I’m looking for the best arguments against contraception. Can you lay out a few of your top reasons and perhaps a few books that make the best case?
I’m conversing with a close Protestant friend who’s considering a vasectomy after his fourth child. He’s a faithful Christian, and wants to be thoughtful in this decision, but his elders are pointing him to 1 Corinthians 10, “everything is permissible” and just asking if he can do this “in faith.”
I’m hoping to share a more thoughtful challenge to his decision making process. As he is a Protestant, arguments from Scripture are especially useful.
Thank you!
In a sense, we can get very quickly to the heart of the issue with a terrible question: “Vomitoriums: Why not?”
Supposedly, the Romans, to maximize the pleasure of eating, would vomit up their food to make room for more.
By mortally divorcing the natural purpose of sex from the pleasure, we engage in the same kind of abandon.
In fact, 4 times, contraception is expressly prohibited in Scripture, at the plain language level. On 3 of this occasions, the text is nasty. I know of no Bible which correctly translates the verses. Here is the story.
Beginning around 400 B.C., the girls of the Roman Empire began to use three different teas to stop ovulation – a plant called silphium, Queen Anne’s Lace, and asafoetida (sp?) sometimes used as a spice today in Worcestershire Sauce. Silphium was the most effective, almost magically disrupting the woman’s cycle without serious side effects. Siphium grew wild in North Africa. What we now call Tunisiua grew rich selling silphium. An ancient Carthaginian coin features a naked girl holding a silphium plant with one hand while she pointed to her crotch with the other.
After silphium and other contraceptives were imported into the Roman Empire, wholesalers would sell bundles of the plants to fortune tellers as leaves for contraceptive teas.
So, it’s interesting, isn’t it? To this day we can go into drug stores, buy contraceptives, and then up at the cash register are horoscopes for sale.
Back to the story: All the girls in the cities of the Empire were aware that the fortune tellers sold contraceptive teas. They’d rush down to the fortune teller, pay for a fortune about their latest love match, and then buy some contraceptive tea.
At any rate, one girl would never say to the other, “I’m going to get some tea for sex later!”
Instead, they euphemized the discussion. They would say, “I’m going to go buy some
pharmakeia” – “drugs.”
So, the Greco-Roman word for “drugs” became the euphemism for contraceptives in the Roman Empire.
If I leave the
pharmakeia root untranslated in the following verses, you can see, now, where the Bible expressly and nastilky condemns use of contraceptives…
19 Now the works of the flesh are obvious: immorality, impurity, licentiousness,
20 idolatry, pharmakeia, hatreds, rivalry, jealousy, outbursts of fury, acts of selfishness, dissensions, factions,
21 occasions of envy, drinking bouts, orgies, and the like. I warn you, as I warned you before, that those who do such things will not inherit the kingdom of God.
Galatians 5:19-21.
21 Nor did they repent of their murders, their pharmakeia, their unchastity, or their robberies. Revelation 9:21. Notice how “
pharmakeia” is paired with a sex word, unchastity.
8 But as for cowards, the unfaithful, the depraved, murderers, the unchaste, pharmakeus, idol-worshipers, and deceivers of every sort, their lot is in the burning pool of fire and sulfur, which is the second death." Revelation 21:8. Again, it is paired-up with a sex word, “unchaste.”
15 Outside [the heavenly city] are the dogs, the pharmakos, the unchaste, the murderers, the idol-worshipers, and all who love and practice deceit. Revelation 22:15.
But in my opinion the wife and husband have to be talked-to together on this subject. Additionally, Natural Family Planning works! I use it, and it’s wonderful.
