Publication:

The roman catholic church and contraception

The official position regarding the use of artificial means of family planning varies from religion to religion. With its steadfast opposition to the use of any form of contraception or sterilization, the Roman Catholic Church puts its 1.2 billion followers worldwide in the difficult dilemma of either adhering to the teaching of their church and thereby risk an unwanted pregnancy, or ignoring that teaching and use an artificial method of family planning, but thereby become marginalized by their church. Pope Francis has made a number of statements and actions indicating that their might be a possibility of some changes in the teaching of the Roman Catholic Church regarding a number of issues re-lated to the family, such as divorce, remarriage, gays and women’s rights. However he has continued to reaffirm the Church’s opposition to the use of any artificial method of family planning and has reiterated on a number of occasions that the Church will only allow the so called natural methods. This essay argues that in the opinion of the author, the time has come for the Roman Catholic hierarchy to revise this outdated position and allow catholics to resort to modern methods for limiting the size of their family, which is some-thing that a large percentage of the catholics are doing already anyway.