Do i need to go to confession if i have been using birth control. I never thought i was wrong until i decided to come back to the church. i still don’t know if i really believe that it is evil i can understand how it could be viewed as not in keeping with what God wants. So since i have come back to the church i have decided to really try and live the way the church proscribes. so i am just wondering if it is a sin and that i would probably need to go to confession. on a side note i am meeting with a lady to learn about Natural family planning so that i can stop using chemical birth control. Thanks so much for you help and insight.
as ron conte, dubay, and ron lewis have said, yes, you do need to go to confession. also, you need to stop taking the pill. it is really bad for you, both physically and spiritually!
i’d like to share my personal story in this case. when i was away from the church, i also used chemical birth control. (there was also the issue that i have a condition called mittelschmerz, meaning that my ovaries expand too much when they release an egg. it is quite painful. being on the pill stopped that pain.) the man who would become my husband and i were together at the time. i had, because of psychological issues, coerced him into moving in with me, which resulted in the occasions of sin that led to our active sex life before marriage. as part of our marriage preparation, we were required to attend an nfp session. that’s when things got interesting.
i forgot to take the pill for three days in a row toward the beginning of that cycle. as you probably know, that meant that i was considered ‘unprotected’ for the rest of the cycle. knowing that i would have to take the pill for the entire next cycle
before being considered ‘protected’, i decided to save a little money and stop taking the pill for the rest of this cycle, preparatory to taking it for the entirety of the next so that i’d be considered ‘protected’ again. the next day, i had my period, only a week after finishing my previous period. it was the most painful period i had ever experienced and i lost a lot of blood. the most alarming thing, however, was that some of the blood that i lost was hardened. when my period started, i was on the toilet because of the pain. when i got up, it looked like someone had taken a handful of red sand and thrown it into the toilet bowl. it didn’t dissolve into the water; the rest of the bowl was clear. this was the old blood. if i had conceived, my baby would have starved to death and i never would have known it. for all i know, this did happen. not knowing and therefore not being able to grieve it is the most tragic thing of all. i was misinformed. later that day, the rest of the blood
really started to flow. i’d never had such a heavy period before or since, not even by half. my doctor told me that what i went through was normal, even though i had only been on the pill for a little less than a year. i felt so betrayed! i was never warned about this. i was in so much pain (not a small thing, considering my pain tolerance because of living with mittelschmerz) and i felt so weak from losing all that blood. it took several months of living without the pill for my body to get into any kind of sync with itself again. in many ways, my periods are still not back to normal, more than 7 years later.
the church has long warned us against contraception of any kind. if i hadn’t strayed away from the church (my husband brought me back), if i hadn’t tempted a man in good standing with the church into a life of sin (no matter what i was going through at the time), if i hadn’t believed everything that the doctor said about the pill, this would never have happened to me.
nfp is amazing. we started using it immediately. i don’t think that the timing was coincidental; i think that it was providential. i was in the midst of that terrible second period when we went to that nfp session and, of course, we signed up immediately. we were able to avoid pregnancy while i finished school. then, the information gleaned from years of using nfp helped the doctor to diagnose our recently developed infertility problem. after the infertility problem was solved, we used nfp to conceive our son on the very first try. i don’t know why anyone ever takes the pill. it is so damaging to you in every possible way and nfp is great. my husband knows better than i do when my period is going to start. we share the process together. best of all, there’s no side effects! just cooperating with each other and with God!
i never knew if she got on the pill after she moved out or what, but i tell people all the time that chemical birth control is bad! like my chemistry professor said in college, you can’t mess around with the body’s hormone balance like that and not expect some pretty serious side effects.