By BRIAN CLOWES
(Editor’s Note: Brian Clowes has been director of research and training at Human Life International since 1995. For an electronic copy of chapter 21 of The Facts of Life, “Contraception,” e-mail him at bclowes@hli.org.)
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“No matter how thin you slice it, ladies and gentlemen, family planning is a euphemism. We don’t intend or desire to prevent conception for conception’s sake; we want to prevent conception because of what follows conception. Family planning is the prevention of births, and as birth is the end of a sequence which begins with the sexual urge, then family planning is anti-conception, anti-nidation, and the termination of the conceptus if implanted. This is the societal role of abortion in the future” — Professor Irvin Cushner of the Johns Hopkins School of Medicine in 1971.
In 1986, Fr. Paul Marx, OSB, the founder of Human Life International, gave an excellent talk on contraception in my hometown of Portland, Ore. I met him afterward and explained that I still didn’t understand the connections between contraception and abortion. After all, isn’t contraception designed to reduce the incidence of abortion? For a moment, he stared at me as if I had suddenly sprouted a third eye in the middle of my forehead. Then he said, “Ve haff to talk.”
Half an hour later, I understood.
The pro-life movement is currently divided into two schools of thought on the link between contraception and abortion.
The first group either sees no connection between the two practices, or takes a “no official position” stance on contraception in order to avoid controversy or to focus attention solely on abortion. But more and more pro-life groups and individuals have seen their many connections and realize that, as long as contraception is widely available and the underlying anti-life mentality reigns, the practice of abortion will never end.
Regardless of what one thinks about the links between abortion and contraception, they should consider the following, and perhaps reflect on the relevance of contraception to their own lives.
Even committed Christians rarely discuss the moral aspects of contraception anymore. Mortal sin has become just another brightly packaged consumer item on the grocery store shelf. Despite this profound silence, it remains one of the major life issues of our time because it serves as the foundation of the practice of abortion. Wherever contraception leads, abortion always follows, whether for a married couple, a church denomination, or for an entire country.
At one time, the Protestant churches were united in opposing both contraception and abortion. After the Anglicans accepted contraception in limited cases during their 1930 Lambeth Conference, resistance to all of the anti-life practices unraveled with amazing speed. All but a few of the many Protestant denominations now accept or at least tolerate contraception, abortion, divorce, homosexuality, euthanasia, and pornography. Today, most of the churches that actively oppose abortion are those that have steadfastly defended the Christian tradition against birth control.
The Sequential Connection: In Western nations, pro-abortion groups work for school-based birth control clinics and comprehensive sex education programs that include training children in the use of contraceptives. Alan Guttmacher revealed one of the primary purposes of value-free sex education when he admitted: “The only avenue the International Planned Parenthood Federation and its allies could travel to win the battle for abortion on demand is through sex education.”
The pro-abortion/population control strategy in the Southern hemisphere is different. Population control groups spend billions of dollars annually in order to saturate developing nations with birth control. They know very well that contraception fails frequently, leading to an increasing demand for illegal abortion. Women begin to die from these illegal abortions, so the population controllers hugely exaggerate these numbers and then demand the legalization of abortion. This is a tried and tested formula that has worked successfully in more than 100 nations.
The ultimate objective of the population controllers is to legalize abortion worldwide. NSSM-200, written in 1974, has not been amended and thus continues to represent official United States population control policy. It says: “No country has reduced its population growth without resorting to abortion.”
Pro-abortionists, population controllers, “family planners,” and sex educators all over the world falsely claim as part of their propaganda campaigns that as contraceptive and abortifacient use increases, “unwanted pregnancies” and both illegal and legal abortions will decrease. At first glance, this allegation seems logical. After all, authentic (non-abortifacient) contraception is designed to stop conceptions and, if more conceptions are prevented, fewer abortions will occur.
As Fr. Marx explained to me long ago, however, this theory does not work in the real world, because the large-scale use of contraceptives and abortifacients leads to a tremendously increased rate of sexual activity, which, combined with method and user failures, leads to a huge increase in the number of “unplanned pregnancies.”
But science and history do not deter the “family planners,” who continue to claim that increased contraceptive use reduces the number of abortions. They know that this message will appeal to the large segment of the public that uncritically accepts their assertions.
It would seem to be counterintuitive that a wider use of contraception would lead to a great increase in the number of abortions, since the stated purpose of contraception is to prevent “unwanted” conceptions that lead to abortion.
However, there are two methods by which a greater general public use of contraceptives will lead to more, not fewer, abortions.
Both of the co-inventors of the birth control pill have confessed that a greater use of contraceptives has led to greater promiscuity and carelessness, which inevitably leads to more abortions. Dr. Robert Kirsner said: “For years I thought the pill would not lead to promiscuity, but I’ve changed my mind. I think it probably has.” And Dr. Min-Chueh Chang said: “[Young people] indulge in too much sexual activity. . . . I personally feel the pill has rather spoiled young people. It’s made them more permissive.”
Secondly, contraception is failure-prone, but people put so much confidence in it because it is advertised as being reliable. There are more than two million contraceptive failures in the United States annually, half of which end in abortion. In fact, more than half of all women currently obtaining abortions were using contraception when they got pregnant.
Up until the early 1980s, the most famous pro-abortion leaders admitted that an increase in contraceptive availability inevitably leads to an increase in promiscuity and therefore abortions. None other than America’s most famous “sexologist,” Alfred Kinsey, admitted: “At the risk of being repetitious, I would remind the group that we have found the highest frequency of induced abortion in the group which, in general, most frequently uses contraceptives.”
And the world’s most experienced abortion statistician, Christopher Tietze, said:
“A high correlation between abortion experience and contraceptive experience can be expected in populations to which both contraception and abortion are available. . . . Women who have practiced contraception are more likely to have had abortions than those who have not practiced contraception, and women who have had abortions are more likely to have been contraceptors than women without a history of abortion.”
Malcolm Potts, former medical director of the International Planned Parenthood Federation (IPPF), acknowledged the contraception-abortion link in 1981 when he said: “As people turn to contraception, there will be a rise, not a fall, in the abortion rate.”
Dr. Judith Bury of Canada’s Brook Advisory Centre confirmed Potts’ view when she said: “There is overwhelming evidence that, contrary to what you might expect, the provision of contraception leads to an increase in the abortion rate.”
People’s laziness about using contraception has naturally morphed into laziness regarding abortion.
Canadian sex educator David Robinson stated: “Today abortion is the most widely used birth control method in the world.”
No Distinction
Indeed, some gender feminists see no distinction whatever between contraception and abortion, seeing both as part of an unbroken continuum. Kristin Luker, in her revealingly entitled book Taking Chances: Abortion and the Decision Not to Contracept, wrote: “We would argue that since abortion has become a primary method of fertility control, it should be offered and subsidized in exactly the same way that other contraceptive services are.”
The thinking behind the use of contraception is quite straightforward. Once a couple starts using contraception, they make lifestyle changes and commitments that do not allow room for children. When contraception fails and they become pregnant, their “life plan” wins out over their preborn children.
Additionally, they have been conditioned to see their preborn child not as a gift from God, but as a “contraceptive failure” or a “mistake.” Since their contraceptive method has failed them, they feel cheated and therefore “entitled” to an abortion — using one method of medical technology to cover up for the failure of another.
The sequential link between contraception and abortion is not the only connection, however, as we will see in the next article.
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