As stated above, the purpose of sex is both unitive and procreative within the context of marriage.1 According to Catholic teaching, sex has to serve these two purposes, within marriage, to be lawful. This is why the Catholic Church opposes all forms of artificial contraception.2
We have to stop and think about what sex is for. It’s not always for making babies. That’s only half of the reason, but it is half! Obviously, God doesn’t expect a wife to become pregnant with every conjugal act, and God does allow natural means in which spouses can space their children and still enjoy the regular unitive half of lawful sex within marriage. Likewise, spouses who experience infertility due to advanced age, or some other reason, may still experience the unitive half of sexual relations, which is blessed by God both in natural law and Church law. This isn’t about circumstances beyond human control. This is specifically about human beings taking too much control.
The whole biological purpose of sex is procreation, and from a purely biological perspective in natural law, that is its sole function. The pleasure that human beings derive from the conjugal act is an additional blessing from God that helps spouses strengthen the intimacy of their relationship. In other words, it helps improve their lifelong bond with each other. That’s why humans experience it. It may be the only reason why humans experience it, purely as a blessing from God. Creatures of the animal kingdom are not so blessed. They procreate by instinct and, for them, it’s not usually a pleasurable experience. They only do it because instinct tells them they must.
God has created the female body with a cyclic regularity that allows fertile couples to time their conjugal acts with periodic continence, in a way the Church recognizes as lawful and responsible family planning. The Vatican made judgements on this in 1853, 1880 and 1932 through the Apostolic Penitentiary, a dicastry of the Roman Curia. The latter judgement, in 1932, came just after the publication of Casti Connubii in 1930, the papal encyclical of Pope Pius XI condemning artificial contraception. The teaching of Pius XI, against artificial contraception, was reaffirmed by Pope Paul VI’s 1968 encyclical Humanae Vitae. This encyclical specifically restates what the Church had already decided through the decisions of the Apostolic Penitentiary. “Neither the Church nor her doctrine is inconsistent when she considers it lawful for married people to take advantage of the infertile period…” (Pope Paul VI, Humanae Vitae, 16) This is again reaffirmed in the Catechism.3
Catholic married couples, who are fertile, are expected to use a process called “Natural Family Planning,” or NFP, if they wish to space their children and plan their family accordingly. Recent scientific and medical advances, which help spouses understand the thermo-symptomatic cycle of the female body, have made this method of spacing children highly reliable, even more reliable than most methods of artificial contraception. Scientific/medical advances, combined with modern technology, now make it possible for married couples to practice this effectively, and conveniently, producing reliable family planning without foreign devices or chemical hormones. All a married couple needs now is a thermometer, a smartphone, a little training and discipline. Truly, we are living in remarkable times.
What many of today’s Christians don’t understand is that all Christian denominations considered artificial contraception to be a grave sin, all the way up to 1930. All of the original Protestant Reformers condemned it, along with the founders of major Protestant denominations, including Martin Luther, John Calvin and John Wesley.4 It was the Anglicans who opened the door to artificial contraception in the 1930 Lambeth Conference. From there, the entire Protestant world caved in the decades that followed. Only the Catholic Church held the line, defending the ancient Christian teaching against it.
The Biblical prohibition against artificial contraception is in Genesis 38:8-10. This is backed by the early Church Fathers who likewise interpreted artificial contraception as a grave sin.5 The problem here is that artificial contraception, meaning an unnatural method of preventing pregnancy, completely closes off the procreative half of the conjugal act, reducing sex to mere entertainment for pleasure’s sake, otherwise known as lust. Unlike NFP, fertile spouses no longer remain open to the creation of life at all. They are attempting to have sex, while cutting out all possible means of creating children, when God has clearly given them those natural means through their fertility. The problem that results is this. What happens when contraception fails? All too often, couples will turn to abortion, because with contraception, they were never open to the possibility of new life to begin with.
Ultimately, this is about playing God to indulge in sexual pleasure. God has already given fertile spouses everything they need to plan their family reasonably. In failing to trust God, however, and the natural processes he created, the married couple has taken matters into their own hands, in a very unnatural, artificial, harmful and sinful way.
- Catechism of the Catholic Church, paragraph 2351
- Catechism of the Catholic Church, paragraphs 2370 & 2399
- Catechism of the Catholic Church, paragraph 2368
- As quoted by Charles D. Provan, The Bible and Birth Control, 1989
- Clement of Alexandria, The Instructor of Children 2:10:91:2, AD 195; Hippolytus of Rome, Refutation of All Heresies 9:12, AD 255; Lactantius, Divine Institutes 6:20, AD 307; St Augustine of Hippo, Marriage and Concupiscence 1:15:17, AD 419
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