As the Pill Turns 50, a New Generation Seeks to Rediscover Marital Chastity
By Robert C. Baker
Celebrated around the world, Mother’s Day is a holiday devoted to honoring motherhood in general and one’s own mother in particular. This Mother’s Day, mothers and grandmothers will receive cards, letters, flowers, candy, telephone calls, and even text messages from their children and grandchildren, who will shower them with love and affection. Mothers, after all, are those who have given us birth or who have adopted us and loved us as one of their own. However, this year’s Mother’s Day takes on a different hue and cast: it coincides with an anniversary devoted not to being a mother. May 9, 2010, you see, is also the fiftieth anniversary of the FDA’s approval of the oral contraceptive commonly known as “the Pill”—now the most frequently prescribed drug worldwide.
As a physician specializing in women’s health issues I’m strongly opposed to advising women to take synthetic hormones for most of their adult menstruating years as a means to prevent cancer. While there may be some truth to claims that the pill could play a role in preventing certain types of cancer in some women, it also appears to increase risks of other cancers, and it has many undesirable potential side effects—including some that are life-threatening….
COMMENTS: Note the worldly mindset of this article.
It does not mention God as the Creator of all life.
It assumes that pregnancies are planned by man.
Unintended pregnancies are to be feared.
It does not assume the marriage bond.
It offers no cautions or health concerns related to various methods.
It cares not whether some birth control methods causes abortions or have abortifacient properties.
It assumes total lack of self-control – since some birth control methods take a few days to start working – to that extent that one needs “backup methods” until it takes effect.
The concept of abstinence is never mentioned.
Even “more natural methods” are not mentioned.
One must have multiple methods available at all times to be ready just in case.
The extent of planning and research and care and caution required to avoid pregnancy is somewhat astounding.
Planned Parenthood, the U.S. top provider of abortion services, is advised as a good source for more information.
Birth control is assumed as a good and necessary part of the lives of all people
In 1930, for the first time ever, the Church changed their view on Birth Control. This was the beginning of the rapid descent of the Church into modernism in the 20th century. Shortly after this disastrous decision, theologian and bishop Charles Gore authored a response:
"There is nothing really more astonishing than that in the course of nature a spiritual power so great as the production of a new personality, destined for immortal life, should have been entrusted by God to that in man which is so easily misled and misused as his sexual instincts and powers. But so it is. And the propagation of the species is in the order of nature judged to be of such importance that man is, like the lower animals, induced to it, with all its attendant pains and cares, by a desire more passionate and a pleasure more intense attaching to the sexual act than to almost any other kind of human action. But the justification of the pleasure lies primarily in its direction towards the end of propagation. This is assuredly the lesson of biology and the lesson of Holy Scripture and of Church tradition. Mankind in its willfulness has been always seeking to separate the pleasure from its end by different kinds of practices which have been condemned by the Church as unnatural. The Church has regarded Birth Prevention as sinful because....
