By JOHN F. KIPPLEY
(Editor’s Note: John F. Kippley is the author of Sex and the Marriage Covenant: A Basis for Morality and other books and articles. With his wife Sheila, he is a coauthor of Natural Family Planning: The Complete Approach and cofounder of NFP International.)
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Peggy Noonan recently wrote two articles in the weekend edition of The Wall Street Journal that look at World War I from the hindsight of 100 years. Her second focused on some of that war’s tragic consequences that still affect us today. She ignored, however, another war that started a bit earlier in 1914 but which had a horribly significant milestone that same August in which the big guns of Europe began their destruction.
In August 1914 Margaret Sanger was indicted on nine charges of violating a Comstock law against the promotion and distribution of contraception. She won the battles and her victories continue to have their effects.
In the 1920s, speculation about contraceptive marriage led self-styled progressives to promote “companionate marriage” as social progress. That is, marry, contracept, and divorce and remarry when you get bored; but if your contraception fails, stay married for the benefit of the child. In 1929, secular humanist Walter Lippmann noted that the revisionists were following the logic of birth control but not that of human nature.
In August 1930, the bishops of the Church of England accepted marital contraception, even while promoting total abstinence as the preferred option. This marked the first time in Christian history that an organized body calling itself Christian had accepted marital contraception. Pope Pius XI responded very strongly on the last day of 1930 with an encyclical condemning this action by the Anglican bishops, but in early 1931 the Federal Council of Churches in the USA accepted the Anglican path.
If you want a single event that marks the start of the Sexual Revolution, it was the Anglican acceptance of marital contraception in August 1930, even more so than Sanger’s efforts. Efforts at contraception go back to some three millennia before the time of Christ, but the Anglican bishops provided the first religious cover in the last 2,000 years.
Nature abhors a vacuum, so the rejection of biblical and natural law norms was replaced by a morality of mutual consent. The moral laws against adultery, fornication, and sodomy have been abandoned by the modernists. The only question they ask is whether the participants were old enough and the degree of consent.
The results are evident for everybody to see, but the powers-that-be want none of it. In early 1965, Daniel Patrick Moynihan pointed to out-of-wedlock birthrates among American black people as a cause of black family problems when the black rate was 24 percent and the white rate was 3 percent. President Johnson called a White House conference to discuss the matter, but Moynihan was not invited to participate. The “leaders” kept calling for more jobs and social services. Contraception and abortion were supposed to limit the social problems. With their promotion, the black rate is now over 70 percent and the white rate is about 24 percent, despite some 4,000 abortions per day.
All of this has led to a huge increase in fatherless families, increased welfare costs, increased murders, increased prison populations, and increased speculation about what to do. Not to be ignored are the health problems from hormonal birth control and sterilizations. The acceptance of the “logic of birth control” as contrasted with the “logic of human nature” is not only at the heart of the culture wars; it is also a primary factor in the social and economic woes of the United States. It is truly the elephant in the living room.
Life doesn’t have to be this way. We can follow the logic of human nature. The Anglican bishops in August 1930 proposed a false dichotomy for themselves — total abstinence or contraception. The basics of “calendar rhythm,” the first and primitive form of natural family planning, were published in early 1930, but the Anglican majority was either woefully ignorant or simply ignored the data. The majority also ignored the warnings of their conservative colleagues that the acceptance of contraception would lead to the acceptance of sodomy.
The basis for the biblical injunctions against fornication and non-marital sins is not rooted in the fear of pregnancy but in the meaning of sexual union. Pope St. John Paul II noted that the marriage act ought to be a renewal of the marriage covenant. This concept can help men and women alike, single and married, to understand the meaning of sexual intercourse. This idea can help them to see that sexual activity outside of marriage is essentially dishonest because it pretends to be what it cannot be.
Contemporary fertility awareness can well identify the fertile and infertile times of the female fertility cycle — typically about seven to ten days. It has also been demonstrated that the frequent nursing called Ecological Breastfeeding can postpone the return of fertility for about 14 to 15 months, on average.
What I am writing may be offensive and almost incomprehensible even to some Catholics who will label as “old wives’ tales” what I have written in the previous paragraph. It seems the exceptions get more talk than the scientifically observed outcomes. At any rate, the time has come not only to reject the errors of Sanger and her devotees, but also to live out the logic of human nature and to educate young and old about ecological breastfeeding and the crosschecking systems of fertility awareness.
My wife, Sheila, and I teach natural family planning. Much of what we learned was taught us by our chief medical adviser, Konald A. Prem, MD, who held a term as the head of the department of obstetrics and gynecology at the University of Minnesota Medical School. Sheila has researched and published on ecological breastfeeding, the kind of frequent breastfeeding that truly does space babies as indicated above. Interested parties can find our work at www.nfpandmore.org.
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