I talked about women’s health in church.
I am on my church’s young adult leadership team, a group of five that plans our Sunday School curriculum for the semester, prays for our fellow congregants, and plans opportunities to hang out. I really appreciate how much autonomy our church leadership gives us to choose what we study in the Sunday School hour in between services— never have we received a set of rules or been told that a certain topic was off-limits. This semester we chose to open the floor for folks to lead discussions on difficult topics— including sexuality, technology, abortion, capitalism, money, etc etc. I talked about women’s health yesterday and I thought I’d share here what I brought forward.
Good morning and welcome, thank you all for being here. I am truly excited to talk about this— I realized this morning that I have never heard women’s health discussed in church in my life and I think that’s a huge miss. To provide some background I will first share a bit about myself and my work in this area. I am an RN and have worked most recently as the nurse manager at a private OB/GYN practice, that is, a clinic taking care of women who are pregnant and for women across the lifespan for any gynecologic needs. Previously I worked at the Nashville Public Health Department as a nurse providing birth control to uninsured women through a federal grant, most of whom were undocumented, and briefly on a labor and delivery unit as a nurse and also as a volunteer doula while in college. I care a lot about this topic and my mind has changed on it quite a bit over the years, too.
By mentioning women’s health, I mean specifically biologically female issues, for those who have the potential to create, carry, and feed babies through our reproductive system. That is a subject of anatomy and physiology, medicine and gynecology. However, I consider women’s health and fertility intimately tied with other topics, too, including sex & marriage, and also ethics, theology, sociology, even the economy. I can’t go into great detail on all of these connections this morning and I do not wish to change any minds or make any grand statements today except to point out that these complex things sit much closer to one another than you might have previously thought and that the status quo in our society ought to be poked at. I’d like to narrow down today to a discussion on contraception and to start, I’ll give a bit of context around Protestantism’s history around contraception, briefly read from our good friend Wendell Berry, and then give us a few questions to discuss in small groups.
In short, any kind of contraception was outrightly condemned by Protestants from the Reformation on until the early 1900’s, when no medical intervention was available to prevent pregnancy in the ways with which we are familiar. Calvin referred to a rather upsetting passage in Genesis 38:9, where a man named Onan “spilled his seed” and God killed him; Calvin condemned Onan’s “spilling” as murder. Some Post-Enlightenment liberal theology that emerged in the early 1900’s first supported the use of it which was then followed by the Lambeth Conference of 1930, in which Anglican bishops formally stated that married couples could intentionally prevent pregnancy. They stated,
“Where there is a clearly felt moral obligation to limit or avoid parenthood, the method must be decided on Christian principles. The primary and obvious method is complete abstinence from intercourse (as far as may be necessary) in a life of discipline and self-control lived in the power of the Holy Spirit. Nevertheless, in those cases where there is such a clearly felt moral obligation to limit or avoid parenthood, and where there is a morally sound reason for avoiding complete abstinence, the Conference agrees that other methods may be used, provided that this is done in the light of the same Christian principles."
The conference also stated,
“The Conference records its strong condemnation of the use of any methods of conception-control from motives of selfishness, luxury, or mere convenience."
The shift to sanctioning contraception happened quickly amongst Protestant denominations and as birth control technology advanced (with the birth control pill’s FDA approval in 1960), most Protestant denominations became comfortable leaving the decision of family planning to an individual couple’s private discernment. The majority of Protestants and Catholics practice some kind of birth control now, whether through hormonal contraceptives, barrier methods, or through fertility awareness methods.
Before we move to discussion, I want to read an excerpt from Wendell Berry’s marvelous essay, Feminism, the Body, and the Machine. As you listen, consider medical contraceptive methods as what they are— technology.
“The danger most immediately to be feared in “technological progress” is the degradation and obsolescence of the body. Implicit in the technological revolution from the beginning has been a new version of an old dualism, one always destructive, and now more destructive than ever. For many centuries there have been people who looked upon the body, as upon the natural world, as an encumbrance of the soul, and so have hated the body, as they have hated the natural world, and longed to be free of it. They have seen the body as intolerably imperfect by spiritual standards. More recently, since the beginning of the technological revolution, more and more people have looked upon the body, along with the rest of the natural creation, as intolerably imperfect by mechanical standards. They see the body as an encumbrance of the mind— the mind, that is, as reduced to a set of mechanical ideas that can be implemented in machines— and so they hate it and long to be free of it. The body has limits that machine does not have; therefore, remove the body from the machine so that the machine can continue as an unlimited idea.
It is odd that simply because of its “sexual freedom” our time should be considered extraordinarily physical. In fact, our “sexual revolution” is mostly an industrial phenomenon, in which the body is used as an idea of pleasure or pleasure machine with the aim of “freeing” natural pleasure from natural consequence. Like any other industrial enterprise, industrial sexuality seeks to conquer nature by exploiting it and ignoring the consequences, by denying any connection between nature and spirit or body and soul, and by evading social responsibility. [emphasis added] The spiritual, physical, and economic costs of this “freedom” are immense, and are characteristically belittled or ignored. The diseases of sexual irresponsibility are regarded as a technological problem and an affront to liberty. Industrial sex, characteristically, establishes its freeness and goodness by an industrial accounting, dutifully toting up numbers of “sexual partners,” orgasms, and so one, with the inevitable industrial implication that the body is somehow a limit on the idea of sex, which will be a great deal more abundant as soon as it can be done by robots.”
And now, here are questions to discuss.
What role should a married man play in family planning? Is family planning primarily the woman’s responsibility? Ought it to be so?
Hormonal birth control used for pregnancy prevention disrupts and effectively shuts down a normal, healthy function of the female body. Do you think our freedom in Christ gives us license to practice discernment in using HBC/do you think God condones or condemns its use? Discuss theological and ethical implications.
If you have time:
How can the church approach issues around women’s health (including family planning, infertility, pregnancy, & pregnancy loss) with sensitivity and conviction?
There were about 20 people in the room (which had me sweating) and we had about 45 minutes together. It was fun and interesting (to me, at least!) and also left me somewhat frustrated and bummed that we are communally so poorly versed in knowledge of the female body and fertility. Birth control technology helps in some ways and hurts in others and I think it definitely hurts us not to consider its implications.
Hello Ruthie!
As a new subscriber (this post was amazing), thank you for offering such deep reflections on fertility, women’s health, and the church’s need to engage these topics more honestly. Since getting married, my wife and I have often reflected on how little we were taught in church about women’s bodies, sexual health, and reproduction—topics that were treated as taboo, if not shameful.
This silence not only made the female body seem like something dangerous or primarily provocative, but it also left us without a framework for understanding what’s good or healthy in a sexual context. I’m currently writing a piece about the need for a framework of sexual formation—one that modernity and postmodernity often fail to offer. But reading your piece, I found myself thinking: maybe the church hasn’t offered one either. Because if being sexually formed means aligning our sexuality with Christ’s design, how could that ever be separated from conversations about sexual health?
I was recently introduced to the story of Onan and his “spilled seed,” and I remember thinking, “Why have I never heard of this? Why has no one ever talked about this verse?” I didn’t walk away opposed to birth control—but I was surprised that such a theologically loaded passage had been so widely glossed over.
One last thought (and then I promise to stop writing a whole essay in your comments!)—I’ve also been fascinated by how industrialization has shaped our entire framework for sexuality. Sometimes when I imagine a world without contraception, where sex is always potentially tied to childbearing, it feels… radical. Even reckless. And then I realize: for most of history, that was simply normal. People lived with the consequences of sex—and saw it as sacred because of those consequences.
Thank you again for sharing this—it was both challenging and refreshing. I’m really looking forward to reading more from you.
Ruthie, thanks for this. Grateful for you and that crew of young adults, and I wish we'd been there to be part of the conversation!