POPULATION: THE GREAT TABOO

Birth Control

One of the main reasons that some people avoid talking about population is because they believe that birth control is in some way against the word of God. In contemporary America, some Fundamentalist Christians hold this belief quite strongly. But for all the emotions this generates, and for all the certainty that people sometimes express, there is nothing in the Bible, Old Testament or New, which discusses birth control.

That's kind of important. The Bible contains injunctions against many, many things, such as eating pork. It contains admonitions to sell all one's belongings and give all proceeds to the poor. It contains 22 references to God's prohibition against making loans for interest (usury). And it contains injunctions that thieves should repay double that which they have stolen. But even though various contraceptive measures were known in the ancient world, there is nothing against birth control. It would be better to follow the teachings that are in the Bible than to worry about ideas that are not.

There is one passage in the Bible that is sometimes quoted to show that God is against birth control, and that is the story of Onan, son of Judah. But when you read it, you find it is about something quite different. Here's the story. In Genesis (38) after Judah's first son was killed, he told his second son "(8) Go in unto thy brother's wife (Tamar), and marry her, and raise up seed to thy brother. (9) And Onan knew that the seed should not be his; and it came to pass, when he went in unto his brother's wife, that he spilled it on the ground, lest that he should give seed to his brother. (10) And the thing which he did displeased the Lord: wherefore he slew him." (King James version)

It was Onan's failure to impregnate his brother's wife that was displeasing to God. Under the law (Deuteronomy 25:5-10) that child would have been his brother's child, not his. He broke the law by not "giving seed to his brother," that is, fathering a child that would not have been legally his. It would not have mattered whether Onan went into the tent and pretended to have sex with Tamar, or flat-out refused. Either way, he would have been disobeying the will of God and would have been killed.

So it is in error that this story is quoted as showing something about birth control, rather than about legal parentage of children and brotherly responsibility, as was the original intent.

So Christians and Jews who take the Bible literally as the word of God cannot really find there any reason to oppose birth control. And given the population crisis which is looming over our planet, perhaps we can honor instead God's many injunctions to take care of His beautiful creation and His creatures which live upon it, over which he has given us dominion and which He commanded that we rule with care.

Abortion

People often assume that the discussion about birth control must somehow include a debate about abortion. But that's not really so. Birth control is critical to empowering humanity to choose the size of our population. And birth control empowers individual people to decide the size they want for their own families. But abortion accounts for such a tiny proportion of prevention of births that whatever your feeling about it need not affect your support for birth control as a necessary means of being good stewards of God's creation.

Still, for all the controversy about abortion, it is amazing that there is absolutely nothing in the Bible about it. We know that various herbs and procedures were available in Biblical times. But if God or Jesus thought it was as important as some people today seem to think, wouldn't they have said something pretty major about it? After all, the Bible contains 22 references to the prohibition on usury, but most preachers and politicians think nothing about getting bank loans, then why are they so worked up about some trapped family having to make the painful personal decision to terminate a pregnancy?

Some people act as if they know what God thinks about birth control and abortion, but much of the wisdom of the Bible is that the mind of God and His plan for the future is unknowable, and anyone who claims differently is not to be trusted. We at IfPopS believe that it is quite possible to support population control and birth control without condoning - or even debating - abortion.

It is ours to choose what kind of world this will be in 20 or 40 years. It is ours to choose whether our grandchildren will live with chronic shortages of food and water, packed into high-rise apartment buildings, or whether they can walk the fields and see the stars at night. And since the choice is ours, we might as well choose the best possible future for ourselves and for them. This may at times require sacrifices, such as not having large numbers of children. But this is what God asked from us when He gave us this wonderful planet.