Thank you to all who have taken the time to read all or part of this series. This is but one attempt to get people thinking about an issue which we are convinced is one of the most important of our day.
We're also honored by all who have taken the time to engage seriously with what we've written, either in the comments or through other means. Getting people thinking about this issue is exactly our goal. The push-back also helps us to further refine our own thinking and articulation of these ideas.
Krista worked very closely with me on editing this series, but the series is nonetheless written from my perspective (though there is a great deal of overlap obviously). The original plan for the series included a part from Krista explaining things that were unique to her perspective, but for various reasons we decided to let this series just be from my perspective. Instead, Krista plans to write a standalone piece/series about her own experience, particularly about issues that are specific to her as a woman. She's in no rush to put anything out, so don't expect anything too soon, but do keep an eye out for it!
Lastly, we'd like to extend an open door to anyone who seriously wants to discuss these matters with us further. We welcome you to contact us first through Facebook or email and then from there we'd be more than happy to interact with you through Facebook, email, phone, video chat, or, if you're in the Twin Cities area in MN, having you over for dinner - whichever makes sense. We don't have all the answers, but we know what we know and have our own experience.
God bless!
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This is the Post Script of a six-part series:
Part 1: Asking the Question
Part 2: Flipping the Switch
Part 3: No Longer Afraid
Part 4: Hey Baby
Part 5: Tested Twice
Part 6: No Regrets
Post Script
Resources:
- Humanae Vitae
- Marriage: Love and Life in the Divine Plan
- Children of the Reformation: A Short and Surprising History of Protestantism and Contraception
- Sanger's Victory: How Planned Parenthood’s Founder Played the Christians—and Won
- Birth control is moral (but not all methods)
- Organic Sex, Organic Farming
- The Vindication of Humanae Vitae
- Adam and Eve After the Pill: Paradoxes of the Sexual Revolution
- iUseNFP.com
- Find an NFP class
Wednesday, June 12, 2013
Tuesday, June 11, 2013
Why We're Contraception-Free, Part 6: No Regrets
Krista and I feel like we dodged a bullet. We were totally foolish; we got engaged and hadn't given serious thought to contraception or children at all. By God's merciful grace, we stumbled upon some 45 year old document of a long-dead pope, and it saved us not only from grave perversion in our marriage but also from missing out on our greatest joys.
I am more convinced every day that getting married and starting a family after becoming an adult should be normal. But instead, in our contracepted world in which pleasure is a right, chastity is unhealthy, adolescence is extended indefinitely, commitment is shunned, and service to others is a burden, something as simple as getting married soon into adulthood and allowing fruit to naturally come therefrom has become a revolutionary act.
Indeed, if the arguments of Humanae Vitae are right, contraception is an attack at the very foundation of human society: the marriage bed. And it has been an attack virtually global in scope and with almost universal acceptance, with billions of dollars spent in its promotion. In just a few decades in the 20th century, the world went from largely rejecting its use to considering it to be a form of necessary preventative medicine (the natural functioning of a healthy body is a disease?) and access to it to be a human right that trumps the right to conscience of anyone who thinks otherwise (and in some countries mandating its use). Of course, the world will go on, and so will the Church, but many souls can be lost in the process.
Our new convictions deeply shook Krista's and my confidence in Protestantism and played a significant role in our decision to join the Catholic Church. With small exceptions consisting mostly of individuals or small communities, virtually all Protestant denominations have been incapable of preserving this most basic moral truth.
The Catholic Church remains the only major organization on the planet that has held the historic Christian line, and it has done so despite enormous pressure to capitulate from without and from within. The successor of St Peter's promulgation of Humanae Vitae in the tumultuous year of 1968 stands as strong confirmation that Christ really did build his Church on Peter the Rock (Matthew 16.18-19).
Thankfully, it looks like some evangelicals are starting to take a second look. Lutheran pastor Russel Saltzman last year wrote in a piece for First Things:
I am rethinking Humanae Vitae, Pope Paul VI’s 1968 encyclical condemning artificial birth control. Well, actually not rethinking since I cannot remember ever thinking about it much at all, ever, except dismissively. So best to say, I am considering it seriously for the first time. I actually sat down to read it.In an old piece re-posted in the last year on his website entitled "Can Christians Use Birth Control?" (to which I responded here), Southern Baptist Theological Seminary president Albert Mohler, though he refrains from endorsing the full Catholic position, challenges his readers:
[W]e should look closely at the Catholic moral argument as found in Humanae Vitae. Evangelicals will find themselves in surprising agreement with much of the encyclical’s argument.And just last summer, evangelicalism's flagship magazine Christianity Today published a review of Mary Eberstadt's recent book Adam and Eve After the Pill: Paradoxes of the Sexual Revolution entitled "The Consequences of Contraception: Evangelicals need to reckon with the empirical evidence of what the sexual revolution has wrought". The review encourages its readers:
In this day and age, such a suggestion will seem ridiculous to Christians and non-Christians alike, but the data is undeniable. If we want to think seriously and Christianly about sex, then we need to think seriously about contraception.I am greatly encouraged that some evangelicals are beginning to rethink contraception. I hope my readers will as well.
This coming August will mark the beginning of our fifth year of marriage. Looking back, we wouldn't have done anything different, whether it was getting married when we did or having the children when we did. We don't feel like we've missed out on anything and none of the nightmare scenarios have come close to materializing. On the contrary, we've seen all the great joys and blessings we could have missed out on.
We have no regrets. I have written this with the hope that other couples won't either.
Keep Reading: Post Script
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This is Part 6 of a six-part series:
Part 1: Asking the Question
Part 2: Flipping the Switch
Part 3: No Longer Afraid
Part 4: Hey Baby
Part 5: Tested Twice
Part 6: No Regrets
Post Script
Resources:
- Humanae Vitae
- Marriage: Love and Life in the Divine Plan
- Children of the Reformation: A Short and Surprising History of Protestantism and Contraception
- Sanger's Victory: How Planned Parenthood’s Founder Played the Christians—and Won
- Birth control is moral (but not all methods)
- Organic Sex, Organic Farming
- The Vindication of Humanae Vitae
- Adam and Eve After the Pill: Paradoxes of the Sexual Revolution
- iUseNFP.com
- Find an NFP class
Sunday, June 9, 2013
Why We're Contraception-Free, Part 5: Tested Twice
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| Elijah taking a nap in the hospital |
But the next day, her leg was still swollen, and bad enough that it was difficult for her to walk. For the next three days leading up to the birth, Krista could hardly get out of bed.
After our son was born, the swelling in Krista's leg didn't recede as we were expecting. A doctor decided to do another scan, and they discovered that Krista had a massive blood clot stretching the length of much of her left leg. They didn't want to put her on a blood thinner yet since she had just given birth, so they rushed her into surgery to put in a filter to catch any clot that might dislodge (which can be deadly). Within a few days, though, she was on warfarin, a common blood thinner taken orally.
Here's the thing about warfarin: it is known to cause deformities or death in babies developing in their mother's womb. In other words, as long as Krista was taking warfarin, we did not want to conceive a child.
There are blood thinning drugs that do not cause problems for babies developing in their mother's womb, but they are given by injection and cost significantly more. The doctors said that they would want her to be on some sort of blood thinner indefinitely, so if she ever did become pregnant, she would have to be on the injections. We wanted Krista to be able to give her body a break from the injections when she didn't need to be doing them and so we decided she would be on warfarin pills for the time being.
We could have used natural family planning techniques to try to avoid conceiving a child while she was on the warfarin. But from what we understood (perhaps wrongly), you had to chart for a few cycles before you could start to predict when the woman would be fertile or not, and since Krista had just given birth, she wasn't having her cycle. Besides, like all forms of birth control, it's never 100%: anytime a couple has sex, they should be prepared to welcome a child. Couldn't we just hold off once she got her period back? But a period means a woman has already had a cycle and could have conceived a child.
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| Elijah was born-again soon after his birth. See: Why we baptized our newborn, and you should too |
We didn't want it on our consciences that we produced a deformed or dead child simply because we couldn't control ourselves. So we decided to take no chances and use the only birth control method that is absolutely 100%: we would abstain for as along as she was on the warfarin.
Meanwhile, we were enjoying our beautiful new baby. Even though I had come from a family of six kids, I was one of the youngest, so I had very little experience with babies. Changing Elijah's first diaper in the hospital was my first time ever changing a diaper.
It was a few weeks before the swelling in Krista's leg went down enough for her to be back up and walking around normally. I was able to take off a week from my job to be around to help out during the day, and our parents staggered their visits so we had someone there to help us for much of the summer.
We had a lot of fun taking Elijah out and enjoying the summer weather. We went on lots of walks around the neighborhood, went to the park and the farmer's market regularly, and enjoyed free outdoor concerts near where we were living. We generally took the attitude that we'd still go out to do things we'd normally do and just bring him along for the ride.
And as anyone who has children knows, taking care of a new baby, particularly one's first baby, can also be very challenging. They obviously need someone 24 hours a day. They cry, sometimes for seemingly no reason. Routine things like sleeping or going to Mass have never been the same.
But he wasn't a burden and he didn't detract from our relationship as we were warned a baby within the first year of our marriage would. He wasn't something coming from the outside to disrupt our marriage; he was the fruit of our married love. He was another person with whom we were now sharing our lives, one with his own personality that showed itself right away and his own will and desires which became apparent as he got older (what? he doesn't always want to do what we want him to do?). While it was still nice to be able to leave him with Krista's mother for an hour or two every now and then and get away together, we felt he brought us closer together. We didn't have less love to go around, we had more love.
We needed to be out of the place we were living by the end of August. We had been entertaining a pipe dream of moving to Rome for me to work on a graduate degree in theology at the Pontifical University of St Thomas Aquinas in Rome, but after the complications with Krista's blood clot, we decided it was no longer feasible.
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| Elijah was growing up fast! (No, the thing his finger is in is not an electrical socket.) |
I thought it would be wise for me to continue my education, and given her medical condition I thought it would be good to be near Krista's family. Krista's mother lived in a suburb of the Twin Cities in Minnesota, so I applied to the MA of Theology program at the St Paul Seminary School of Divinity in St Paul, MN. Thankfully, I got in to start right away that fall, along with a very helpful scholarship to help cover tuition. But how would we support ourselves financially? It wasn't immediately clear, so we started praying that God would provide.
The school offered classes in the evenings, so I would be available to work during the day. I had a degree in philosophy from an evangelical college; my job experience included work in my college's alumni giving department, work as a teaching assistant in the philosophy department, a paid summer internship for two summers at the baptist church I attended back in Oregon while I was still an evangelical, a summer working in a True Value distribution center, and, most recently, work as a summer nanny; and I had just joined the Catholic Church a few months ago. It wasn't immediately clear to me for what kind of work I was qualified that could support a family.
Since I had largely read my way into the Catholic Church, I thought I could maybe work for a parish. I knew I understood the faith well; I also knew getting a parish to hire me would probably be a long-shot. But I didn't have many other leads, so a month before we were moving up to Minnesota, I applied for several faith formation jobs throughout the Archdiocese of St Paul/Minneapolis.
All but one emailed me back right away saying I wasn't qualified enough for consideration, so I didn't get my hopes up for the one I hadn't heard from yet. But a few weeks later, they contacted me and said they wanted an interview. I was still in Illinois, so I did it over the phone while sitting in our car in the summer heat after getting off my nanny job for the day.
I thought the interview went well, but I was still surprised when the priest contacted me again and said he wanted to meet with me in person as soon as I got up to Minnesota. I scheduled the meeting for the first day after we'd be arriving at Krista's mother's house (she had graciously allowed us to land there until we found a place to live). Our meeting went well and ended with the priest offering me the job.
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| Outside our house in Buffalo, MN last summer soon after Adelaide was born |
Krista ended up being on the warfarin for about a year, during which we abstained. I'm sure there are many married couples out there who for one reason or another have to abstain for extended periods of time (a good thing for young engaged couples to remember).
Did we desire each other? Of course. Was it really that hard? For the most part, no. Life went on: going to work, taking care of our son, learning about how to be parents. We didn't feel any less married. Our relationship did not suffer in any way whatsoever. If anything, our relationship was strengthened in our mutual respect for each other.
After a year of being on the warfarin, Krista's period had returned and we were excited to try for baby number two. She switched to injections that were self-administered once a day (later increased to twice a day) - a task Krista took on with grace. We didn't want her to be doing the injections for nothing, and little time was lost: we were blessed to conceive our second child two months later.
Krista was blessed to have a gestational-diabetes-and-blood-clot-free pregnancy, and, in March of last year, our daughter Adelaide Esther Millegan was born.
Keep Reading: Part 6: No Regrets
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This is Part 5 of a six-part series:
Part 1: Asking the Question
Part 2: Flipping the Switch
Part 3: No Longer Afraid
Part 4: Hey Baby
Part 5: Tested Twice
Part 6: No Regrets
Post Script
Resources:
- Humanae Vitae
- Marriage: Love and Life in the Divine Plan
- Children of the Reformation: A Short and Surprising History of Protestantism and Contraception
- Sanger's Victory: How Planned Parenthood’s Founder Played the Christians—and Won
- Birth control is moral (but not all methods)
- Organic Sex, Organic Farming
- The Vindication of Humanae Vitae
- Adam and Eve After the Pill: Paradoxes of the Sexual Revolution
- iUseNFP.com
- Find an NFP class
Thursday, June 6, 2013
Why We're Contraception-Free, Part 4: Hey Baby
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| Newly weds! |
We had decided to risk it with an outdoor wedding, and sure enough, just after the processional, we felt a few drops. But my high school youth pastor from Oregon who was presiding over our wedding kept going, and the drops stopped.
We finished the ceremony and all our photos without rain, but the moment I shut the car door to drive over to the reception site, the clouds burst. Luckily, the reception had always been planned to be inside. It stormed with high winds, thunder, and lightening the rest of the evening.
The time had come to live out our new found convictions. We honestly had no fear, no reservations, we didn't find ourselves second-guessing anything; instead, we were thrilled. We thoroughly enjoyed our short honeymoon in a cabin on a small lake in Wisconsin and were excited at the prospect of conceiving a child. We took the prospect seriously enough that we didn't share any wine during our honeymoon.
So we were actually disappointed when Krista had a period a week later. We knew it could take healthy couples a few months or even years to conceive a child, and we figured we probably hadn't had a real shot at conceiving a child anyway given the timing of everything. Nonetheless, as ridiculous as it might sound to any couple that has had real struggles with infertility, we were genuinely disappointed: our love had not borne fruit as we wished it would and as it was naturally ordered to do.
A month later, we figured we had had a fair shot and so were anxiously awaiting the first day we would be able to do a pregnancy test. That day happened to be a Sunday morning. When Krista returned with the completed test, she noted that the instructions said the test could take a few minutes to return a result, but that her's had returned a result immediately: it was very clearly positive.
We wanted to celebrate, but we also didn't want to get our hopes up too fast: the instructions said that the accuracy was lower when done that early in a possible pregnancy. But we didn't have too much time to think about it since we needed to be at church soon.
Krista did another test that afternoon and it was, again, clearly positive right away. We figured that probably confirmed it: Krista was pregnant! We embraced, said a prayer of thanks, and started calling our family. All of our parents and siblings were excited and congratulated us.
We were advised not to make a bigger announcement until Krista was passed the first trimester (due to the higher possibility of miscarriage), which we heeded. We also got Krista in to see a doctor, and they put the due date at May 31st. So unless he or she was born pre-maturely, the baby would be born after graduation (May 9th).
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| The Visitation |
A friend had told us that lots of people would want to give us gifts and help us out once word had gotten out that we had conceived. That was certainly true for us. We didn't have to go looking for it; people came to us wanting to help. Gifts poured in from members of our immediate family, extended family, friends, acquaintances, and people from the parish. It's always hard to judge people's motives, but I think it was probably a combination of general new-baby excitement mixed with the fact that people saw we were young and poor students. Whatever the reasons, we were over-abundantly blessed and were left with very little to get on our own.
Being married and expecting a child during our Senior year of college, we were blessed with some unique experiences. One professor mentioned he had heard about our news and shared with me how he and his wife had put off having children, only to find that by the time they wanted to start trying his wife had developed a disorder that made her infertile. He looked me in the eye very seriously and told me he thought what we were doing was very good.
We also quickly saw how much being married changed our social standing, particularly with professors. The fact we were married and expecting a child seemed to put us on a more even playing field. We befriended several professors and their spouses and regularly got together as couples. One professor admitted he forgot we were his students and just thought of us as his young married friends.
It also affected some of our friendships. Part of it was it seemed that, being married and expecting a child, we weren't as interested in doing the same things as we were before and that our peers were still doing. Combined with the fact that we were in the process of becoming Catholic, some friends became distant while we also gained new ones.
Krista was blessed to have a relatively stress-free pregnancy. No major 'morning sickness', though she was diagnosed with mild, diet-controlled gestational diabetes. The pregnancy didn't interfere much with her school work or campus job.
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| Krista never did 'show' that much |
On the day we talked about contraception, the second professor started by saying, "So it's clear where the tradition stands on contraception. But I think it's ok." When the few Catholic students in the class and I asked her why, she said, "I don't have a theological reason why, I just don't think there's anything wrong with it from my experience." She said she was concerned that the Pill was sometimes abortifacient and so was against its use, but she recommended the use of barrier methods. She said she thought sex did have the dual purpose of unity of the couple and the procreation of children, but that the procreative aspect didn't have to be present every time. I pointed out that any barrier method would be putting a physical separation between the spouses and thus disrupting the unitive aspect as well (it's called the "barrier" method after all). Since throughout the course she had repeatedly said that we needed to take our human physicality seriously in our theology, I thought this would be a particularly effective argument for her. But I was disappointed: "Yeah, but it's not very much. There's still lots of touching," was her response. So the unitive aspect of sex is expressed in mere touching, not in a full, physical gift of self?
The class on the media effects on the idea of womanhood was attended only by a small group of female students hand-picked by the professor, including Krista, and then myself as the only male student (the professor said he included me since I was married and could have a useful perspective). Contraception was the topic of one of the meetings. After going through the history of Protestant views on contraception and rehearsing the natural law argument, one worry on which all the female students (besides Krista) agreed was that, even if they wanted to not use contraception, they didn't think they could find a man who was also willing to not use contraception. In other words, they felt pressure to use contraception because they were worried they would be making themselves virtually unmarriageable if they didn't. (One of the women from the class later emailed Krista and I and said she was now engaged and she and her fiance had decided not to use contraception.)
Krista and I had been attending Rite of Christian Initiation for Adults (RCIA) classes since the fall and by the spring we were ready to join the Catholic Church, which we did with four other Wheaton College students at the Easter Vigil Mass on April 3rd.
A month later, finals week and graduation came and went without any major baby developments. I started work as a summer nanny watching two boys (a temporary summer job until August when we were planning on moving), and Krista stayed home to finish the final preparations for the child.
One evening a few weeks later, we had a friend over. In the middle of conversation, Krista all of a sudden started laughing without an obvious reason. When she caught her breath, she said she had felt a thump and that she thought her water had broken, seeing as there was now a good amount of clear liquid where she was sitting.
We didn't have the car seat in the car yet or even a bag of clothes packed. Since Krista wasn't feeling any labor yet, she went upstairs to pack a bag, while the friend and I started getting the car seat out of its box. It was dark and raining and neither of us had experience with car seats, so it took us a while. By the time we got back inside, I could hear Krista upstairs. I ran up to find her in intense labor.
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| Newly born Elijah Francis Millegan |
Though we lived just 5 minutes away from a hospital, Krista was to set to deliver at a hospital about 45 minutes away so she could use a certain midwife group that a few professors had recommended. We were comfortable using a hospital so far away because we were expecting the labor to progress slowly and take a long time. Krista's labor, however, was moving along fast; on our way there, she was already feeling like she needed to push.
I dropped her off at the emergency room door with a nurse and parked the car. When I got back inside, they said they had already taken her up to delivery. When I finally met back up with her, they said she was at 9 cm, and she started pushing. Krista had been planning on trying to deliver pain medication-free, but it wouldn't have mattered anyway. Just 45 minutes after getting in the room, our beautiful baby was born.
As he was born, the nurse exclaimed, "It's a boy! And he has his mother's chin!" She was talking about their dimple chins. Born at 3:05am on Friday, May 21st of 2010, he weighed 7 lbs 15 oz and was 19 in tall. And in honor of the great prophet Elijah and the great 13th century monk St Francis of Assisi, we named him Elijah Francis Millegan.
Keep Reading: Part 5: Tested Twice
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This is Part 4 of a six-part series:
Part 1: Asking the Question
Part 2: Flipping the Switch
Part 3: No Longer Afraid
Part 4: Hey Baby
Part 5: Tested Twice
Part 6: No Regrets
Post Script
Resources:
- Humanae Vitae
- Marriage: Love and Life in the Divine Plan
- Children of the Reformation: A Short and Surprising History of Protestantism and Contraception
- Sanger's Victory: How Planned Parenthood’s Founder Played the Christians—and Won
- Birth control is moral (but not all methods)
- Organic Sex, Organic Farming
- The Vindication of Humanae Vitae
- Adam and Eve After the Pill: Paradoxes of the Sexual Revolution
- iUseNFP.com
- Find an NFP class
Sunday, June 2, 2013
Why We're Contraception-Free, Part 3: No Longer Afraid
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| Ready to head out for a date (did not intend to match; and yes, Krista did continue to date me even though my shirt was not ironed) |
When we first concluded that the use of contraception was immoral, Krista and I were not immediately aware of anyone else who believed likewise, much less anyone who lived accordingly. Granted, contraception habits hadn't exactly been a common conversation topic among the few married couples we knew. But was anyone else out there thinking the way we were?
I was acquainted with a communications professor who I knew had seven kids (eight kids now) and was known for giving good marriage counseling with his wife. They were at least open to a big family, so they seemed like a good place to start. Since Krista was still in France, I headed over to their house for dinner by myself to start getting advice.
I learned they had also married and conceived their first child while still in college. But the child was an accident: she was conceived when they were in the process of changing contraceptive methods. Though surprised, they were still very excited and welcomed the news. They both finished their undergraduate degrees, and the woman received her diploma in one hand while holding her baby daughter in the other.
They continued to use contraception, and their contraception continued to fail (a real possibility that's important for couples who contracept to remember). After having five kids, the wife came across some literature explaining the Catholic view of sexuality and it resonated with her deeply. After she began to feel that using contraception went against her conscience, the man did more research and was eventually convinced as well. Though they were attending an Anglican church (pastored by someone who also accepted the Catholic view of sexuality) and had no desire to join the Catholic Church, they both explicitly championed Pope Paul VI's Humanae Vitae and Pope Bl John Paul II's Theology of the Body.
Krista visited Wheaton from France during her Spring break, and we got to meet with them together. Aside from the fact that both were smart and articulate - and that they were successfully living out what most people today assume to be oppressive, stupid, or, at best, impractical - what struck us the most was the nature of their home: it was such a positive place to be. Their house was full of people instead of just things (they did not have much), which was so refreshing. It's difficult to describe. It felt so radical - and yet eminently human.
They were open to us not only about their joys but also their difficulties, and wanted to ensure that we really understood what we were getting ourselves into. We became good friends and they were, and have remained, inspiring role models for us.
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| Available online for free or on Amazon for $3.95 |
The traditional Christian ideas about marriage, sexuality, and the human person had excluded contraception. So the acceptance of contraception necessarily required, even implicitly, a drastic change in people's thinking about marriage, sexuality, and the human person to accommodate it. The result is often called the contraceptive mentality.
The contraceptive mentality views procreation as separate from sex (sex doesn't make babies, unprotected sex makes babies) and thus also from marriage. In contrast, the Catholic view understands marriage, as a natural institution and with sex as its expression, to be inherently ordered to procreation. Procreation, instead of being something that a couple might add on to their marriage, is one of the reasons we have marriage at all in the first place. (The word 'matrimony' literally means something like 'mother maker'.)
The Catholic Church does not hold that a couple is required to have as many children as physically possible, but instead that couples can indeed have just reasons for limiting their number or timing of children. Nonetheless, the Church does teach: "Sacred Scripture and the Church’s traditional practice see in large families a sign of God’s blessing and the parents’ generosity." (CCC 2373) Since children are a good thing that flow naturally from marriage, large families are a good thing if possible. A large family is a privilege, not a curse (see Psalm 127.3-5). The contraceptive mentality, on the other hand, tends to view children as a burden to be avoided, an annoying possible side effect of sex that disrupts one's life, and encourages even couples with great means to intentionally restrict their families to 1 or 2 children, or even intentionally to have no children at all.
Some charge that natural family planning also engenders the contraceptive mentality since it is used to avoid children. The opposite is true: natural family planning maintains the connection between sex and procreation since the couple, if they wish to avoid a child, abstains from the procreative act. The connection is respected. Contraception, in contrast, disregards the connection and works against the human body to frustrate the natural purposes of the act.
I also quickly made the connection between contraception and other sexual perversions, such as masturbation, oral sex, anal sex, or homosexual acts. The traditional argument against contraception had been the same argument used against those acts. The theological/philosophical changes necessary to accept contraception thus also necessarily accepted those acts as well, even if only implicitly. Sure enough, not only have Protestants accepted contraception in contradiction to the historic Christian teaching, many have also quietly (or not so quietly) accepted the practices of masturbation, oral sex, and anal sex - practices that also had been previously universally condemned among Christians. Thus, it is no surprise that many are beginning to accept homosexual acts as well, since Protestants gave up the argument against it years ago when they accepted contraception.
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| Blanchard Hall, home of Wheaton College's Philosophy department (yes, we were located in an ivory tower) |
As we realized that Humanae Vitae wasn't ultimately just about contraception but was an entirely different way of approaching the world, and that, as such, we were going to be swimming upstream against major cultural forces, it became clear that finding as many role models as possible was going to be immensely helpful. So I continued to seek out like-minded people.
There was another professor, this one from the Bible department, who I came to hear was against the use of contraception. He and his wife had come to the conviction that the use of contraception was immoral in the last few years via Catholic moral arguments. They also became our friends and a helpful support.
I found additional support from a philosophy professor (I was a philosophy major) who was Episcopalian. She said she found the Catholic Church's arguments against contraception based on the teleology of the human body very persuasive.
I also got some push-back. When I started to explain the history of Christian thinking on contraception to a philosophy professor who specialized in ethics, he quietly pulled a big book off his shelf and started reading aloud. It was the article on birth control from the New Dictionary of Christian Ethics and Pastoral Theology and it was recounting the same history I was telling him. He looked up and informed me he had written the article.
He acknowledged the historical arguments for the Christian sexual ethic which excluded contraception and acknowledged that without the traditional arguments he wasn't aware of a good argument against homosexual acts (even though he still wanted to hold that they were immoral). Nonetheless, he said he supported the use of contraception because he thought it was necessary for women's progress, and he supported women's progress. I also support women's progress, but, as with anything, only as it is achieved through moral means. Needless to say, I found his utilitarianism unconvincing.
A few evangelical theology professors with whom I spoke said they agreed that marriage, with sex as its expression, had the dual purpose of uniting the couple and procreating children. But they disputed that every sex act had to be open to both as long as a couple was in general open to children. One even argued that a couple's fruitful service in their community could replace the procreative fruitfulness intentionally frustrated by using contraception. This made no sense to me. First off, as I explained in Part 1, it's not possible to disrupt the procreative aspect without also disrupting the unitive aspect since they are two aspects of the same act. Second, would it ever be morally acceptable to embrace the procreative aspect of sex but reject the unitive aspect? Of course not. Third, one's "sex life" is not an item; each sex act is its own act. Which is why, fourth, doing one sex act correctly doesn't make up for doing another sex act wrongly. Obviously, I wasn't convinced by them either.
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| My family when I was a baby, with my parents Lloyd and Karen, and four of my siblings (from left) Colleen, Lisa, Eric, and Jeffrey (my younger brother Patrick wasn't born yet) |
When I talked to my parents about it I learned that, though my parents were protestant and were never taught to have any reservations about contraception, my mother's conscience had told her early on in her marriage that using contraception wasn't right. My mother had tried the Pill for the first six months of their marriage but from then on felt compelled to be open to as many children as God gave her, and that happened to be six (I was number five). She has since told me, "I felt it was wrong to waste the Millegan seed." And my dad has said, "We never really talked about it. I just left it up to her. She would just let me know when another child was coming." So neither thought that contraception was necessary. Both wanted to be sure that we understood the practicalities of raising a child, but they were confident we could figure it out and were excited we were open to giving them another grandchild soon.
As for myself and Krista, though we were set on not using contraception, we still weren't sure if we wanted to be open to conceiving a child right away. Having found other couples who were successfully living the life had been encouraging. Still, being in college with no firm idea of exactly how we'd support ourselves after graduation seemed to be a legitimate reason to intentionally avoid conception through natural family planning. But did we really want to abstain for the first bit of our marriage? It was an option, even if not an attractive option to a couple excited to be getting married.
I reconsidered the timeline I had worked out previously. Our wedding was now scheduled for August 15th. If we conceived right away, nine months later was May 15th, though an online due date calculator put the due date more exactly at May 8th. Graduation was May 9th. It was close, but it was far from being a sure bet that Krista would be going into labor while taking a final. And besides, if there was ever a good excuse for postponing a test, imminent childbirth was one of them. We also had to remind ourselves that it was very possible that we would not conceive right away. We could even be infertile - you don't know until you actually try and a child is never a given.
What about the pregnancy itself? Would it make it hard for Krista to do her school work even if the baby was born after graduation? We figured out that Krista could take a lighter course load in the Spring and still finish her degree on time. Combined with the fact that her mother's pregnancies had not been unusually difficult, Krista wasn't too worried.
Another question was how I would support Krista and the child. I would be just finishing my own undergraduate degree - and I was majoring in philosophy. It was hard to plan so far out how we'd get by, but I figured that we would need to have a way to live anyway. And though it wasn't something either of us wanted to do, we both knew we would always be welcome to stay with any of our parents as a last resort.
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| Me and Krista enjoying croissants in downtown Aix-en-Provence, France, where she was studying |
Even with the planning we had done, we knew we couldn't anticipate everything. Did we really know how we'd manage everything? No. But does a couple ever really know? Obviously, raising a child is a big job. But we weren't facing it alone: we were in it together and had the sure support of our families.
We started to feel that we wanted our love to go beyond us to create a new human life. And, by golly, we'd be married - so why not? Together, we decided we wouldn't try to prevent anything and instead just be open to receiving whomever came our way.
After making that decision, it was as though a huge burden had been lifted from our shoulders. We both felt we were finally allowed to let our marriage do what we naturally wanted our marriage to do: be fruitful. We didn't have to be bothered with trying to control anything or be worried about what would happen if it failed. We could just enjoy ourselves and look forward to the prospect of receiving the supreme gift of marriage: another person.
Our wedding date took on a whole new layer of excitement and anticipation. It was not just the date of when we would be getting married; it was the date we would begin trying to start a family. It all seemed so wonderful! We couldn't believe we had ever wanted to do anything different. We were no longer afraid; we were pumped.
Keep reading: Part 4: Hey Baby
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This is Part 3 of a six-part series:
Part 1: Asking the Question
Part 2: Flipping the Switch
Part 3: No Longer Afraid
Part 4: Hey Baby
Part 5: Tested Twice
Part 6: No Regrets
Post Script
Resources:
- Humanae Vitae
- Marriage: Love and Life in the Divine Plan
- Children of the Reformation: A Short and Surprising History of Protestantism and Contraception
- Sanger's Victory: How Planned Parenthood’s Founder Played the Christians—and Won
- Birth control is moral (but not all methods)
- Organic Sex, Organic Farming
- The Vindication of Humanae Vitae
- Adam and Eve After the Pill: Paradoxes of the Sexual Revolution
- iUseNFP.com
- Find an NFP class
Thursday, May 30, 2013
Why We're Contraception-Free, Part 2: Flipping the Switch
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| Me and Krista the Christmas before we got engaged and married |
In my separate consideration of the Catholic Church's claims to authority, I had already accepted the basic premise that the historic Christian belief on a particular issue is much more likely to be the correct one than a view that appeared more recently (with an acknowledgement of legitimate development in our understanding). The Truth is what was revealed by Jesus 2000 years ago, not what we just made up in the last few years. Further, Jesus himself promised to be "with [us] always, to the very end of the age," (Mt 28.20); he said that, since He would build His Church on the rock, "the gates of Hades will not overcome it" (Mt 16.18); and he said he would send us the Holy Spirit, the “Spirit of Truth” (John 14.16-17, John 15.26, John 16.13). In other words, even for me as Protestant, the Christian tradition carried weight: it was hard for me to believe the Church could err on fundamental doctrines for extended periods of time if Christ's promises were to have any real meaning.
Early on in my research, I came across the claim that although virtually all Protestant denominations today hold that the use of contraception is morally permissible, all Protestants had been against the use of contraception until the mid-20th century.
My first thought about this claim was, Wasn't contraception a new thing in the 20th century? If contraception was new, then there couldn't be a traditional teaching and different Christian ideas would be on a level playing field in this regard. Wasn't the Catholic Church just ignorantly rejecting new scientific and technological breakthroughs as it had supposedly done in the past?
Unfortunately, I quickly discovered that various contraceptive techniques have been around for thousands of years. No, Americans in the 20th century weren't the first to try to have all the pleasure while suppressing the natural purposes of sex.
And regarding the history of Protestant teaching on contraception, I confirmed what I had heard: until the 20th century, all Protestant denominations had held that the use of contraception was gravely perverse and immoral.
In addition to the natural law argument (the premises of which are reflected in Scripture), I learned there was another key biblical argument against contraception. Both Catholics and Protestants traditionally interpreted the story of Onan in Genesis 38.8-10 as a condemnation of coitus interruptus and, by extension, all forms of contraception. Though many modern commentators try to argue that Onan was punished by God only for failing in his obligation to his brother and not also for sexual deviancy, here is what Martin Luther had to say about Onan:
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. ...at such a time the order of nature established by God in procreation should be followed. (Lectures on Genesis)
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| Atheist and racist eugenicist Margaret Sanger founded in the early 20th century what is now known as Planned Parenthood |
But things changed. Atheist Margaret Sanger, worried that poor people and minorities were having too many children and polluting the gene pool (she was a racist eugenicist) in addition to concerns about the role of women in society, founded in the early 20th century the American Birth Control League (later renamed Planned Parenthood). She campaigned for years against contraception laws, and, though all Christian denominations were officially opposed to contraception, she tried to win over Protestants by framing contraception as a "Catholic issue" - and succeeded. (Co-founders of NARAL Larry Lader and Bernard Nathanson successfully used the same tactic to legalize abortion in the late '60s and early '70s.)
G. K. Chesterton argued in the 1920s that another major driving force of the birth control movement was that wealthy business owners didn't want to have to pay their workers with big families a just wage: "The landlord or the employer says in his hearty and handsome fashion: ‘You really cannot expect me to deprive myself of my money. But I will make a sacrifice, I will deprive myself of your children.’"
The Anglican Church was the first to buckle. At its 1930 Lambeth Conference, the Anglican Church became the first denomination in the history of Christianity to approve the use of contraception under any circumstances at all. And even then, its accommodation was much stricter than virtually any current Protestant view:
- the limiting of children was permissible only when there was a "clearly felt moral obligation"
- when children should be limited, the "primary and obvious method is complete abstinence from intercourse (as far as may be necessary) in a life of discipline and self-control lived in the power of the Holy Spirit" (notice that abstinence is considered the "primary and obvious" go-to method)
- contraception may be used, but only when "there is a morally sound reason for avoiding complete abstinence" (what could that possibly be?)
- and "the use of any methods of conception control from motives of selfishness, luxury, or mere convenience" received a "strong condemnation".
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| Mahatma Gandhi opposed contraception |
The [sexual] union is meant not for pleasure, but for bringing forth progeny. And union is a crime when the desire for progeny is absent. It is wrong and immoral to seek to escape the consequences of one’s acts. [...] Nature is relentless and will have full revenge for any such violation of her laws. [...] Artificial methods [of birth control] are like putting premium upon vice. (Young India, 12-3-25, pp. 88-89)Gandhi anticipated Pope Paul VI’s concerns about the consequences of widespread acceptance of contraception:
I urge the advocates of artificial methods [of birth control] to consider the consequences. Any large use of the methods is likely to result in the dissolution of the marriage bond and in free love. (Young India, 2-4-25, pp. 118)Finally, I learned that Christians have been against contraception from the beginning. For example, Clement of Alexandria wrote in the second century:
Because of its divine institution for the propagation of man, the seed is not to be vainly ejaculated, nor is it to be damaged, nor is it to be wasted. [...] To have coitus other than to procreate children is to do injury to nature.And in the fourth century, Lactantius anticipated natural family planning:
[Some] complain of the scantiness of their means, and allege that they have not enough for bringing up more children, as though, in truth, their means were in [their] power . . . or God did not daily make the rich poor and the poor rich. Wherefore, if any one on any account of poverty shall be unable to bring up children, it is better to abstain from relations with his wife.Indeed, Humanae Vitae was not the narrow-minded reaction of a few old celibate men against progress; Humanae Vitae represented the sound, well-reasoned Christian thinking of two millennia. The Church hadn't changed; she was simply maintaining what Christians had always believed based on Scripture and reason. It was Protestants who had made up something new.
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| The Holy Spirit's descent on the Church on Pentecost |
I remember kneeling in prayer, deeply engaging my conscience, desperately trying to find a way to get it to say that using contraception was acceptable. Was there any way I could rationalize the use of contraception given what I now knew? There were moments, flickers, in which I was able to bury the voice of my conscience enough that it seemed like any concerns about the use of contraception were gone. But I knew such tactics would only work if I lied to myself that I wasn’t purposely burying it.
Discussing it again with Krista, it was obvious we both were convinced of contraception's immorality. Yet, I proposed that we use it for our marriage's first four months - just enough time to ensure that any child conceived would be born a few months after we were both done with school - and then never use it again. The proposal was of course completely illogical, and Krista called me on it: "Brantly, this makes no sense. Either it's ok for us to use, or it's not."
And I was forced to admit she was right. Krista's words penetrated the weak rationalizations I had built up in my mind and they all fell apart. In that moment, I relented and let my mind flip the switch to fully acknowledge and accept what my conscience had been quietly but persistently telling me for some time: the use of contraception is always immoral.
I let out a sigh of relief. It was as though all the pressure built up between the moral principle and the heavy practical concerns had dissipated. Not that my practical concerns were answered or solved - not at all. I still didn’t know if I’d want us to allow ourselves to be open to a child right away and, if we did, how we would possibly get by. But I no longer allowed the two forces to act against each other. Though we hadn’t solved any of our practical concerns, right there, Krista and I both agreed that any use of contraception was immoral and that therefore we would not be using it. Whatever the practical concerns were, we’d have to find a way to navigate them without contraception.
Keep Reading: Part 3: No Longer Afraid
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This is Part 2 of a six-part series:
Part 1: Asking the Question
Part 2: Flipping the Switch
Part 3: No Longer Afraid
Part 4: Hey Baby
Part 5: Tested Twice
Part 6: No Regrets
Post Script
Resources:
- Humanae Vitae
- Marriage: Love and Life in the Divine Plan
- Children of the Reformation: A Short and Surprising History of Protestantism and Contraception
- Sanger's Victory: How Planned Parenthood’s Founder Played the Christians—and Won
- Birth control is moral (but not all methods)
- Organic Sex, Organic Farming
- The Vindication of Humanae Vitae
- Adam and Eve After the Pill: Paradoxes of the Sexual Revolution
- iUseNFP.com
- Find an NFP class
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