NASHVILLE (BP) — When Evan Lenow raises the issue of contraception in his college and seminary ethics classes, it is the first time most students have considered that a married couple’s efforts to prevent pregnancy might be morally problematic.
“When we get to the more extreme forms of birth control like abortion, that’s not the question,” said Lenow, associate professor at Mississippi College and director of New Orleans Baptist Theological Seminary’s Clinton, Miss., extension. Students know taking unborn life is wrong. “It’s things like hormonal contraception. The students say, ‘I didn’t even think there was even an issue to be considered here.’”
Lenow is not alone in urging caution about birth control, even within marriage. Couples must not only consider whether their birth control methods may be destroying tiny human lives, evangelical ethicists say, they also must consider whether their efforts to prevent pregnancy contravene Scripture’s teaching that children are a blessing from God.
“Within Southern Baptist life, we are always going to have a diversity of opinion on this question,” Lenow said, “but what I want to prevent from happening is just a wholesale acceptance (of the notion) that everyone should use contraception until they feel like now is the right time to have the 2.1 children we’re going to have.”
It’s little wonder Lenow’s students have never questioned birth control. It is ubiquitous in the United States. According to the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, 99% of sexually active women in the nation have used birth control at some point. Around 65% of sexually active women report using at least one form of birth control in the last 12 months, according to data compiled by Statistica.
Birth control is not just a modern phenomenon. Barrier methods date back to 1000 B.C., and Aristotle wrote of spermicides more than 300 years before the time of Jesus.
Historically, Christians have opposed contraception. The Roman Catholic Church opposes all contraception except natural family planning, believing that sexual acts in marriage always should be open to procreation. Until 100 years ago, Protestants also typically opposed contraception.
Believers “mostly avoided contraception until recently, welcoming children as a gift from the Lord and realizing that widespread use of contraceptives would inevitably lead to promiscuity,” ethicist C. Ben Mitchell wrote in a 2022 article published by the Ethics & Religious Liberty Commission (ERLC).
Southern Baptist Convention (SBC) resolutions have addressed birth control on at least four occasions, opposing it on the first of those occasions. In 1934, the SBC “expresse(d) its disapproval of the Hastings Bill,” legislation to delete some restrictions on birth control from federal law.
Southern Baptist statements in more recent decades showed greater openness to contraception. Southern Baptists opposed distribution of contraception to minors without parental consent in 1977, 1980 and 1981, but none of those resolutions included a blanket warning against birth control.
The SBC’s confession of faith, The Baptist Faith and Message, does not address birth control explicitly. It states, “Children, from the moment of conception, are a blessing and heritage from the Lord” (Article 18). Other evangelical denominations tend to take similar stances.
What changed evangelicals’ view from opposition to openness? The answer is not clear, but Lenow would like to discuss the issue before accepting contraception as a fact of life. While every marital sexual act is not required to have childbearing among its goals, he said, couples must never view children as problems.
“I would caution against” saying “this is not convenient, or I don’t need the burden of another child,” Lenow, an ERLC research fellow, said. “That shifts our perspective away from Psalm 127 (and) children as a blessing from the Lord, and we begin to view children as burdens rather than blessings.”
He cautioned against “commodifying children” by estimating how much each child will cost over a lifetime and then weighing child rearing as one option alongside traveling more, buying nicer vehicles or having a bigger house. Additionally, couples should be leery of setting a “perfect number of children” and ruling out any additional children after achieving that number.
Still, there may be situations where having a child would be unwise, Lenow said. Such situations might include mental illness, severe financial strain or a major medical issue that needs to be resolved before a woman gets pregnant. In those situations, contraception may be warranted.
If a couple decides to use birth control, they should use forms with low potential of destroying a tiny human life inside its mother, said Jeff Barrows, an ob-gyn and former senior vice president at the Christian Medical and Dental Associations.
“Life begins at fertilization,” Barrows said, the moment the egg and sperm come together to generate a new human life. That means methods of contraception should prevent fertilization rather than preventing a fertilized egg from implanting in a woman’s uterus and developing.
Birth control methods with high potential to destroy unborn life include so-called emergency contraception and the intrauterine device (IUD), which have a greater likelihood of preventing a fertilized egg from implanting and developing, Barrows said.
Birth control methods with the lowest potential to destroy unborn life, Barrows said, include barrier methods as well as permanent forms of birth control like vasectomies for men and tubal ligations for women.
Lenow agrees that surgical forms of birth control do not destroy human life, but he urges caution when it comes to preventing bodies from functioning as God designed.
Perhaps the greatest debate among evangelicals centers on hormonal contraception. Those methods include hormone shots, implants under a woman’s skin that release hormones gradually and various forms of the birth control pill. Such methods aim to prevent the release of eggs from a woman’s ovaries, thin the lining of her uterus (which may hinder implantation of a fertilized egg) and prevent sperm from passing through the cervix.
“The embryocidal potential” of long-term hormonal contraception like shots and implants “is extremely low,” Barrows said. He also feels comfortable prescribing some forms of birth control pills. “One of the best evidences in my mind that (the pill) doesn’t have a high embryocidal capacity is the number of women who became pregnant on the pill,” he said.
Barrows cautioned, however, that “a few” types of birth control pills “probably are embryocidal.” If a couple wants a zero percent chance of destroying an embryo, he said, they should not use hormonal contraception.
Couples should navigate the challenging waters of contraception by finding a pro-life ob-gyn who will understand their desire not to harm tiny humans, Barrows said. Pastors should counsel couples that life begins at fertilization and urge them to avoid forms of contraception that “clearly will be destructive to the embryo.”
Saying with certainty whether a specific method of hormonal contraception destroys embryos can be difficult, Barrows said. “We don’t know for sure in a lot of these methods, and it’s very unethical to even study it. So what we have to do is use deduction” to estimate the results of various birth control methods.
Yet for Lenow, any discussion of birth control is not optimally helpful unless it is framed in light of the preciousness of children.
“Maybe we need to rethink how we have approached the question of contraception,” he said.
(EDITOR’S NOTE — David Roach is a writer in Mobile, Ala.)
