“If contraception is really so wrong, why doesn’t it say
so in the Bible?” This is a question that Catholics often
hear from Protestants, and sometimes priests even hear
this from some Catholics. That the Bible is the sole,
ultimate theological authority is, of course, a very
Protestant point of view. As Catholics, we also have the
Tradition of the Church and the Magisteriam or teaching
authority of the Church. Contrary to popular belief,
Tradition, the Magisteriam and the Bible are in
agreement when it comes to the question of
contraception.
That there is no specific prohibition of contraception in
the Ten Commandments is a reflection of a society with
a mindset that puts the highest value on having children
rather than an omission on the part of God. When God
made His Covenant with Noah after the waters of the
Great Flood had receded, He said to Noah and his sons
(and by implication to us) “Be fruitful and multiply, and fill
the Earth” (Gen 9:1). God did not add a caveat to that to
the effect that we should stop at 6 billion or so. In fact
the desire for children was so great that when giving the
Law to Moses, God included the so-called levirate law,
which was actually practiced even before Israel went to
Egypt. The levirate law required a man to marry his
brother’s widow and get children by her for his dead
brother, if the deceased brother left no children! (Deut.
25:5-6).
This brings us to the only instance of contraception in
Sacred Scripture. Er, the first born son of Judah, was
married to Tamar, but died before fathering children.
Judah required his next son Onan to marry Tamar to get
children by her for his late brother, but Onan spilt his
seed rather than father children by Tamar. For this God
slew him (Gen. 38:7-10). That seems to be a pretty
unequivocal condemnation of contraception. Some
Scripture scholars try to explain this away by saying that
Onan was punished not for contraception but for his lack
of generosity to his late brother. This is specious
reasoning at its best (or worst), but these scholars
unwittingly do hit on one important Truth: Contraception
is a lack of generosity; a lack of generosity both to God
and to the possible child.
Tamar, for her part, was so desperate to get children
for her first husband Er that she tricked Judah into
fathering them! This sad and sordid story underscores
how important children were; so much so that the very
idea of contraception, of not wanting children, was so far
from the norm as not to be considered.
Jesus Himself testifies to this attitude when, on the way
to Calvary, He meets the women of Jerusalem and tells
them not to weep for Him, but for themselves and their
children by saying “For behold the days are coming when
they will say ’Blessed are the barren and the wombs that
never bore…’ ”(Luke 23:29). So while Scripture may not
explicitly forbid contraception, it does implicitly forbid it.
One of the earliest documents of the Church, the
Didache, or “Teaching of the Twelve Apostles”, which
dates to about the year 110 AD and is early enough that
its author knew firsthand the teachings of the Apostles,