Any Protestant Sourced Justifications for Contraception Before 1900?

[manualman]

There was a recent thread about contraception and protestants. It devolved into a brawl over pickiness in the language of the thread opening statement. This thread is both a reboot and an honest attempt to examine some history.

Is anyone familiar with ANY reputable (within his own denomination) protestant theologian, pastor or preacher who made an attempt to morally justify the use of artificial contraception BEFORE the year 1900?

Human nature being what it is, I rather doubt the temptation to have sex without babies is all that new. It HAS to have been addressed fairly frequently. I’ve seen dozens of examples of protestant condemnations of contraception dating that far back, but never any endorsements of it by any name I remotely recognized from history. That said, I’m hardly a scholar, so I’m open to the learning of the larger community here.

As clarification, I am NOT speaking of the mere opinions of unknown Joe Blows here. I’d prefer it if you could name names that one might be able to find using reasonable scholarly research methods (aka not just google!). People who were in leadership or published in their day.

Was the Anglican Lambeth compromise of the early 1900’s the first protestant record of such an endorsement?

 

[puzzleannie]

Was the Anglican Lambeth compromise of the early 1900’s the first protestant record of such an endorsement?

I believe that date is in the 1930s. I did come across several references and a couple of copies of a very influential book published on both sides of the Atlantic immediately after WW1, by a medical doctor who was also a clergyman. It was immensely popular and widely discussed among the upper clawses, because it is in their archival collections this work and letters about it (including and especially correspondence between spouses) appear. He argued that proper spacing of children and limiting family size was not only a right but a duty and wrote to popularize contemporary methods for assisting that goal, which had been used on the Contintent and of which Americans particularly in France were just learning, namely condoms and diaphraghms. My own grandmother and her sisters told us they heard sermons from the pulpit and circulated books promoted by their own clergy in the 1920s basically promoting the same thing, use of artificial contraceptives to limit family size as a moral imperative. The issue can be seen in discussion in the popular media of that day, beginning just before and during the war years, and yes some clergy are among those cited. A search on general bibliographies on women’s studies and similar issues will yield a lot of sources.

I am not aware specifically of any clergy or denomination promoting it before the very early 1900s, but then I have not researched that period, which is not to say individual clergymen, not necessarily the governing bodies of specific denominations, might have had something to say.

 

[manualman]

Nobody has anything prior to 1900, eh?

Annie, it isn’t surprising that Lambeth didn’t occur overnight. But it WAS a very new idea to the best of my reading. And let’s not kid ourselves. People have been making fairly reliable condoms from lamb intestines for centuries. It’s simply not true that this is new technology.

 

[Joe_Kelley]

The best history of the Protestant Churches and contraception that I have seen is Children of the Reformation A Short & Surprising History of Protestantism & Contraception*by* Allan Carlson**

note that the author is a “cradle Lutheran” and an historian.

 

[StrawberryJam]

Maybe the bible? The part where the jewish priest could give a woman accused of adultery a poison that would cause a miscarriage?

That’s closer to abortion then contraception though. Anything goes with God I guess.