I realize that this subject has been well debated, but I had come here to ask this very question. <smiles> I appreciate the links to the articles by Piper and others. I will read them.
I received an interesting email from my sister having to do with the Pill. While I won't go into all the details, apparently there are some common serious side-effects. But, the medical community (specifically her doctor) was convinced that the Pill wasn't the source. Anywho, she began researching the Pill and its effects. What she found disturbing is that, for the most part, Protestant theologians have little or no comment about birth control. But, the same arguments that can be used in support of abortion can also be used in support of birth control. As a simplification, abortion is birth control after the pregnancy.
The Protestant argues that they are "Pro-life" - that they do not support the killing of unborn children. And yet, consistantly taken, they are not "pro-life" with regards to conception. Only after conception has happened is it deemed valuable. The Catholic theologians have argued that a culture that accepts and supports birth control is a culture that is "Pro-death" in that it is aggressively pursuing avoiding life.
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From our church library I checked out a book by George
Grant called Grand Illusions: the Legacy of Planned
Parenthood. It's a fascinating book, and he claims to
have left out some of the more incendiary information
to protect himself from lawsuits. What he includes is
sufficiently shocking on its own. In addition to
sketching a brief biography of Margaret Sanger, he
explains the social forces, the media and legal
manipulations, and the outright duplicity that led to
Planned Parenthood's success in promoting abortion and
its little sister, artificial birth control. One of
the more interesting facts I learned from the book is
that Ms. Sanger used $2 million of her second
husband's money to fund research into the Pill. She
then lobbied aggressively to have it approved by the
FDA in a shorter time even than normal drug trials.
As you know, attempts to question the safety of the
Pill are stifled at birth or else the results of the
studies are downplayed. One of the curious things I
have discovered in the last few months is how few
women actually have a good experience with hormonal
birth control, either the Pill or the progesterone
shot. Yet the drug companies (and Planned Parenthood)
persist in portraying the Pill as the best possible
way for women to take charge of their bodies and their
fertility. As George Grant writes, the Pill is not a
medical, but rather a recreational drug. I hadn't
thought of it that way before. I've been doing a lot
of reading on fertility, etc. recently and most of
what's out there that doesn't promote the use of the
Pill is from the Catholics. Of course, most of those
critiques come from people who hold to the Church's
official position that all artificial contraception is
wrong. I have been searching for writings from
Protestant theologians and teachers addressing this
issue, but there seems to be very little material.
Interestingly, the most extensive treatment I have yet
found on the subject of the morality of birth control
from a Protestant perspective is in a book published
in 1970 by Norman Geisler about ethics.
Unfortunately, he argues that abortion can be morally
permissible under certain circumstances, when the
destruction of a potential human life is weighed
against harm to an actual human life (the mother's).
I was deeply disturbed by that phrasing (potential vs.
actual) and by his reasoning that seemed to introduce
a certain level of situational ethics into his
argument. Although he was careful to emphasize that
taking even a potential human life is grave and ought
not be done for any less than the most compelling
circumstances, I thought he was providing ammunition
for the pro-abortion camp by saying that there are
cases when abortion would be justifiable, although
only to the point of viability. (He was not
discussing what to do in the case of an ectopic
pregnancy, which obviously cannot be carried to term
and which will kill the mother if the embryo is not
removed. He was discussing cases of rape, incest, the
life of the mother, etc.). The discoveries about
fetal development which have come over the past 35
years indicate that although we don't know when a
fetus becomes "alive" in a strict sense, we know that
if the fetus is allowed to develop normally, he or she
will be born as a living human being. I have gotten
off on a rabbit track. Sorry about that. Anyway, the
Catholic position is that abortion is a great evil but
a culture that sanctions birth control is already a
culture of death. It is only a small step (according
to these commentators) from using artificial
contraception to prevent pregnancy to using abortion
as an after-the-fact birth control. After reading
Grant's book and some pro-abortion writings too, I'm
not sure I find that such a foreign assertion now.
But that leads to the question of family planning.
Are Christians really called to have a lot of
children? Or is there, as some Protestant authors I
have read believe, a responsibility to consider the
cost of a family and have the number of children that
a couple can afford. There is no clear consensus and
there are compelling arguments on both sides. This is
an issue with which Protestant pastors and teachers
seem reluctant to deal, probalby because of the
societal expectations that birth control is part of
life.
That was a long and rambling dissertation, although I
hope it was reasonably coherent. I apologize for the
length. These are the issues with which I'm wrestling
right now. Before I got involved in thinking about
this, the matter seemed simple, but the farther I get
into it, the less clearly defined the boundaries are
and the more I see that a couple's private decision
regarding their family planning can have wide
implications for society at large. There are pro-life
activists who believe you cannot really consider
yourself pro-life and support the use of any
artificial means of contraception. Yet there are
people on the other side who point out that the
ability to limit the size of our families allows us to
treasure and provide for the children we do have.
Perhaps that is simply a Western, consumer-driven
attitude. I haven't decided yet.
In my research on the Pill, I learned that the
pharmaceutical companies and Planned Parenthood have
powerful motivations for marketing the Pill
aggressively and for downplaying its side effects.
The most powerful reason is money, of course, since
the market for birth control runs into the billions.
What I find frustrating is that my doctors didn't warn
me about side effects and would not believe that my
symptoms might have been due to the synthetic
hormones. It is difficult to find a list of side
effects in plain English. The listed side effects in
the product insert that comes with the Pill are so
hidden in medical jargon that I had no idea what most
of them were. The insert also made a point of calling
the side effects "rare," "unusual," and "uncommon."
But as I have talked with other women who have used
it, I have learned that most of them have suffered
some sort of adverse effects. Some of them opt to
remain on the Pill because they like the convenience
or they believe other forms of contraception are too
difficult to practice or they are convinced they are
receiving health benefits from taking the Pill.
George Grant calls the Pill a "recreational drug" and
he does so because he claims that there are no medical
reasons for most of us to take it. Its only purpose
is to enable women to be sexually active without the
risk of pregnancy. Unfortunately, there are many
other risks to the drug that are not well known.
The Catholic Church and some Protestant pro-lifers
(such as Randy Alcorn) believe that the decision to
use contraception in itself comes from an attitude of
death. It divorces sex from procreation, rendering it
sterile rather than life-giving. They say that
engaging in sex without being open to the possibility
of conceiving a child is to render the act
purposeless. This is why the Catholic Church calls
such sexual activity lust, even if it is between a
married couple. I don't think I agree with that
assertion--it is too restrictive and does not have
Scriptural basis. But I think that the advocates of
this view have a very valid point, one often
overlooked by most Protestants--namely that a culture
that will not embrace children and that will not
accept responsibility for the consequences of sexual
activity is a culture that embraces death. We want
all the physical pleasure of sex without any of the
responsibility that comes with it. As Grant says, we
have redefined responsibility to mean using birth
control rather than being ready for the consequence of
conception.
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Is the Pill a "recreational drug"?
It was a double standard in all those previous threads and it is a double standard now. You cannot have it both ways. If you are going to use trust in God as your hammer it strikes both birth control and fertility enhancement treatments. I mean I guess what you are saying is: God couldn't get past the physical problems Himself and so we must help Him through scientific means...... Conception is either something that we are to steward or it is something that we are to completely leave hands off. If we are to steward it then we may do so either positively or negatively as God leads while attempting to maintain Godly motives. By the way is there any other gift of God that he has told us to leave completely alone and not steward? I am trying to think of one and have not been able to..... 
