QUOTATION: Contraception and Abortion

We need to realize that a society in which contraceptives are widely used is going to have a very difficult time keeping free of abortions since the lifestyles and attitudes that contraception fosters create an alleged 'need' for abortion.

--Janet Smith

QUOTATION: Contraception

It was the Catholic Church's firm stand against contraception and abortion which finally made me decide to become a Catholic.

Contraception and abortion have made havoc both for the young and for the old.  The terrible things that are going on, the precocious sexual practices of children, the debauchery in universities, making eroticism an end and not a means, are a consequence of violating the natural order of things. As the Romans treated eating as an end in itself, making themselves sick in a vomitorium so as to enable them to return to the table and stuff themselves with more delicacies, so people now up in a sort of sexual vomitorium. The Church's stand is absolutely correct. It is to its eternal honour that it opposed contraception, even if the opposition failed.  I think, historically, people will say it was a very gallant effort to prevent a moral disaster.

--Malcolm Muggeridge, Conversion: A Spiritual Journey

QUOTATION: Contraception

Contraception is the selfish practice of mutual masturbation. Each partner uses the other person to heighten his or her sexual pleasure, while excluding the willingness to accept whatever children God may want to give them.

--Fr. John A. Hardon, "Contraception Feeds Social Decline"

QUOTATION: The Purpose of Contraception

Contraception was not invented to prevent pregnancy. We already had a 100% reliable way of doing that - abstinence. In the final analysis, contraception serves one purpose: to spare us the difficulty we experience when confronted with the choice of abstinence.

--Christopher West

QUOTATION: Contraception -- The Ends Do Not Justify the Means

Though it is true that sometimes it is lawful to tolerate a lesser moral evil in order to avoid a greater evil or in order to promote a greater good, it is never lawful, even for the gravest reasons, to do evil that good may come of it — in other words, to intend directly something which of its very nature contradicts the moral order, and which must therefore be judged unworthy of man, even though the intention is to protect or promote the welfare of an individual, of a family or of society in general. Consequently, it is a serious error to think that a whole married life of otherwise normal relations can justify sexual intercourse which is deliberately contraceptive and so intrinsically wrong.

--Pope Paul VI

QUOTATION: Birth Control

Birth control - the words are not very proper because those who believe in it actually believe neither in birth or control.

--Archbishop Fulton J. Sheen

QUOTATION: Contraception

The root principle of birth-control is unsound. It is a glorification of the means and a contempt of the end; it says that the pleasure which is a means to the procreation of children is good, but the children themselves are no good. In other words, to be logical, the philosophy of birth-control would commit us to a world in which trees were always blooming but never giving fruit, a world full of sign-posts that were leading nowhere. In this cosmos every tree would be a barren fig-tree and for that reason would have upon it the curse of God.

--Archbishop Fulton J. Sheen

QUOTATION: The Nominal Christian

No decent person wants free love; no decent person wants race suicide. They live, therefore, not by principle but by a compromise between principles; they are in favour of divorce, but not of easy divorce, of small families but not of too small families. Consequently, they feel themselves responsible for the decision where exactly the line shall be drawn, within the generous limits which our legal system allows. They do not like the responsibility; who would? Who, in tampering with institutions so sacred as those of the family, would not like to feel that he had an authority behind him, a "warrant" from somewhere to ratify his behaviour? If only there were some great spiritual institution which would act, in these matters, as a sort of public conscience, guiding, from a higher point of vision, the moral choice made by the individual!

So, naturally, he feels; unfortunately, he does not feel that the views of any non-Catholic denomination are worth having, even if they are discoverable. He knows that the advice of an individual clergyman will be unofficial and inexpert. He knows, if he has followed the course of recent ecclesiastical deliberations, that representatives of Christian thought speak with an uncertain voice on such subjects. He respects our Church for having, at least, definite opinions and fixed rules. He respects it, although he disagrees with it. He thinks us far too severe in forbidding remarriage after divorce, in forbidding the artificial restriction of the family; but although he disagrees with us for the rules we have, he respects us for having rules. If only the people whom we value as advisers would give us the advice we want!

--Msgr Ronald Knox, The Belief of Catholics, 1927

QUOTATION: Contraception

What Paul VI wanted to say, and what is still correct as a main vision, is that if we separate sexuality and fecundity from each other in principle, which is what the use of the pill does, then sexuality becomes arbitrary. Logically, ever form of sexuality is of equal value.

--Pope Benedict XVI, Light of the World, 2010