The standard consequences of sin. Romans 6:23, the wages of sin are death. A spiritual death, an increase in distance between us and the source of life, God. A decrease in holiness, an increase in unholiness, and a greater tendency to sin in related areas. Eventually this manifests as disorder, stress, suffering, difficulty loving, and difficulty practicing virtues.
We’d expect the consequences to be focused around marriage, romantic and sexual love, sexuality, conception, and new life, since those are the areas most directly touched by this sin. We’d expect to see disorder, stress, suffering, and unholiness in married and sexual relationships and expecting parents. We’d expect to see growth in different sins besides trying to avoid conception, due to the disordered attitudes of the individuals, a sort of “ripple effect”, in severe cases (chronic use, severe hostility towards natural fertility, etc.). Other sins in those areas include non-marital sex, abortion, domestic abuse, rape, pornography, child sex abuse, and adultery. Of course, to see an obvious rise in any of those behaviors in a large population (rather than a specific case), there would have to be an epidemic of the sinful behaviors and attitudes at the root; if only a few people engaged in that sin, the consequences would probably be mostly checked by their local society. If the progress of the sin were unchecked, we would expect the ripple to go out through our entire culture and result in a full society that has disordered beliefs about sexuality that cause great suffering and hardhsip in the long term; since sex touches every person’s life at least at the moment of conception, and since it touches our parent’s lives, this could end up having a huge effect.
Of course, the consequences of the sin are checked by the power of God Himself, who destroys death. In the confessional, he removes the spiritual death that we’ve earned and returns us to holiness, making it easier for us to fight against the temporal effects of these sins, and His Church and Body also join in that fight in many ways, lending support to those trying to understand what has gone who want things to change.
Many people think, however, that these consequences arriving following a widespread epidemic of contraception use, is just what happened. The Church of England was the first Christian church to allow contraception, in 1930. Since then, it’s hard to argue that there has not been an increase in marital and sexual turmoil that manifests as increased divorce rates, increased pre-marital sex, increased single motherhood and absent fathers, increased adultery, increased pornography, increased abortions, and increased acceptance of these behaviors. Of course, real life doesn’t happen in a vacuum and correlation does not imply causation; there are lots of other possible explanations available However, it is clear that the effects one would expect from wide-spread use of contraception are, in fact, present. There is, at the very least, no counter-evidence that I know of. In the presence of evidence for a cause-and-effect relationship and no evidence against, it seems reasonable to conclude that the relationship likely exists.
I have seen couples who ditched contraception use from their marriage as part of an effort to “fix” a failing marriage with multiple other sexual problems, so this isn’t just abstract theories with no applications. People who are convinced by these arguments can, and do, make real-life changes to pursue happiness in their marriages and sexual relationships. Successfully.
