Contraceptives and Abortion are fruits of the same evil tree.
“When you sow contraception, you reap abortion.” Father Paul Marx (deceased), founder of Human Life International.
Inconsistent Contraceptive Use Results in Unintended Pregnancies
Half of all unintended pregnancies—some 1.5 million annually—occur among contraceptive users; of these, 9 in 10 [90%] result from inconsistent or incorrect method use, and only one in 10 from method failure. https://www.guttmacher.org/pubs/journals/4009408.html
Archived 2012 Guttmacher: 54% of women who have abortions had used a contraceptive method (usually the condom or the pill) during the month they became pregnant. Among those women, 76% of pill users and 49% of condom users report having used their method inconsistently, while 13% of pill users and 14% of condom users report correct use. http://www.guttmacher.org/pubs/fb_induced_abortion.html
Update 8/25/2015. The previous paragraph from 2012 is no longer on Guttmacher’s cited page. It has been updated to read:
51% of women who have abortions had used a contraceptive method in the month they got pregnant, most commonly condoms (27%) or a hormonal method (17%).
2015. Contraceptive Use in The U.S.
Secretariat for Pro-Life Activities 1988
HUMANAE VITAE: A PROPHETIC DOCUMENT?
By Professor Janet E. Smith
Popes are not customarily considered to be prophets. But Pope Paul VI has earned the title in the eyes of
many for the “prophecies” he made twenty years ago in Humanae Vitae. There he “prophesied” that marriages
and society would suffer if the use of contraception became widespread. Now the vast majority of spouses use
some form of contraception and the use of contraception is widespread among the unmarried as well. It seems a good time to evaluate the legitimacy of Humanae Vitae’s prophetic voice and to reconsider the wisdom of the
widespread neglect of this document.
READ FULL DOCUMENT – HumanaeVitaeProphetic_Janet_Smith (click the link).
More by Prof. Janet E. Smith . . .
Available at One More Soul.
Contraception: One More Soul Catalog – click the link
Books, CD’s, Study Guides
The Humanae Vitae Prophecies
Father Thomas Euteneur
Pope Paul VI has been called a prophet for his intuitions expressed in the 1968 encyclical, Humanae vitae, about what would happen to society if contraception ever became widely used. But a “prophecy” is much more than just a prediction: it is really a view of reality and an assessment of what happens when the right order of things is snubbed. All the Old Testament prophets told the people of Israel, in unambiguous terms, that they had turned their backs on the Lord’s covenant (God’s view of reality) and that the consequences would be dire if they persevered in that apostasy. Succeeding generations of scholars, who saw the fulfillment of the prophets’ words, then scrupulously wrote their prophecies down for posterity – lest anyone forget them!
Brother priests, faithful to the Magisterium, in a certain sense, we are the true prophets of our modern times when we teach God’s view of reality to our world. Or rather, we are the scribes who echo the teachings of our great papal prophets for the benefit of our flocks. Let us make sure our people know what the Prophet, Paul VI, said in Humanae vitae forty years ago so that their marriages, and their souls, will not perish.
The four prophecies of Humanae vitae are clear, but also stubborn, views of reality. They are unequivocally countercultural. Paul VI said that if a society accepted contraception as a way of life (like all economically developed societies have), then several consequences would inevitably result:
- First, contraception would lead to conjugal infidelity. Not hard to see this one right? When you separate babies from the marital act there is nothing binding that act to, well, marriage. Fornication (pre-marital) and adultery (extra-marital) have thus skyrocketed with the massive practice of contraception.
- Second, Pope Paul predicted that contraceptive practice would lead to a “general lowering of morality.” Hmm, let’s see if this one was right: “normal” youthful entertainments in our society today include that despicable MTV channel, hooking up, salacious reality TV shows, heavy metal music, wicca and the New Age, drugs and ubiquitous internet porn. In Janet Smith’s famous words: has anyone noticed a “general lowering of morality” lately?
- Third, Paul VI said that contraception would lead men to cease respecting women in their totality and would cause them to treat women as “mere instruments of selfish enjoyment” rather than as cherished partners. Clearly, this prophecy has been vindicated many times over by pornography alone, the most lucrative business in the modern world. That entire industry is singularly dedicated to the “selfish enjoyment” of men.
- Finally, the Holy Father said that massive acceptance of contraception by couples would lead to a massive imposition of contraception by unscrupulous governments. He predicted, in other words, that contraception would pass from a “lifestyle choice” to a weapon of mass destruction, and how dreadfully his prophecy has been vindicated by population control and coercive sterilization programs, fertility reduction quotas and the promotion of abortion literally everywhere in the world.
Should the blame for all these terrible evils of our modern times be laid at the feet of contraception? Well, yes – at least largely so. That’s the truth that we, as priests, must absolutely get clear so that we can hand this on to our people. Contraception’s destruction of the integrity of the marital act – as unitive and procreative – has dire consequences for society and for souls. Contraception is a rejection of God’s view of reality. It is a wedge driven into the most intimate sphere of communion known to man outside of the Holy Mass. It is a degrading poison that withers life and love both in marriage and in society. No wonder everything goes wrong when contraception shows up.
The Prophet has warned us. Now it’s our turn to warn our people. Brothers, their very souls are at stake!
Father Thomas Euteneuer is the former president of Human Life International.
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Priest For Life Study Guide for Humanae Vitae
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History of Contraception and Abortion Laws. Source: One More Soul.
1965 Griswold v. Connecticut — U.S. Supreme Court rules Connecticut’s law prohibiting birth control for married couples violates a newly defined “right of privacy” found in the penumbra of the Constitution. Over 6 million American women are on the Pill.
1968 Pope Paul VI’s Humanae Vitae released. Pope Paul VI confirms Church’s ban on contraception and encourages the use of Natural Family Planning. Unfortunately, dissenting theologians and liberated nuns in the U.S. had already contaminated the minds of Catholics paving the way for them to use contraception, submit to abortions, and be promiscuous.
1970 Title X Signed into law. Program provides contraceptive and related reproductive health care services to low-income women.
1972 Eisenstadt v. Baird. Guarantees unmarried couples’ right to use contraception.
1973 Roe v. Wade and Doe v. Bolton. U.S. Supreme Court strikes down all laws criminalizing abortion, in all states, throughout the pregnancy, on the basis of the same “right to privacy” used in Griswold v. Connecticut.
1980’s 10.7 million American women are on the Pill.
1992 Planned Parenthood v. Casey. Supreme Court decision confirming Roe v. Wade states, “ in some critical respects the abortion decision is of the same character as the decision to use contraception . . . for two decades (since Roe v. Wade) of economic and social developments, people have organized intimate relationships and made choices that define their views of themselves and their places in society, in reliance on the availability of abortion in the event that contraception should fail.”
Pro-Life Action of Oregon. There you have it: contraceptives indeed DO FAIL and abortion is the back-up. The abortion lobby refers to this as an “unintended pregnancy.”
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“How Abortion Became Legal” from Choices in Matters of Life & Death by Judie Brown with Paul Brown
If we study the Supreme Court’s decisions and try to see when the Court began arbitrarily granting the right to kill, we have to go back to 1965 when the last of the so-called Comstock Laws or the old birth control laws in America was overturned. [Margaret Sanger played a major role in the legalization of birth control.]
- In Griswold v. Connecticut [1965], the Court created the “right to privacy.”
- There never has been in the U.S. Constitution a right to privacy, but in 1965, to legalize all forms of birth control for married couples, the Court ruled that couples have a “right to privacy” and therefore the state has no compelling interest even in alerting them to the medical side effects of birth control.
- This contrived “right to privacy” laid the groundwork for further anti-life actions by the Court.
Justice Stewart agreed that the “right to privacy” was contrived and could not be found in the Constitution. In his dissenting opinion in Griswold, he wrote:
“In the course of its opinion the Court refers to no less than six amendments to the Constitution: The First, the Third, the Fourth, the Fifth, the Ninth and the 14th. But the Court does not say which of these amendments, if any, it thinks is infringed by this Connecticut [birth control] law.
“What provision of the Constitution, then, does makes this [birth control] law invalid? The Courts says it is the right of privacy ‘created by several fundamental constitutional guarantees.’ With all deference, I can find no such general right of privacy in the Bill of Rights, in any other part of the Constitution, or in any case ever before decided by this Court.
“At the oral argument in this case we were told that the Connecticut [birth control] law does not ‘conform to current community standards.’ But it is not the function of this Court to decide cases on the basis of community standards. We are here to decide cases ‘agreeable to the Constitution and laws of the United States.’”—-Justice Stewart’s dissenting opinion in Griswold.
In 1972, in Eisenstadt v. Baird, the Supreme Court again referred to the “right to privacy,” ruling that contraceptives may be given to unmarried individuals, concluding that the “equal protection under the law” guaranteed by the Constitution confers the rights of married persons on the unmarried as well.
What the Court did in 1973 [Roe v. Wade] was simply to carry forward that right to privacy created in 1965 and legalize the killing of innocent preborn children.
Judie Brown is the president of American Life League and a member of the Pontifical Academy For Life.
Non-Catholics On Contraception-Abortion
“Contraception the Tragic Deception” (newsletter in pdf) by National Director of Life Chain Royce Dunn. Titles in this newsletter include, A Protestant’s Confession; The Sexual Revolution Comes of Age in the Church; Abortifacient Birth Control: the Leading Killer in American and the World.”
“Contraception is abortion’s bedfellow, and America’s current holocaust will not end until we the Church renounce our eagerness to contracept and seek the devotion we should have for children.”—-Royce Dunn, Director of Life Chain
The National Right To Life Committee NRLC takes no position on contraceptives. That must mean that the NRLC and its state affiliates are in favor of contraceptives. Their statement below is no longer on their website. However, it has been ARCHIVED HERE.
The National Right to Life Committee was founded in 1973 in response to a United States Supreme Court decision released on January 22 of that year, legalizing the practice of human abortion in all 50 states, throughout the entire nine months of pregnancy. Prior to that Supreme Court case– Roe vs. Wade — the abortion debate had been centered in the legislatures of the states, 17 of which had legalized abortion under some circumstances and 33 of which had voted to continue to protect human life from conception.
In June of 1973, a group of pro-life leaders met in Detroit for the first meeting of a new organization, to be non-sectarian, non- partisan, and to have its board consist of an elected representative from each of the 50 states. These first board members included experts in the fields of science, medicine, medical ethics, constitutional law, and religion.
Since its official beginning at that conference, the National Right to Life Committee has grown to represent over 3000 chapters in all 50 states and the District of Columbia.
The NRLC Board of Directors now consists of a director from each state– elected to fill the position by the state group– as well as an internally elected nine- member executive committee and officers, and three “at-large” board positions. NRLC also publishes a monthly newspaper, the National Right to Life News, and has an internal Political Action Committee and Educational Trust Fund.
The National Right to Life Committee has been instrumental in achieving a number of legislative reforms at the national level, including a ban on non-therapeutic experimentation of unborn and newborn babies, a federal conscience clause guaranteeing medical personnel the right to refuse to participate in abortion procedures, and various amendments to appropriations bills which prohibit (or limit) the use of federal funds to subsidize or promote abortions in the United States and overseas.
The ultimate goal of the National Right to Life Committee is to restore legal protection to innocent human life. The primary interest of the National Right to Life Committee and its members has been the abortion controversy; however, it is also concerned with related matters of medical ethics which relate to the right to life issues of euthanasia and infanticide. The Committee does not have a position on issues such as contraception, sex education, capital punishment, and national defense.
In addition to maintaining a lobbying presence at the federal level, NRLC serves as a clearinghouse of information for its state affiliates and local chapters, its individual members, the press, and the public.
West Coast Pro-Life 