental intrusion into matters so fundamentally affecting a person as the decisionwhether to bear or beget a child.” Through this dictum, Brennan served notice that the right recognized in the Griswold opiion was not merela right of marital privacy, but extended to single persons as well, and encompassed not only contraception, but the “decision whether tobear or beget a child.”
  • Griswold and Eisenstadt hold that he state may not forbid the use of contraceptives to prevent pregnancy, not only because individuals have the right to decide whether to procreate, but because the consequences of procreation are the responsibilities of parenthood, responsibilities that are felt most heavily by women in our society and perhaps even more heavily by single women. Individuals have the fundamental right to decide whether they want to become parents and assume those responsibilities. When the state bans contraception, it compels individuals to risk becoming parents-with all the attendant social expectations and responsibilities-or else give up sexual intercourse. Because the state may not force people to become parents against their will, it may not put people to this choice.
  • There are a number of general objections that can apply to any mass contraception programme.
    Imperialism: Both the following can be regarded as forms of imperialism:
    rich countries funding contraceptive programmes in the third world
    rich countries demanding the implementation of birth control programmes in exchange for financial or other aid
    Cultural imperialism: Bringing birth control to a community that has previously avoided it will inevitably change the relationships and power dynamics within that community. It's important to take appropriate precautions to minimise the impact of contraception on cultures to which it is introduced.
    Human rights: Mass birth control interferes with a person's right to have as many children as they wish
    Eugenics: Mass birth control programmes may be used to reduce the birth rate of certain classes, castes or ethnic groups
    Gender bias: The majority of mass birth-control programmes operate by controlling only female fertility. This is because there are long-term female contraceptives such as the pill, hormone implants, and IUDs, but no male equivalents. As a result:
    women unfairly bear the burden of population control
    female fertility is treated as something dangerous that needs to be controlled
    this gender bias operates regardless of the good intentions behind programmes of mass contraception.
  • The regulation of births, which is an aspect of responsible fatherhood and motherhood, is objectively morally acceptable when it is pursued by the spouses without external pressure; when it is practiced not out of selfishness but for serious reasons; and with methods that conform to the objective criteria of morality, that is, periodic continence and use of the infertile periods.
    • Compedium of the Catechism of the Catholic Church, question 497.
  • Birth control as it is now practised in the United States is bound to bring about a notable decline in our white population in the near future. Skilled statisticians predict that in twenty or thirty years our nation will cease to grow and begin to diminish, unless there occurs some extraordinary immigrational influx or widespread change in the attitude toward birth control. When the decline becomes pronounced and rapid, the government will probably become concerned in the matter, like the government of France, which is now making strenuous efforts to induce married couples to produce more children. It is not at all unlikely that the babies who are being born in the United States today will receive similar inducements from our government before they are too old to bear offspring. Even now there are many thoughtful men and women in our land who are gravely disturbed over the decline of the population and are engaged in a campaign for more births, although some of them continue to advocate the use of contraception by persons whose offspring are liable to be unsound in mind or in body.
  • [A]ccess to birth control is dependent on the privacy right articulated in Griswold and echoed in Roe. Contraception availability is crucial toward reducing unintended pregnancies, reducing the number of abortions, and improving women's health. In addition, improved access to contraception will allow more women to control the timing of their pregnancies. This, in turn, helps reduce infant mortality, low birth weight, and maternal health complications during pregnancy. Thus, undermining the privacy right will serve to endanger women’s health and lives even beyond the abortion decision.
  • If under Griswold the distribution of contraceptives to married persons cannot be prohibited, a ban on the distribution to unmarried persons would be equally impermissible.
  • Thus it seems to me entirely proper to infer a general right of privacy, so long as some care is taken in defining the sort of right the inference will support. Those aspects of the First, Fourth and Fifth Amendments to which the Court refers all limit the ways in which, and the circumstances under which, the government can go about gathering information about a person he would rather it did not have. Katz v. United States, limiting governmental tapping of telephones, may not involve what the framers would have called a “search,” but it plainly involves this general concern with privacy. Griswold is a long step, even a leap, beyond this, but at least the connection is discernible. Had it been a case that purported to discover in the Constitution a “right to contraception,” it would have been Roe’s strongest precedent. But the Court in Roe gives no evidence of so regarding it, and rightly not. Commentators tend to forget, though the Court plainly has not, that the Court in Griswold stressed that it was invalidating only that portion of the Connecticut law that proscribed the use, as opposed to the manufacture, sale, or other distribution of contraceptives. That distinction (which would be silly were the right to contraception being constitutionally enshrined) makes sense if the case is rationalized on the ground that the section of the law whose constitutionality was in issue was such that its enforcement would have been virtually impossible without the most outrageous sort of governmental prying into the privacy of the home.
  • Luker discounts the theory that abortion is used as a contraceptive because women have incomplete knowledge bout preconception measures or because of individual intrapsychic conflicts that cannot be fully. Instead, she hypothesizes that women engage in a fairly conscious, rational, though often not express, cost-benefit analysis in which they weigh the many different relational costs and benefits of pregnancy against those of contraception and birth. Thus, for example, many of the women she surveyed found contraception “unnatural” and “cold blooded,” a measure that robbed the sexual act of its warm intimacy.. For others, to use a contraceptive, such as the pill, was to acknowledge to herself and to others that she was available for sex and thus transgressing the model of a “good girl in the traditional moral sense. Some women avoided contraception because they saw in pregnancy a way to notify parents, husbands, and lovers that they had not been properly attentive and to ask for help and care. Still others recognized pregnancy as a means of measuring their partner’s commitment to then. Some believed that if they got pregnant, their partners would marry them or become more living. Disillusioned in those beliefs after becoming pregnant, many sought abortions. Finally, some women saw contraceptives not as a way to control one’s body but as a technology that permitted women to be exploited by their male partners. As one woman stated:
    [If you use a contraceptive,] [h]e’s not worrying about what’s going to happen to you He’s only worrying about himself.
    . . . [Getting birth control pills] worked to where it was a one-way street for his benefit, not for mine. It would be mine because I wouldn’t get pregnant, but safe for him, too, because I wouldn’t put him on the spot. So I get sick of being used. I’m tired of this same old crap, forget it. I’m not getting pills for his benefit. . . . He gets all the feelings, girls have all hassles.
  • The ulema declare: If need be, then, as long as the excuse lasts, one can use contraceptive methods, but, frankly speaking, it is sheer ingratitude for divine bounty that one gets oneself deprived of offspring through tubectomy without a legal excuse. The Holy Prophet (pbuh.!) has said: ‘Contract marriage with women who love more and beget more children so that on account of your multitudinousness on the Day of Judgement I may take pride in your number vis-à-vis the other ummahs’ (Mishkat). God is the Provider; He will provide for you as well as your children. The children’s provider is God, not we. He who supplied nourishment in the mother’s womb, He will provide it after birth also. The list of livelihood the offspring bring with them from the mother’s womb and they will receive their quota according to the same. Why should then one entertain such thoughts? The Divine Commandment is: ‘And that ye slay not your children because of penury—We provide for you and for them’ (6:151). At another place it has been said: ‘Slay not your children, fearing a [fall to poverty]; We shall provide for them and for you’ (17:31). It is reported in a hadith that certain Companions, in order to save themselves from sins and wordly worries and to engage themselves in devotions, expressed the wish to get themselves castrated. The Holy Prophet (pbuh.!) did not permit it and recited the Quranic verse: ‘O ye who believe ! Fobid not the good things which Allah hath made lawful for you, and transgress not. Lo! Allah loveth not transgressors’ (V. 87). (Bukh., vol. ii, p.759). It is conclusively proved from this that castration, that is, the discontinuance of procreation artificially is unlawful (haram) according to the explicit verse of the Quran also and is included in transgression from the limits fixed by God. Hence an operation that discontinues procreation is unanimously unlawful (UQ, vol. xx, p. 72)... And the jurisconsults have said: ‘Castration of men is forbidden’ (haram). (DM & S., vol. v, p. 342). And: ‘And that ye slay not your children because of penury—We provide for you and for them.’ (VI: 151). And: ‘Slay not your children, fearing a fall to poverty.We shall provide for them and for you.’ (XVII: 31).
    • Fatawa-i-Raihimiyyah, Quran, Hadis, quoted in Arun Shourie - The World of Fatwas Or The Sharia in Action (2012, Harper Collins).
  • When the Companions asked the Holy Prophet (Sallallaho Aliaihe wa sallaml) about coitus interruptus (‘azl), he said: ‘This is like burying a live child.’ And this is the same which has been described in the Quranic verse: ‘And when the girl-child that was buried alive is asked’ (LXXXI) (Vide Muslim Sharif, vol. i, p. 466; Mishkat Sharif, p. 276). In Path al-Mulhim Sharh-e Sahih-e Muslim, Allamah Shabbir Ahmed Usmani quotes that Qazi has written that the Holy Prophet (Sallallaho Aliaihe wa sallam!) has determined coitus interruptus ‘a hidden burial’, that is, to waste the seed which Allah Most High had prepared for procreation is like infanticide and burying the child alive. The result is the same: the only difference is that it is not buried alive openly and hence it has been called hidden. There is a hadith in the Bukhari Sharif to the effect that when the Companions, on account of their zest of engaging in devotions and in order to avoid sins and for remaining aloof from relations, expressed the desire to get themselves castrated, the Holy Prophet (Sallallaho alaihe wa sallam!) did not allow them and adduced the Quranic verse, ‘O ye who believe: Forbid not the good things which Allah hath made lawful for you, and transgress not. Lo! Allah loveth not transgressors’ (V: 87), in proof. Even as the Holy Prophet (Sallallaho Alaihe wa sallam!) has, by this verse, determined castration to be unlawful, it is obvious that the termination of propagation under the family planning scheme will also be included under this order.
    • Fatawa-i-Raihimiyyah, Quran, Hadis, quoted in Arun Shourie - The World of Fatwas Or The Sharia in Action (2012, Harper Collins).
  • Before considering abortion, the Justices had faced the issue of contraception. They eliminated state restrictions on contraceptives in two major cases in 1965 and 1972, an action that provoked little public opposition in the midst of the sexual revolution. The ease with which they were able to eliminate those laws likely gave some of the Justices a sense that the abortion laws were simply another set of laws that could be eliminated as an “invasion of privacy.” They saw contraception and abortion laws as one and the same intrusion on “privacy.”
    The Justices first seriously addressed the issue of contraception in 1961 in a case called Poe v. Ullman, but in a very limited way. The Connecticut statute in Poe was unique, the only one of its kind in the country to “criminally prohibit” the marital use of contraception.
    Although a majority of the Justices dismissed the Poe case-Justice Brennan complained about “this skimpy record”-two influential dissents by Justices William O. Douglas (a “liberal”) and John Harlan (a “conservative”) kept the issue alive. Both dissents emphasized marital privacy as the reason for striking the Connecticut law. Harlan made clear in Poe that “[t]he right to privacy most manifestly is not an absolute. Thus, I would not suggest that adultery, homosexuality, fornication and incest are immune from criminal enquiry, however privately practiced. So much has been explicitly recognized in acknowledging the State’s rightful concern for its people’s moral welfare.”
    The same Connecticut statute came back to the Court in 1965 in a similar test case, then called Griswold v. Connecticut. The Justices struck down the Connecticut criminal prohibition on the marital use of contraception and announced, for the first time, a general constitutional right of privacy. Griswold quickly became the Supreem Court precedent that spurred the litigation campaign against state abortion statutes, led in large part by Attorney Roy Lucas, who authored one of the first major law review articles attacking state abortion laws on constitutional grounds in 1969.
  • A constitutional right to contraception was pushed in the courts for a decade before it succeeded between 1965 and 1972. After the Griswold decision in 1965, the drive for a right to contraception then merged with a drive for a right to abortion.
  • Since certain portions of the Affordable Care Act took effect in 2012, birth control has become free for many American women, since the law requires most insurance plans to cover contraception without charging individuals. According to the CDC, roughly 62 percent of American women of childbearing age used some sort of contraception as of 2013. Yet according to a report by a company that tracks the pharmaceuticals industry, women aren’t necessarily using more birth control. For example, the number of prescriptions for the pill—the most popular form of contraception—has only increased slightly the past half decade, rising from 93 to 95 million between 2009 and 2013.
    Theoretically, more affordable birth control might lead to fewer unintended pregnancies. It’s still unclear how the Affordable Care Act will affect this number; the latest data available is from 2010, when roughly 37 percent of births were either unintended or mistimed, according to the CDC.
  • Birth control should be resorted to only in cases of extreme necessity, such as the wife's ill-health owing to constant births. Imam Abu Hanifa holds it makruh (abominable).
    • M. Imran: Ideal Woman, Delhi 1994 (1981), p.66.
  • I similarly appraise the right of men and women to full knowledge of all that the sciences of nature and man have established regarding sex and reproduction, and to decide for themselves upon the number of children they want and the intervals at which they want them.
    • Horace M. Kallen, “An Ethic of Freedom: A Philosopher’s View”, ‘’N.Y.U.I.R 31:1167 (November 1956). Cf. Glanville Williams, “The Control of Conception”, in The Sanctity of Life and the Criminal Law, New York 1957, pp. 34-74
  • Enforcement of sharply-differentiated concepts of the roles and choices of men and women underlay regulation of abortion and contraception in the nineteenth century.
    Nineteenth-century contraception and abortion regulation also reflected ethnocentric fears about the relative birthrates of immigrants and Yankee Protestants.
  • In Contraception and Abortion from the Ancient World to the Renaissance (Harvard University Press, 1992), Riddle proposed that effective contraception began in the ancient world: "the ancients discovered what we only recently rediscovered". In Eve's Herbs he concentrates on the period from the Middle Ages to the present day, arguing that contraceptive knowledge gradually became less easily available to women because the witch-hunts killed the wise women. He again makes extensive use both of comparative studies of world-wide plant folklore and of laboratory work on the chemical efficacy of the materials used.
  • Desired or undesired, sex usually entails pregnancy. Even when contraception is used conscientiously and skillfully, it only reduces the risk of pregnancy; it does not eliminate it. Small risks taken repeatedly become large risks. Even a woman who uses a contraceptive that is 95% effective has a 70% probability of pregnancy over ten years. Even surgical sterilization is not absolutely reliable, and one “sterilized” woman in 25 will become pregnant if she continues to have intercourse over a ten year period. “Thus, in the absence of improved contraceptive technology unwanted childbearing and abortion will occur in response to contraceptive failure.”
  • These pressures to engage in sex are often accompanied by pressures “not” to use contraception. Some of these involve physical danger: the most effective contraceptive, the pill, poses long-term health risks, while safer methods have higher failure rates. Contraceptive materials and information are sometimes hard to get, particularly for the teenagers who are a third of the women who abort. Contraception is sometimes stigmatized: “Using contraception means acknowledging and planning the possibility of intercourse, accepting one’s sexual availability, and appearing non-spontaneous.” The issue of power arises again, since many men dislike contracepetives and discourage the women they have sex with from using them. “Sex does not look a lot like freedom when it appears normatively less costly for women to risk an undesired, often painful, traumatic, dangerous, sometimes illegal, and potentially life-threatening procedure than to protect oneself in advance.” In short, women’s consent to the risk of pregnancy is as dubious as Bailey’s consent to the risk of being put on the chain gang.
  • Since the 1970s, drugs that interfere with the synthesis, secretion, or peripheral actions of progesterone have been tested as emergency contraceptives because progesterone and its effects on the endometrium are critical for the successful implantation and establishment of a pregnancy. Because of the variability in timing of the administration of the drug, if the emergency contraceptive worked only to prevent ovulation and interfere with fertilization, it would have limited success, so according to researchers,
    to achieve the highest possible efficacy, the ideal emergency contraceptive drug needs to act interceptively; that is, it should be capable of interfering with a physiological event that occurs after fertilization—during the period of early embryonic development prior to implantation. (Von Hertzen and Van Look 1996)
  • In 1965, the Supreme Court, in Griswold v. Connecticut, forced the last holdout state to comply with an overwhelming national consensus when it struck down Connecticut’s law banning the use of contraceptives by married couples, the only law of its kind in the nation still on the books. Because popular support for banning contraception had eroded, the Griswold decision was embraced by Congress, the White House, and the country as a whole.
  • The historic fertility declines in Western countries that occurred prior to diffusion of modern contraceptives were achieved primarily through induced abortion, abstinence, and use of traditional methods of contraception, in particular withdrawal. While these alternative means of fertility regulation have also contributed to contemporary fertility declines in developing countries, modern contraception seems to have taken the center stage in the scientific literature and policy debates. Indeed, fertility declines in developing countries have been highly correlated with the diffusion of modern contraception. Sub-Saharan Africa is no exception to this general pattern, although, as is typical in the beginning of fertility transitions, the relationship between fertility decline and contraceptive use is still relatively loose in the region (Westoff and Bankole 2001). It thus seems especially important to consider the role of alternative means of birth control, including traditional contraceptive methods and periods of sexual abstinence or inactivity, in the case of contemporary sub-Saharan Africa.
  • Some research has been conducted on the role of traditional methods in regulating births in the early stages of the fertility transition in contemporary developing countries, most notably on the relationship between induced abortion and contraception (Bongaarts and Westoff 2000; Marston and Cleland 2003; WHO 2011). These studies have generally found that in Latin America, Asia, and North Africa, abortion rates increased during the first phases of fertility decline, as growing demand for fertility regulation outstripped the diffusion of modern contraception, and then declined at later stages when modern contraceptives were more widely used. There is also evidence that a similar pattern is playing out in contemporary sub-Saharan African, with a number of country-specific studies indicating that abortion rates are currently highest among urban women, a finding explained by these women’s greater demand for birth control and the many obstacles remaining to contraceptive use in the region (Singh et al. 2005; Singh et al. 2010; Basinga et al. 2012; Levandowski et al. 2013; Bankole et al. 2014; Sedgh et al. 2015).
  • The use of traditional contraception has received less attention than either abortion or changing patterns of abstinence. The lack of substantive research on these methods likely stems from the fact that traditional methods are both less effective and less often used than modern methods. Contraceptive efficacy is one of the most important aspects of method choice and promotion, and, with typical use, periodic abstinence and withdrawal (the two most commonly used traditional methods) are less effective than nearly all modern methods (Trussell 2004). Moreover, use of these less-effective methods is generally low throughout contemporary regions. According to regional estimates from the United Nations (UN), in sub-Saharan Africa only 5.4 percent of women aged 15–49 in union use traditional methods (periodic abstinence, withdrawal, or other informal methods of contraception), a level that is comparable to Asia (5.6 percent) and Latin America and the Caribbean (6.1 percent) (UN 2013). Within sub-Saharan Africa, however, the prevalence of traditional method use is particularly high in Central Africa, where 12.0 percent of women of reproductive age report using a traditional method. According to the same UN estimates, modern contraceptive prevalence is 19.7 percent for sub-Saharan Africa, which is significantly lower than modern method use in Asia (61.2 percent) or Latin America and the Caribbean (66.6 percent). As a result, traditional method use constitutes a much larger proportion of overall contraceptive use in sub-Saharan Africa, particularly in Central Africa, and may play an under-appreciated, and certainly under-studied, role in Africa’s fertility transition.
  • " [s]ince contraception alone seems insufficient to reduce fertility to the point of no-growth, . . . we should permit all voluntary means of birth control (including abortion).
    • National Abortion Rights League, Speaker's and Debater's Notebook Excerpt (c. 1972) (on file with Schlesinger Library, Harvard University, The NARAL Papers).
  • It is "one of the fundamental tenets of Islam -- namely, to multiply the tribe."
    • Saeed Naqvi: Reflections of an Indian Mus¬lim (Har-Anand, Delhi 1993), p.32.
  • See Siegel & Siegel, supra note 268, at 1028 (observing that the government’s compelling interest in providing employees access to contraception “encompass[es] not only core concerns of the community in promoting public health and facilitating women’s integration in the workplace,” but also “crucial concerns of the employees who are the intended beneficiaries of federal law’s contraceptive coverage requirement—interests that sound in bodily integrity, personal autonomy, and equal citizenship”). As the Department of Health and Human Services explained: “Researchers have shown that access to contraception improves the social and economic status of women. Contraceptive access . . . allow[s] women to achieve equal status as healthy and productive members of the job force.” Group Health Plans and Health Insurance Issuers Relating to Coverage of Preventive Services Under the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act, 77 Fed. Reg. 8725-01 (Feb. 15, 2012). Cf. Hobby Lobby, 134 S. Ct. at 2779-80 (discussing the government’s asserted interests in requiring employers to provide employees insurance for contraception, including “‘public health’ and ‘gender quality’” (citing Griswold, 381 U.S. 479)).
  • Sanger never accepted rhythm as a legitimate form of birth control because of its high failure rate and because it dictated when a couple could or could not have sex. “I disagree with it violently,” she told a friend in 1953. Yet when preparing the program for the Third International Conference on Planned Parenthood in Bombay in 1952, Sanger invited Rock to give a paper on rhythm to placate public health leaders in India. She might have sought Rock’s insights into the topic because he had just published a paper that concluded the rhythm method offered a “satisfactory degree of protection” only to “rigorously selected and carefully instructed wives.” For all others, Rock and his co-authors wrote, “the effectiveness of the method in preventing conception is not considered adequate.” Whether or not Rock was aware of Sanger’s strong views on rhythm, he declined the invitation because he was “pressed for time.” He added that “I thoroughly believe in the work you are doing,” an acknowledgment, perhaps, that he had expanded his advocacy of birth control beyond its use for medical reasons. (Sanger to Edward Steele, Mar. 31, 1953 [quote 1]; Sanger to Rock, June 14, 1952; Rock to Sanger, Aug. 28, 1952 [quotes 5 and 6] [MSM S37:966, S39:409, S41: 197]; Christopher Tietze, Samuel R. Poliakoff and John Rock, “The Clinical Effectiveness of the Rhythm Method of Contraception,” Obstetrical & Gynecological Survey 7:2 [April 1952]: 299-302 [quotes 2-4].)
  • Had the monster of 'Birth Control' as an instrument of state policy raised its head in the days of the Holy Prophet, he would surely have declared Jihad against it in the same manner as he waged Jihad against Shirk (polytheism). ... The Qur'an says that 'Children are an ornament of life' and Hadith literature views with favour larger families for the greater strength of Ummah, and as such birth control / family planning cannot be in any way compatible with the Shari'ah.
    • M. Samiullah: Muslims in Alien Society, p.90-97.
  • Islam is one of the few religions that allow for birth control.
    • Yoginder Sikand: "Bogey of family planning and Islam", Observer of Business and Politics, 27-2-1993, with refere¬nce to B.F. Musallam: Sex and Society in Islam (Cambridge 1933). Quoted from Elst, Koenraad. (1997) The Demographic Siege
 
To improve conditions so that dirt, poverty, and disease will disappear is, of course, the ideal solution. But that, to put it mildly, will take time, involving long-term medical and economic campaigns on a dozen fronts. Birth control, in the meantime, offers immediate help. Its advocates point out that at least the family without much to eat ought to have the choice as to whether it wants to bring another high chair to the table. Birth control, they say, can help to stop the infant and maternal carnage and in the end build a healthier and perhaps even a larger population. ~ Don Wharton
  • I look back in history, and there was a time when many states had laws making contraception illegal. The Supreme Court in ’65 ruled (in Griswold v. Connecticut) that there is a right of privacy and that married people have the right to use contraception. And then the Supreme Court in Baird vs. Eisenstadt (1972) said that right of privacy to decide whether you want to bear or beget a child, and therefore the right to use contraception, is [for] married and single people. So, I thought that this would be a case where Roe vs. Wade would be accepted, maybe not just right at first, but within a few years. And that we could go ahead and move on to work on other issues.
  • Catholic theologians argued that contraception contravened natural law in several ways. First, it separated sex from its natural purpose of procreation. Second, by attempting to prevent the formation of new human life, it challenged God's authority as the Creator. Finally, it treated human life as something to be prevented rather than valued. Contraception introduced a "deadly...cheapening of human life," the Jesuit magazine America charged in 1924. Those who promoted contraception "would destroy the law of God and the law of nature by interfering with human life at its inception. For they would teach the custodians of human life how to frustrate life before birth. In the views of Catholics, this was only a short step removed from abortion. "Does artificial prevention of life stand on any higher moral ground than the artificial taking of life?" Edward J. Heffron, executive secretary of the National Council of Catholic Men, asked in 1942.
    Birth control advocates, including Sanger, disagreed. They saw contraception as an anti-abortion measure, since women would likely have fewer illegal abortions if they had a more convenient and safer way to limit their fertility Catholics disputed this claim. They argued that legalized birth control would actually increase the abortion rate, because people who had been encouraged to try and avoid pregnancy would resort to any means at their disposal-even an illegal abortion-if their contraceptive devices failed. Birth control had "created the mentality which abhors births," Jesuit priest Wilifrid Parsons declared in 1935. It's "inexorable outcome will be the killing by abortion of unwanted babies."
  • To improve conditions so that dirt, poverty, and disease will disappear is, of course, the ideal solution. But that, to put it mildly, will take time, involving long-term medical and economic campaigns on a dozen fronts. Birth control, in the meantime, offers immediate help. Its advocates point out that at least the family without much to eat ought to have the choice as to whether it wants to bring another high chair to the table. Birth control, they say, can help to stop the infant and maternal carnage and in the end build a healthier and perhaps even a larger population.
  • Many African-Americans, particularly physicians and feminists, found black-genocide arguments utterly unconvincing. Dr. Jerome Holland of Planned Parenthood emphasized that legalized abortion would prevent unnecessary deaths of black mothers and babies. An African-American physician, Edward Keemer, worked with NARAL in a Michigan abortion test case pursued in 1971. Shirley Chisholm of NARAL called the black-genocide argument “male rhetoric, for male ears.” In the early 1970s, popular advice columns in the Chicago Defender advised African-American women about how and why to seek contraception or support the repeal of abortion bans. Yet many African-American women appeared afraid that abortion or even contraception would be used against them. For example, one Planned Parenthood worker reported: “Many Negro women have told us, ‘There are two kinds of [birth control] pill-one for white women, and one for us . . . and the one for us causes sterilization.”

Cook, Hera, “The long sexual revolution: English women, sex and contraception 1800-1975”, Oxford University Press, (2004)

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  • This book began as a project about sexuality and contraception in which maternity had no part. This is how sexuality has been constructed in Western cultures since the mid-twentieth century, but this was the first period in which it was possible for heterosexual women to separate physical sexual activity from the reality of frequent conceptions and births. Even those few who were infertile lived in a society dominated by this experience. The importance of this became obvious during the research and the physical impact of motherhood upon birth rates and hence upon female sexuality has become central to the book. However, although historians had produced valuable research focusing on the impact of eugenic thought and the state on concept of motherhood during the early twentieth century there is no evidence that the pressure this placed upon women had any impact upon birth rates. Birth control was almost entirely a matter of self-help and levels of use of contraception rose persistently from the 1890s when survey records began. When birth rates altered during the twentieth century, it was not according to the desires of eugenicists and population controllers.
    • p.4

James Reed, “The Birth Control Movement and American Society: From Private Vice to Public Virtue”, Princeton University Press, (1984).

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In 1962, Population Council gave Guttmacher a grant “to travel around the world to assess what methods of birth control they should back.” He reported that conventional contraceptives were not working and advised the council to invest in development of the IUD. ~ James Reed
  • In 1962, Population Council gave Guttmacher a grant “to travel around the world to assess what methods of birth control they should back.” He reported that conventional contraceptives were not working and advised the council to invest in development of the IUD. The council invited forty-two clinicians to a conference on intrauterine contraception. Tietze remembered the “conspirational air” that surrounded the conference “It was a very exiting period. . . . we were working with something that had been absolutely rejected by the profession . . . we had a great feeling of urgency to produce a method that worked. It seemed to work. Now we had to establish it. And we had to start from scratch.”
    The council invested more than $2.5 million in the clinical testing, improvement, and statistical evaluation of the IUD, which proved to be highly effective for the approximately seven out of ten women who could retain one. Tietze, an unusually candid man with the habit of precise expression, recalls the care with which clinicians were recruited and the effort poured into making sure that their records were accurate.
    There was such a feeling of urgency among professional people, not among the masses, but something had to be done. And this was something that you could do to the people rather than something people could do for themselves. So it made it very attractive to the doers.
    Armed at last with a method that was inexpensive and required little motivation from the user beyond initial acceptance, family planning programs began to have an effect on birth rates in South Korea, Taiwan, and Pakistan. By 1967 a review article in Demography criticized the over optimism of the Population Council technocrats about the prospects for controlling world population growth. Other social scientists claimed that population control was getting too much of the development dollar and pointed out that population control was no substitute for social justice. Lower birth rates did not guarantee a better society. Whether or not world population growth could be controlled remained an unanswered question.
    • p.306-307

“A History of Birth Control Methods“, Planned Parenthood

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Contemporary studies show that, out of a list of eight reasons for having sex, having a baby is the least frequent motivator for most people (Hill, 1997). This seems to have been true for all people at all times. Ever since the dawn of history, women and men have wanted to be able to decide when and whether to have a child. Contraceptives have been used in one form or another for thousands of years throughout human history and even prehistory. In fact, family planning has always been widely practiced, even in societies dominated by social, political, or religious codes that require people to “be fruitful and multiply” —from the era of Pericles in ancient Athens to that of Pope Benedict XVI, today (Blundell, 1995; Himes, 1963; Pomeroy, 1975; Wills, 2000).
Of course, the methods used before the 20th century were not always as safe or effective as those available today. ~ Planned Parenthood
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