Contraception: The Tragic Deception

January 08, 2005

Royce Dunn

Contraception did not command my attention easily. Assuming it non-threatening to existing human life, and hearing no objections from the voices I respected most, I regarded it a minor issue.

But the "glass darkly" began turning translucent and, eventually, transparent during my research for Sex Education and Your School Board and for Planned Parenthood: What the Facts Reveal. Not only did I observe contraception's grievous influence on youth and its abiding intimacy with abortion, but I also perceived within it a self-directing spirit. When released with government approval into an unmindful nation, contraception, I noted, worked a will of its own, and its power to injure and destroy called to mind the "principalities of the air" Ephesians 6 warns against.

Today, I am among the small but growing Protestant minority who deems conception God's domain and contraception a devious intruder. If loss of human life is a major indicator, contraceptives that contain birth control components comprise the most deadly force in history. The Pill (in over 40 varieties), Norplant, Depo-Provera, Prostaglandins, and the solely abortifacient intrauterine devices (IUDs) have, by research estimates, killed in America alone over 150 million unborn citizens after their conception.

If contraception bears homage to the spirit world, as I contend, that helps explain the mystery of today's passive Church amidst an unspeakable holocaust, and it helps explain the immense divide between our boisterous pro-life rhetoric and our ineffectual pro-life action. It also helps explain our readiness to apply the same regrettable response of nonintervention that our Church forebears applied to slavery in America and to Nazism in Germany.

As did they, we have yielded to a spiritual stronghold, and the senior villain is contraception rather than the surgical abortions on which pro-lifers continue to focus. Satan knows those abortions (or the chemicals ready to supplant them) are secure so long as contraception is secure. He knows the annual loss of 1.3 million American infants to surgical mutilation today is far below the number of unborn children killed in the U.S. by abortifacient birth controls, and that loss does not address the capabilities of contraception to tempt, cripple, and destroy incrementally. My generation has yielded to contraception because the portion of our hearts ordained for children has found other interests, and as a result we are less detached from abortion industry values than we want to assume.

Margaret Sanger, the mother of "family planning," inflicted greater injury on our nation than any other person who has lived on earth this century. She wrote: "Civilization, in any true sense of the word, is based upon the control and guidance of the great natural instinct of Sex. Mastery of this force is possible only through the instrument of Birth Control." Through Sanger's relentless guidance, contraception forged the path for America's sexual revolution and its accompanying depravities. It forged the path for unrestricted abortion and its inestimable death toll.

When modern contraceptives were being developed at mid-century, U.S. doctors were treating four sexually transmitted diseases (STDs), illegitimacy was at four percent, and abortions were estimated to be 100,000 annually. Soon thereafter, officials in our democracy decided with their human reasoning that sexuality in our nation needed institutional management and that fornication could be made safe for both single adults and youth. Today, U.S. physicians are treating more than 50 strains of STDs, illegitimacy has reached 35 percent, and abortions (surgical and abortifacient) are estimated to be about 10 million annually. As a result, our economists tell us that illegitimacy alone can bankrupt the U.S., and anthropologists tell us that never before in history has such a high percentage of children, in any culture, grown up fatherless. Add to these losses a 100 percent increase in divorce since 1960, an alarming rise in abuse and violence outside the womb, and epidemics of illiteracy, estranged youth, and dysfunctional families. Contraception, we know, is not the sole culprit, but it is a fierce contributor, with enduring penalty.

As this century closes, America bears the shame God assigns to nations that reject chastity, fidelity, and procreation. The badge of Sodom-legalization of same-sex marriages-looms before us in significant measure because we who claim to know Christ have joined the grim coalition against children. Contraception has served to steal our affection for them and, thereby, our will to seriously defend them. Little should we marvel that homosexuality fills that void in our society.

Yet there is a more intimate reason for my opposition to contraception. It was reaffirmed recently when a friend told me about an elderly missionary mother. When asked to cite her "most important accomplishment in life," she replied, "Raising my six kids." She then told about her investment in her children and how each of them had become "a light to the world."

That testimony speaks eloquently to my personal loss. My wife and I have a son and daughter whom we cherish and who are developing, with diligence, the gifts God has graced to them so that they, too, can be lights to the world. Daily, I rejoice in their lives, but I wonder how many more lights God wanted to originate in our family. The evidence suggests my wife and I could have had additional children with little difficulty, and though we yielded no ground to abortion we fell prey to its more deceptive and senior partner.

With passing years, an abiding sadness has settled into my spirit, and I do not want to lose it, for it has taught me the incomparable worth of procreation. Today, my loss is all too similar to that of grieving parents who have had to bury sons and daughters-and it is also similar to that of regretful mothers and fathers who have by trifle aborted their unborn babies. How many children did God desire in my family? I long to know-and I long to know their interests, their gifts, their laughter, and their own family members. But most of all, I long to know the light they could have brought into the world.

May God grant that others will welcome into their homes the uniquely wondrous gift of children.

Royce Dunn is president of Please Let Me Live, the organization responsible for Life Chain.