Concerning Birth Control

The World Council of Churches marched straight into a longstanding moral controversy last week, appeared to come close to outright endorsement of artificial birth control.

The council, representing some 171 Protestant, Anglican and Orthodox denominations, emphasized that it was making no official decision. (Said one official: "We are no Vatican; we issue no edicts.") But in Geneva, the council secretariat authorized publication of a study group's report that reached a dramatic, clear-cut conclusion: "Limiting or spacing of children is a morally valid thesis . . . There appears to be no moral distinction between the means now known and practiced--whether by the use of estimated periods of fertility [i.e., "rhythm" system], or of artificial barriers to the meeting of sperm and ovum [i.e., contraceptives], or indeed of drugs which would, if made effective and safe, inhibit or control ovulation in a calculable way."

Marriage Freedom. The report was written in England by a 21-member committee of theologians, physicians and sociologists under Congregationalist Dr. Norman Goodall, sixtyish, who is secretary of the Joint Committee of the World Council of Churches and the International Missionary Council. The committee substantially accepted the official Anglican and Episcopal position--spelled out at last year's Lambeth Conference (TIME, Sept. 8, 1958)--that there are two, separable, equally moral reasons for marital intercourse: procreation and sexual love.

The committee based part of its argument on a statement of practical problems: the worldwide "population explosion," high incidence of abortion, Christianity's occasional tendency to escape reality by taking refuge in tradition. Says the report: "The extremely high rates of abortion in many regions, Eastern and Western, with their toll of human suffering and violation of personality, testify to a tragic determination among parents to find some means, however bad, to prevent unwanted births." The committee added: "It must be confessed that in the past Christian thought has, especially in the area of the family and its relationships, often clung to tradition without taking into account new knowledge. In the current age, God is calling upon us not to desert the eternal Christian truth but to apply it to the changing circumstances of the modern world."

True marriage and parenthood, said the committee, are areas in which the Christian is permitted freedom of twofold kind: "This means freedom from sensuality and selfishness which enslave. It also means considerable latitude of choice, when the motives are right, in regard to mutually acceptable and noninjurious means to avert or defer conception." The only controlling factor: individual conscience. God has put it up to husband and wife to decide for themselves, said the committee, "whether any one act of intercourse shall be for the enrichment or expression of their personal relationship only, or for the begetting of a child also . . . Sexual intercourse within marriage has in itself a goodness given by God, even when there is neither the possibility nor the immediate intention to beget children."

Marriage Responsibility. The World Council report brought quick reaction from Roman Catholics. The Vatican expressed "regret"; from the Catholic position, the Rev. John Ford, Jesuit professor of moral theology at Washington's Catholic University, argued that use of artificial contraceptives is a violation of natural law. Said Ford: "In no circumstances is it morally permissible to have intercourse while deliberately destroying the physical integrity of the marriage act ... There is an essential moral difference between abstaining from an act and performing it while at the same time mutilating it. One means is in accordance with nature, and the other is not."

The World Council's own ranks were not entirely solid, either. When the report comes up for approval by the council's general assembly in 1961, the Eastern Orthodox churches will almost certainly oppose its adoption. The Orthodox Church made sure its own minority dissent was appended to the study-group report, asserted that "parents do not have the right to prevent the creative process of matrimonial intercourse; God entrusted to them this responsibility for childbearing, with full confidence that His Providence would take care of material and other needs."

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