Religion: The Birth-Control Debate

Ever since San Francisco’s Protestant Episcopal Bishop James A. Pike had challenged Roman Catholic presidential aspirants to speak out on the question of governmental sponsorship of birth-control information for other countries (TIME, Dec. 7), every non-Catholic with a pulpit seemed eager to get a word in. And Bishop Pike himself returned to the fray.

An overflow crowd of worshipers last week watched the 46-year-old bishop enter San Francisco’s Grace Cathedral at the end of the procession, carrying his golden crosier and thoughtfully blinking his eyes behind his black-rimmed spectacles.

Minutes later, he was in the pulpit. “Responsible choice as to the number and spacing of children,” he said in his sermon, “is simply one of the many areas of life in which people are called upon to make conscientious decisions under God.” If a couple “ought to be having a child,” any method of birth control—including abstinence from intercourse—is sinful. But if they should not be having a child—for economic, psychological or physical reasons—they are under obligation to use the most effective methods to prevent it. “We are not permitted to use a chancy method, like the rhythm method, which some have called ‘Vatican roulette,’ when a more medically sound approach is available.”

Bachelor’s Theology? The National Council of the Protestant Episcopal Church, meeting in Milwaukee, also heard some strong words on the subject from Bishop Stephen F. Bayne Jr., of the diocese of Olympia, Wash., who will take up his new duties next month as executive officer of the worldwide Anglican Communion in London (TIME, May 4). Said he: Roman Catholic doctrine on birth control, i.e., that continence, either total or during fertile periods, is the only moral means of preventing conception, was “devised by bachelors on a faulty moral theology which glorifies the single state; it is not particularly observed within the Roman Catholic Church or outside it.”

The National Council went on to a thoroughgoing endorsement of birth control, urging Protestant Episcopal citizens “to press through their governments, and through social, educational and international agencies, for measures aimed at relieving problems of population growth.”

Delaying Action? In Manhattan, the Rev. Truman B. Douglass, vice president of the Board of Home Missions of the Congregational Churches, said that his church’s Ryder Hospital in predominantly Catholic Puerto Rico is experimenting with contraceptive pills. “This service to the cause of population control.” he said, “is a positive expression of Christian compassion and humanitarian concern.”

The U.S. Government, continued Douglass, cannot improve the health and economies of other countries “and at the same time disown all responsibility for the population problem which success on these fronts greatly accentuates.” The Roman Catholic Church is “staging a desperate delaying action” in “a battle which it knows is already lost. It knows that millions of faithful Catholics disregard its prohibitions in the practice of contraception, and do this with a clear conscience.”

Baptist Evangelist Billy Graham agreed. Birth control, he said, is one of the ways of coping with the “terrifying and tragic” problem of overpopulation; there is nothing in Scripture that prohibits its responsible use, and most Americans practice it, “whether they are Protestants or Roman Catholics.”

Archbishop Iakovos, head of the Greek Orthodox Church of North and South America, lined up with the Roman Catholics. As he sees it, the argument in favor of birth control is based on the secular notion that society “must forever banish from the face of the earth hunger, misfortune, juvenile crime, social revolution and wars—since all these are a consequence of overpopulation.” Said the archbishop: “This argument may be correct, but it is entirely negative.” Childbirth, he added, is a “duty binding on all—not to avoid children, but to care for them in the nurture and admonition of the Lord.”