Religion: Bishops on Birth Control

The Anglicans and Episcopalians, like most Protestant groups, do not share the Roman Catholic disapproval of birth control; contraception, they have long held, is permissible for both family planning and reasons of health. But the Anglican Communion’s five-week Lambeth conference of bishops just concluded went a liberal’s step further: it positively recommended contraception as a valuable liberating force in the family and in the enjoyment of sexual relations.

Among the 131 resolutions published last week with the encyclical letter of the 1958 Lambeth conference was a report on “The Family in Contemporary Society.” made by a 38-man committee, headed by Bishop Stephen F. Bayne Jr. of Olympia. Wash. Highlights:

¶ “The procreation of children is not the only purpose of marriage.” Husbands and wives have the duty of practising sexual intercourse as an expression of their love. Though intercourse is not “the only language of earthly love.” it is certainly the most intimate; “it has the depth of communication signified by the Biblical word so often used for it, ‘knowledge’ . . .” Therefore it is wrong to shackle sex to the conception of children.

¶ Family planning ought to be the result of “thoughtful and prayerful Christian decision.” The means are largely a matter of “clinical and aesthetic choice.” But for Christians some means are unlawful: 1) withholding of one partner from the other without mutual consent; 2) interrupted coitus, precluding the husband’s or wife’s “full completion of the sexual act”; 3) induced abortion or infanticide. The bishops endorsed artificial insemination only if the husband is the donor.

¶ Voluntary sterilization of husband or wife is justified when a woman’s health is at stake—but never when a government makes it compulsory as a means of population control. But voluntary sterilization might be justified (“after the procreation of a proper number of children”) as “a safe and easy method of family planning.” One disadvantage of sterilization, the report warns, is that it is “generally an irreversible process” and may be regretted in changed circumstances. The bishops note with disapproval that sterilization operations are being increasingly sought and recommended “without any adequate appreciation of its gravity as a moral decision.”

¶ Married couples have three equally important duties: procreation, sexual relations and the obligations of family loyalty. To keep all three “in one frame of moral reference is an art man has had a long fight to learn, and must still steadily fight to preserve.” However difficult the balance may be, the new freedom that modern methods of contraception brings to “sexuality in marriage in our time is … a gate to a new depth and joy in personal relationships between husband and wife. At a time when so much in our culture tends to depersonalize life—to erode and dissolve the old clear outlines of human personality —Christians may well give thanks for the chance given us to establish, in marriage, a new level of intimate, loving interdependence between husband and wife and parents and children, freed from some of the old disciplines of fear.”