The Islamic world has NOT been immune to the negative effects of contraception. Islam has no central teaching authority able to address issues like the pill which did not arise in Muhammed’s day, so they are a bit scattered. In places like Palestine and Yemen where the imams have been against contraception, fertility rates are still quite high (well above replacement levels).
In the West, contraception became culturally acceptable starting in the 1920’s and hit near universal status in the 1960’s. Abortion took another decade and normalization of gay relationships took yet another few decades after that. No surprise, then, that Islamic cultures that are just now accepting contraception at rates similar to where the West was in the 1930’s have not yet manifested these outcomes. But evil seeds WILL sprout there just like they have here.
One can argue that very low divorce rates or premarital promiscuity rates in Islamic places is more due to unrelated cultural restrictions, but that’s a pretty unsupported assertion when one looks at the early impact of contraception of these issues in the West (say the 1930s). What CAN be seen is that in those Islamic countries (like Lebanon, Brunei, Iran, Bahrain, Azerbaijan, Qatar) in which contraception has not been opposed on religious grounds by most local imams for more than a generation is that they are below replacement levels of fertility (just like most of the West has been since the 1960’s). Interestingly, for all the anti-life problems of the more hard core versions of Islam in places like Afghanistan, Yemen and Egypt, one problem they DON’T seem to have is that of understanding that sex and babies are NOT separate things. Not coincidentally, those Islamic countries have growing populations.
Islamic culture has lots of problems that are rapidly causing it to unravel in many areas. But it is interesting to see the way that in rejecting current Western values, they may have actually saved some of the babies while tossing out the bathwater…
(pun intended)
