The Catholic Church's View on Contraception

1225 Words3 Pages

Contraception is the deliberate prevention of conception or impregnation by various drugs, techniques, or devices – also more famously known as birth control. This research paper will examine the views of both the Catholic Church and the view that opposes the Catholic Church on this practice. Each view will be examined thoroughly with the reasoning behind each unique view.

The Catholic Church’s view on contraception is simple. They believe that any act of sex must be both unitive and procreative Birth control, by any means or techniques will halt the procreative process and over time diminish the unity created by sex (Catechism). During the 1960s there was a major boom in contraceptives; The Pill had just been created. It is at this point that contraceptives became a major issue within the Catholic Church. In 1968 Pope Paul VI wrote an encyclical titled the “Humanae Vitae” which translates from Latin to kindness of life. In this encyclical he detailed this theory on contraception: “The reason is that the fundamental nature of the marriage act, while uniting husband and wife in the closest intimacy, also renders them capable of generating new life—and this as a result of laws written into the actual nature of man and of woman” (Paul VI). Within the Humanae Vitae Pope Paul VI predicted several things happening if contraceptives became widely available and used within society. These predictions included a general lowering of moral standards, a general disregard for physical and physiological well being of females by males, governments using contraceptives for coercive purposes, and the treating of our bodies like those of a machine or as objects. (Smith, 1994)(Paul VI)

In 1994 pope John Paul II attempted to further clarify the c...

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...ws/nation/articles/2008/02/26/us_religious_identity_is_rapidly_changing/>.

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