What about contraception?

Question 12015

Birth control is one of those subjects on which Christians have grown noticeably quieter, and I think that silence has left couples to work it out alone with very little help. The Bible does not address the modern question directly. That is not the end of the matter, but it does mean anyone claiming absolute certainty here is claiming more than the text gives.

What Scripture does give us is a strong doctrine of children as blessing, a rich account of marriage and intimacy, a clear commitment to the sanctity of life from conception, and a call to wise stewardship. Those four things, held together, will get a thoughtful couple a long way.

Children are treated as a blessing, not a burden

Start where Scripture starts. “Behold, children are a heritage from the LORD, the fruit of the womb a reward” (Psalm 127:3). The mandate to “be fruitful and multiply” is given at creation and repeated after the Flood (Genesis 1:28; Genesis 9:1). Barrenness is portrayed throughout the Old Testament as grief, and the opening of a womb as divine kindness.

That framework sits awkwardly against a culture that often treats children as an expensive lifestyle option to be deferred indefinitely. Before a Christian couple asks anything about birth control, they should ask whether their attitude towards having children has been shaped by Scripture or by a set of assumptions absorbed from everyone around them.

I put it that way deliberately, because I have found that the method question is rarely the real question. The heart question underneath is whether children are welcomed as gift or managed as risk, and that one is worth praying over properly.

The passage that is usually misused

The text most often produced in this discussion is the account of Onan in Genesis 38:8-10, who “wasted the semen on the ground” and whom the Lord put to death. It has carried an enormous weight of argument for centuries, and I do not think it can bear it.

Read the reason the text itself supplies. Onan was under the levirate obligation to raise up offspring for his dead brother. He was willing to take the pleasure and refuse the duty, defrauding his brother’s line and his widow. The sin named is the deceit and the refusal, not the physical act by which he accomplished it.

That matters methodologically. If we build a doctrine of birth control on a narrative whose stated concern is something else entirely, we are not doing exegesis. We are decorating a conclusion we already held.

Intimacy has purposes beyond conception

Some argue that every act of marital intimacy must remain open to procreation. Scripture does not say so. 1 Corinthians 7:3-5 treats the sexual relationship as mutual obligation and mutual delight, and Paul’s stated concern is not fruitfulness but the protection of the marriage from temptation.

The Song of Songs celebrates desire at length without a single reference to children. Proverbs tells a husband to “rejoice in the wife of your youth” and be “intoxicated always in her love” (Proverbs 5:18-19). Genesis grounds the one-flesh union in companionship before any child appears (Genesis 2:18-24).

A theology that reduces marital intimacy to reproduction has flattened something Scripture treats as multi-layered. Union, comfort, delight and protection are all present in the biblical material, and none of them require a conception to be legitimate.

Stewardship and the case for birth control

Paul says that anyone who does not provide for his household “has denied the faith and is worse than an unbeliever” (1 Timothy 5:8). Jesus commends counting the cost before building (Luke 14:28). Thoughtful planning is not a failure of trust.

There are real considerations. A mother’s health may make another pregnancy dangerous. A family may be stretched to the limit caring for a child with profound needs. Mental health, financial collapse, a season of instability, all of these are legitimate factors in a prayerful decision about birth control rather than excuses to be embarrassed about.

What I would guard against is the endless deferral. “When we are more settled” has a way of becoming a permanent condition, and no couple is ever fully ready. Wisdom weighs genuine constraints. It does not manufacture them.

The distinction that actually carries moral weight

Here is the point I want couples to grasp above all others, because it is the one with real ethical content. There is a difference between methods that prevent conception and methods that may act after conception has occurred.

If personhood begins at conception, and I believe Scripture indicates that it does (Psalm 139:13-16; Jeremiah 1:5), then a method which prevents a fertilised embryo from implanting is not preventing a life. It is ending one. That is a different moral category altogether, and it deserves to be named plainly rather than left in the small print.

Barrier methods and natural family planning prevent conception and raise no such concern. Hormonal methods are more complicated, since their primary action is to prevent ovulation, while a secondary mechanism affecting implantation is at least possible according to the manufacturers’ own literature. Couples should understand how their chosen method actually works before they use it, and their doctor is the right person to ask.

Permanent measures

Sterilisation raises its own questions, because it is not easily reversed. A couple contemplating it should be honest about whether they are closing a door that God may yet want open, and should ideally reach the decision together, unhurried, and after real prayer rather than in the exhausted weeks after a difficult birth.

I would not call it sin. I would call it a decision of a different order from a reversible method, and I would want it treated with corresponding seriousness. Circumstances change. Bereavement, remarriage, unexpected provision, all of these have caused people to wish they had waited.

Where conscience and charity meet

Christians land in genuinely different places on this, from full openness to careful planning, and I have known godly couples across that range. Paul’s treatment of disputable matters is the right register: “Let not the one who eats despise the one who abstains, and let not the one who abstains pass judgment on the one who eats” (Romans 14:3).

That cuts both ways in church life. Large families should not be regarded as eccentric or irresponsible. Couples with one child, or none, should not be interrogated about it, particularly since you rarely know what grief sits behind the answer. I have learned to ask far fewer questions of that kind than I once did.

Praying about it rather than defaulting into it

Most couples never actually decide about birth control. They drift into a pattern set by their doctor, their friends or their student years, and then find twelve years have gone by without a single conversation about it before God. That drift is the thing I would most want to interrupt.

James says that if any of us lacks wisdom, we should ask God, “who gives generously to all without reproach” (James 1:5). This is exactly the sort of question that invitation covers. It is specific, it is genuinely difficult, and Scripture does not hand us a rule, which is precisely when wisdom is promised.

Practically, that means revisiting the question at intervals rather than treating it as settled for ever at twenty-three. Circumstances change. Health changes. Convictions deepen. A couple who pray about this together every few years will make better decisions than one who never raises it, and they will find that the conversation itself does something good for the marriage.

There is one more group I want to speak to directly, because they are usually the quietest people in the room during a discussion like this. Some couples are not choosing anything. They have wanted a child for years and none has come, and every conversation about family planning lands on them like a stone. If that is you, I am sorry, and I have sat with that grief often enough not to offer you a tidy sentence about it.

What I would say is that Scripture never treats a childless marriage as a lesser marriage. Hannah, Elizabeth and Sarah are not presented as women of deficient faith. Paul had no biological children and called Timothy “my true child in the faith” (1 Timothy 1:2). Fruitfulness in the New Testament is a far wider thing than biology, and it is never withheld from anyone who wants it.

So, now what?

Birth control is not a black-and-white biblical issue, and I would be cautious of anyone offering more certainty than the text supplies. What is clear is that children are a blessing to be welcomed, that intimacy in marriage has value beyond conception, that stewardship is legitimate, and that any method which may end a life at its earliest stage demands serious thought.

So approach it prayerfully and together. Ask what your attitude to children says about your trust in God. Find out how your chosen method actually works. And extend to other couples the charity you would want extended to you. You may also find the wider question of family planning, when human life begins and the questions raised by IVF helpful.

“Behold, children are a heritage from the LORD, the fruit of the womb a reward.”

Psalm 127:3 (ESV)