Why don’t more evangelicals recognize the medical and theological problems with the Pill?

True confessions.

My wife and I used it for a short time when we were told by our physician, as young about-to-be married evangelicals at age 23, that if we didn’t want to have a baby in our first year, the best and safest route was the Pill.

When we decided we wanted to start our family, Jean went off it some time before the end of that first year.

No one told us about Natural Family Planning (NFP), except the usual anti-Catholic joke:

Question: “What do you call couples who are on NFP?”

Answer: “Pregnant.”

Our fellow evangelicals–including theologians–wholeheartedly endorsed artificial means of contraception as theologically permissible for committed Christians.

And no one had told us–perhaps they did not know then (1976)–of the risks of using the Pill: possible sterility, depression, massive changes to the woman’s body that can produce all sorts of other problems, not to mention making it difficult to become pregnant after going off the Pill.

Nor were we ever told of what it might mean theologically to separate the marital act–which obviously is designed to make a baby–from the possibility of making a baby.

Not that family planning is wrong.  But the way we plan is not always morally neutral.

Then our oldest son and his wife started using NFP, and our youngest son and his wife used it.  Julie, our youngest son’s wife, was trained and became a teacher and counselor in NFP.  Her main role was to help couples get pregnant if they were having trouble doing so.

Julie explained to me the many, many biological and emotional problems the Pill can cause.  She also explained “the Creighton method,” which is a long list of methods which doctors and researchers at Creighton University have developed to help women solve gynecological problems in natural ways without the Pill.

Such as irregular periods, which is a problem for many teenage girls, whose doctors typically prescribe the Pill to cure.  This of course gives these young women one less reason not to engage in pre-marital sex, and also opens the door to a host of biological and emotional changes in their bodies, none of which are pleasant and some of which are dangerous.

Check out this report by Chelsen Vicari at the IRD (Institute for Religion and Democracy) on her learning about NFP as an evangelical woman approaching marriage.