Protestant views on contraception

Protestant views on contraception are markedly more pluralistic than the doctrine expressed by the Magisterium of the Catholic Church, due to historical divergences of theological thought that began during the Protestant Reformation, including the rejection of an infallible doctrinal authority other than Scripture. The doctrine of various forms of Protestantism as a whole from the Reformation until 1930 strongly condemned contraception as the Catholic Church does, but such opposition has since almost totally been dropped. Since the 1930 Seventh Lambeth Conference of the Anglican Communion, major mainline Protestant denominations shifted their doctrine to accepting contraception. In general, most liberal Protestants, such as the United Church of Christ, hold relatively settled views that accept the use of contraception, while conservative evangelicals denominations mostly also accept the use of contraception; however, some evangelicals are divided on the issue, with a small minority of denominations seeing natural family planning as the only permissible method. Other traditions such as Laestadian Lutheran Churches, do not permit the use of birth control and may teach Quiverfull doctrine, which holds that Christians should have large families.

The Church of England has stated in the 1958 Lambeth Conference that the responsibility for deciding upon the number and frequency of children was laid by God upon the consciences of parents 'in such ways as are acceptable to husband and wife'.

The Evangelical Lutheran Church in America allows for contraception in the event the potential parents do not intend to care for a child. Other Lutheran churches or synods take other positions, or do not take any position at all. For example, in 1990 the Lutheran Churches of the Reformation passed a resolution titled "Procreation" stating that birth control, in all forms, is sin, although they "allow for exegetical differences and exceptional cases (casuistry)", for example, when the woman's life is at risk. Laestadian Lutheran Churches do not permit the use of birth control. Neither the Lutheran Church–Missouri Synod (LCMS) nor the Wisconsin Evangelical Lutheran Synod (WELS) have an official position on contraception. Christian News, a weekly paper edited by a pastor of an LCMS congregation, opposes contraception.

The United Methodist Church, holds that "each couple has the right and the duty prayerfully and responsibly to control conception according to their circumstances." Its Resolution on Responsible Parenthood states that in order to "support the sacred dimensions of personhood, all possible efforts should be made by parents and the community to ensure that each child enters the world with a healthy body, and is born into an environment conducive to realization of his or her potential." To this end, the United Methodist Church supports "adequate public funding and increased participation in family planning services by public and private agencies."

The Methodist Church of Great Britain also supports responsible use of birth control, welcoming its use as a means "towards fulfilment in marriage, the spacing of children, and the need to avoid pregnancy altogether, for example for medical reasons."

The Presbyterian Church (USA) supports “full and equal access to contraceptive methods.” In a recent resolution endorsing insurance coverage for contraceptives, the church affirmed that “contraceptive services are part of basic health care” and cautioned that “unintended pregnancies lead to higher rates of infant mortality, low birth weight, and maternal morbidity, and threaten the economic viability of families.”

The United Church of Christ (UCC), a Reformed denomination of the Congregationalist tradition, promotes the distribution of condoms in churches and faith-based educational settings. Michael Shuenemeyer, a UCC minister, has stated that “The practice of safer sex is a matter of life and death. People of faith make condoms available because we have chosen life so that we and our children may live.”

Certain Conservative Mennonites, as with certain Beachy Amish Mennonite fellowships, maintain a prohibition against the use of birth control, though natural family planning is permitted. Old Colony Mennonites, as with the Old Order Amish, do not officially allow birth control practices.

Mainline Mennonite denominations, such as the Mennonite Church USA, the General Conference Mennonite Church, and the Rosedale Network of Churches, have adopted statements indicating the approval of modern methods of contraception. For example, while also teaching and encouraging love and acceptance of children, the Conservative Mennonite Conference maintains, "The prevention of pregnancy when feasible by birth control with pre-fertilization methods is acceptable." A study published in 1975 found that only 11% of Mennonites believed use of birth control was "always wrong".

All types of birth control, and also all forms of natural family planning such as calendar-based methods, are forbidden in Old-Order Amish communities. However, especially in recent years, more Amish women have begun using contraception. This trend is more pronounced in communities where few of the men earn their living through farming.

The Hutterite Brethren use contraception only if it is recommended by a physician.

The New Apostolic Church, the largest of the Irvingian Churches, teaches:

Before the Protestant Reformation, the Roman Catholic Church viewed procreation as the primary purpose of sexual intercourse and unity of spouses. As part of the Reformation, Reformers began to more strongly emphasize the unitive pleasures of marriage. Still, all major early Protestant Reformers, and indeed Protestants in general until the twentieth century, condemned birth control as a contravention of God's procreative purpose for marriage.

As scientists advanced birth control methods during the late 19th and early 20th centuries, some Protestants continued to reject them, while other Nonconformists welcomed these advances. (Moncure Conway preached on the subject at South Place Chapel in London.) As an example of the dissent, the editor of a Nonconformist weekly journal in the United States wrote in 1893:

Non-Catholic denominations were slow to officially go along with such a view, although followers were not as reluctant.

Then in 1930, at the Seventh Lambeth Conference, the Anglican Communion, after years of considerable internal debate, issued the first statement permitting birth control "when there is a clearly felt moral obligation to limit or avoid parenthood and where there is a morally sound reason for avoiding complete abstinence."

Allan Carlson recounts how this affected the other Protestants:

There was an immediate American Protestant echo. In 1931, the Committee on Home and Marriage of the Federal Council of Churches (an ecumenical body that embraced Methodist, Presbyterian, Congregational, and Church of the Brethren denominations) issued a statement defending family limitation and urging the repeal of laws prohibiting contraceptive education and sales...In the late 1940s, a leading LCMS [Lutheran Church-Missouri Synod ] professor of theology, Alfred Rehwinckel, said that Luther had simply been wrong: the Genesis phrase, “Be fruitful and multiply,” was merely a blessing, not a command. Such views spread at a still more rapid pace among the Protestant “mainline” churches. Held near the end of the post World War II “baby boom,” when American family life for a brief period again seemed somewhat healthy, the 1961 North American Conference on Church and Family of the National Council of Churches (successor to the FCC) can only be called extraordinary....Not a single speaker spoke in the spirit of the old Protestant pronatalist ethic. Indeed, this ethic now stood as the chief enemy. The conference endorsed development of a new evangelical sexual ethic, one “relevant to our culture,” sensitive to the overpopulation crisis, and grounded in modern science. Member denominations soon complied. In a 1970 Report, the Presbyterian Church (U.S.A.) rejected the old “taboos and prohibitions” and gave its blessing to “mass contraceptive techniques,” homosexuality, and low-cost abortion on demand. The same year, the Lutheran Church in America fully embraced contraception and abortion as responsible choices. And in 1977, the United Church of Christ celebrated the terms “freedom,” “sensuousness,” and “androgyny,” and declared free access to contraception and abortion as matters of justice.

By 2005 acceptance had increased such that a Harris Interactive poll conducted online among 2,242 U.S. adults found that 88% of non-Catholic Christians who identified as either "very religious" or Evangelical supported the use of birth control/contraceptives.

Highly conservative Protestants such as Mary Pride, Charles D. Provan, Hess and Hess, and Rachel Scott, argue that Protestants should not have moved away from traditional Protestant views of contraception such as given by Martin Luther and John Calvin. Such modern authors contrast the views of early Reformers who rejected contraception with modern Christians who accept it, and point to primarily feminist, secular, or Satanic influences as causative to the change.

Provan in his The Bible and Birth Control extensively quotes early Protestant views of birth control, which Provan uses to conclude:

Reformed scholars such as James B. Jordan, however, maintain that Provan's view has the effect of adding a law to the Bible it does not contain. Jordan states:

Jordan argues also that the views of early Protestant Reformers on contraception are unreliable because they were heavily influenced by not just the Bible but Neo-Platonic mysticism (otherworldliness) and Aristolean teleologism (measuring all things only by their result), philosophies they inherited from their Catholic predecessors such as Thomas Aquinas and Augustine of Hippo. Bart Garrett describes it, "They operated in a time and context that unhealthily looked at sex as a base, physical pleasure that carried with it spiritual detriments."

Jordan further points to the Reformers' unreliability based upon their rejection of Song of Solomon as a description of passionate sexual expression within marriage. He also cites technophobia among Protestants, as evident by their rejection of things ranging from buttons to airplanes ("if God meant for man to fly he would have given him wings"). As well, Jordan points to what he describes as the Reformers' own mantra, "reformed and always reforming" (ecclesia reformata est semper reformanda), as evidence that Protestants should not crystallize their position on the matter at some point in the past, and says that rejecting contraceptives based upon their correlative rise alongside feminism exhibits the genetic fallacy.

There are numerous ongoing debates at core of Protestant differences concerning contraceptives. These include whether contraceptive use or non-use is a matter of individual conscience or binding Biblical commands, what types of birth control are permissible if any, and the amount of weight modern Protestants should give early Protestant Reformers' views on contraception.

The majority of Protestants, irrespective of denomination, maintain that use or non-use of birth control in its various methods is a matter of conscience for individual Christians before God, and that individual couples should be convinced in their own minds of what is and is not permissible for them particularly (see Romans 14). In this view, God has a personal relationship with individual Christians and, because he has given no explicit Biblical commandment against birth control and uses and has even caused and overseen modern technological advancements (see Daniel 12:4), he guides particular couples' birth control practices in accordance with his particular will for their lives. Conservative evangelical leader John F. MacArthur states the view:

R. Albert Mohler, Jr., the ninth president of the Southern Baptist Theological Seminary in Louisville, Kentucky states:

Additional adherents of this view include Rainey, James Dobson, Jordan, Mohler, and evangelical ethicists Franklin E. Payne and John and Paul Feinberg. Although most Protestants adhere to this view, some such as Rainey may nonetheless advocate for one of the categories he describes, depending upon which Christian values they deem most important.

Some Protestants, however, reject the position that contraceptive use is a matter of conscience. Although some Quiverfull adherents accept that birth control use is a matter of individual conscience, other such adherents may argue that the Bible commands their position for all Christians. For example, David Crank, publisher of Unless The Lord Magazine, states, "The 'Quiverfull' approach is universal in the sense that it is not something unusual that only a few are called to. Rather it is God's basic design and plan for mankind, and it was the way most of mankind lived most of the time, until the 20th century." Charles D. Provan additionally argues:

Quiverfull authors such as Hess and Hess disagree and say the matter is simply one of clear obedience or disobedience to God's words in the Bible:

To such statements, Protestants such as Jordan point out that Christians will, in fact, choose against the blessing of money and great wealth. Jordan also maintains that, while children are indeed blessings, they are only one among a wide range of blessings God offers, and prayerfully choosing foci among them is part of prudent Christian stewardship. John Piper's Desiring God ministry further explains:

Protestants, including Quiverfull adherents, also disagree over whether the Biblical statement "be fruitful and multiply" in Genesis 1:28 and 9:7 is a command or simply a blessing God spoke over its recipients. Mary Pride and Charles D. Provan see it as a binding command upon married Christians, while Dobson, MacArthur, Jordan, and Raymond C. Van Leeuwen do not see the statement as prohibiting family planning by contraceptive use.

As part of this debate, Protestants (as well as some Catholics) disagree over the Sin of Onan as found in the Bible verses of Genesis 38:1-10. Protestants within the "children in abundance" group (see discussion of below) often see Onan's act of coitus interruptus as condemning contraceptive use, while most see Onan's real sin as ongoing rebellion against God, with his failure to fulfill the terms of his Levirate marriage (Yibbum) being his final rebellious act.

Also see: Natural Family Planning, Barrier contraception and Hormonal contraception

Protestants who accept that birth control is permissible may disagree over which methods are impermissible.

In Sam and Bethany Torode's 2002 book, Open Embrace: A Protestant Couple Rethinks Contraception, the young couple argued that only Natural Family Planning was permissible, citing their views borrowed from Catholicism including the Theology of the Body. The couple later accepted barrier methods and stated:

John Piper's Desiring God ministry states of NFP:

In her book, Birth Control for Christians: Making Wise Choices, Jenell Williams Paris, who is associate professor of anthropology at Bethel College in St. Paul, reviews the benefits and uncertainties of various birth control methods, and decidedly favors the Fertility Awareness Method (FAM), which is similar to NFP but is different. (Paris is a FAM instructor.) The main difference is that FAM is not tied to Roman Catholic teaching. Regarding hormonal methods and abortion, Paris explains that both assertions that the hormonal methods are necessarily acting as abortifacients and the counter claim that they never do are impossible to substantiate from data, and that the probability of the hypothesized scenarios are so small such that the collection of data seems infeasible.

Based upon a view that life begins at conception, Protestant author Randy Alcorn rejects all forms of hormonal contraceptives, while James Dobson and obstetrician and minister William R. Cutrer reject only certain forms of them. Dobson and Cutrer view progesterone-only birth control pills as potentially problematic, since they may be potentially abortive contraceptives because of the theoretical possibility that they may have a slight secondary action of preventing a fertilized embryo from implanting within the uterine wall, while Alcorn implicates all hormonal contraceptives as problematic in these regards. Dobson's Focus on the Family states:

The American Association of Pro-Life Obstetricians & Gynecologists, however, argues that it is inappropriate to implicate certain hormonal contraceptives as abortifacient based upon theory only, and points out that no empirical evidence exists to prove any abortifacient action. The organization states:

Author and FamilyLife Today radio host Dennis Rainey suggests four categories as useful in understanding current Protestant views concerning birth control. Christopher G. Ellison and Patricia Goodson use very similar categories in their 1997 study of Protestant seminarians' attitudes on the matter.

The first is the "children in abundance" group. Protestants within this group believe that birth control is a contravention of God's purpose for marriage and that all children conceived during routine sexual intercourse (without regard to time of the month during the ovulation cycle or other matters) should be welcomed as blessings. The Quiverfull movement and its authors such as Mary Pride, Rick and Jan Hess, Charles D. Provan, Nancy Leigh DeMoss, Rachel Giove Scott, and others, predominate this group. Based upon Bible verses that describe God acting to "open and close the womb" (see Genesis 20:18, 29:31, 30:22; 1 Samuel 1:5-6; Isaiah 66:9), Quiverfull adherents believe that Divine Providence alone should control how many and how often children are conceived and born.

Protestants in this group often connect birth control use with modern feminism, an "anti-child mentality", "worldliness", and abortion because birth control is used for "the same reasons why a woman aborts her child".

The second is the "children in managed abundance" group. According to Rainey, Protestants within this group are open to however many children they may conceive during their fertile years yet believe that only Natural Family Planning is acceptable and may use it. A young couple Sam and Bethany Torode advocated for this view in their 2002 book, although they later accepted barrier contraception such as diaphragms and condoms. Denny Kenaston of Charity Christian Fellowship also advocates for this position, as does Presbyterian seminary professor Daniel Doriani.

The third is the "children in moderation" group. In Rainey's view, these Protestants are very pro-child but feel free to use artificial birth control to prudently plan their families. Those within this group see Divine Providence and Biblically required responsibility acting via man's free will as working complementarily. They thus may feel freedom to use non-"natural" birth control in making personal choices in consultation with God about the number and spacing of children.

The fourth group is the "no children" group. Rainey sees couples in this group as believing they are within their Biblical rights to define their lives around non-natal concerns. While not their main emphasis on the subject, Protestant authors such as Samuel Owen and James B. Jordan support this as an acceptable option, but only when a higher ethical principle intervenes to make child bearing imprudent in comparison, such as health concerns or a calling to serve orphans or as missionaries in a dangerous location, etc. A small activist group, the Cyber-Church of Jesus Christ Childfree, argues their position, "Jesus loved children but chose to never have any, so that he could devote his life to telling the Good News." Jordan also maintains that modern birth control methods, as well as Natural Family Planning, are acceptable tools of prudent family planning. Jordan also strongly supports the option for couples to have very large families, while Owen believes that non-use of birth control in any form should be normative. Rainey sees infertile couples as falling into this group apart from their choice in the matter. Sterilized couples may as well. According to Southern Baptist R. Albert Mohler, Jr., "Couples are not given the option of chosen childlessness in the biblical revelation".

Stemming from ideas from the Quiverfull movement, some Protestants such as Bill Gothard advocate for couples to undergo sterilization reversal surgery, while Brad and Dawn Irons of Blessed Arrows Sterilization Reversal Ministry advocate for Quiverfull ideas while providing funding, physician referrals, and support to Protestants wishing to undergo reversal surgery.

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