What is the Biblical View on Family Planning and Reproductive Choices?

Question 12054.

Family planning is one of the few subjects where Christians hold strong private convictions and say almost nothing publicly, which means couples often work it out alone, with no biblical teaching at all and a good deal of unspoken guilt.

I want to change that a little. Not by handing down a rule about how many children a Christian couple should have, because Scripture does not give one, but by putting the biblical furniture in the room so that a couple can think and pray with something more than instinct.

What Scripture says before we reach family planning

Children are described as a heritage from the LORD, the fruit of the womb a reward, Psalm 127:3. That is the settled biblical posture and it is worth pausing on, because our culture speaks of children mainly as a cost, a constraint or a lifestyle choice. Scripture speaks of them as a gift.

The command to be fruitful and multiply is given to humanity at creation and again after the flood. It is a blessing on the human race rather than a quota imposed on each marriage, and the New Testament nowhere repeats it as a requirement for individual couples. But it does tell us God’s disposition. He is in favour of life.

So any Christian approach to family planning begins in a place of welcome rather than management. If the underlying assumption is that children are an obstacle to the life we had planned, no amount of careful reasoning about method will fix what is wrong.

Is family planning itself permitted?

I believe it is. Scripture nowhere forbids a couple from making thoughtful decisions about the timing and number of their children, and the one passage usually cited against it, the account of Onan in Genesis 38, is about a man refusing his covenant duty to raise up offspring for his dead brother, not about contraception as such. What God judged was the treachery, not the technique.

Proverbs commends planning and foresight throughout, and Paul expects believers to provide for their households. Deciding prayerfully how many children you can raise, feed and disciple is an exercise of exactly that wisdom. I would not call family planning an act of unbelief, though it can certainly become one.

The Roman Catholic position, which permits only natural methods, deserves a respectful hearing even though I do not share it. It rests on a theology of the marital act that I do not find in Scripture, and Protestants have generally concluded that the same reasoning would forbid a good deal that Scripture leaves free. My answer on contraception goes into the detail.

Where the line does fall

There is a real distinction between preventing conception and ending a life that has begun. Personhood begins at conception. The language of Psalm 139:13-16, where God forms the inward parts and knits the child together in the womb, and the testimony of Jeremiah 1:5, attribute full personal significance to life before birth. My answer on when human life begins sets that out in full.

That means any method which works by preventing the implantation of an already fertilised embryo raises a question that a Christian cannot wave away, and couples deserve honest information about how a given method actually functions rather than reassurance. I would rather a couple asked an awkward question of their doctor than carried an uneasy conscience for years.

It also means abortion is a different category of question altogether, not a variety of family planning. I have addressed that separately, and I would not want anything in this article to blur the two.

Method, motive and conscience

Christians who agree that family planning is permitted still differ about method, and I think that is a matter for conscience rather than for church rules. Barrier methods raise no question about a life already begun. Hormonal methods work primarily by preventing ovulation, though the possibility of a secondary effect after fertilisation has been argued over for decades, and the honest answer is that the evidence is disputed rather than settled.

Where evidence is disputed, Romans 14 applies. If a couple cannot use a method with a clear conscience, they should not use it, and nobody should press them. If another couple has weighed the same evidence and is settled, they should not be treated as though they had done something wicked.

Permanent measures such as sterilisation deserve particular care, since they close a door that cannot easily be reopened. I have known couples who were certain at thirty-five and grieving at forty-five, and I have known others for whom it was plainly the right decision. Slow counsel is worth more here than a quick opinion, and family planning decisions that cannot be undone deserve the slowest counsel of all.

Underneath the method question sits the motive question, and it is the one that matters most. God sees the heart, and the same decision can be an act of wisdom in one marriage and an act of self-protection in another. Only one person can tell you which it is in yours, and He is willing to be asked.

The pressures nobody names

Couples make these decisions under pressures they rarely admit to. There is the pressure of housing costs and the assumption that both partners must work. There is the pressure of a culture that treats a large family as eccentric. There is also, in some Christian circles, the opposite pressure, an unspoken competition in which the couple with fewer children feels judged.

None of those pressures is a good reason for anything. A couple should be able to say before God why they have decided as they have, and if the honest answer is that a child would be inconvenient rather than unwise, that is worth confessing rather than defending.

Equally, no church should make family planning a measure of spirituality. I have watched couples endure well-meant remarks about when they are going to start a family from people who had no idea they were in the middle of fertility treatment or grieving a loss.

When the plans do not work

Some couples plan carefully and no child comes. Others lose babies they longed for. This is where all the tidy reasoning about family planning meets something it cannot address, and where the church often fails badly by saying too much.

Scripture does not treat childlessness as evidence of divine displeasure, whatever Job’s comforters would have said. Hannah, Sarah, Rachel and Elizabeth all appear in a narrative that takes their grief seriously. Isaiah speaks of God giving to the barren a name better than sons and daughters, Isaiah 56:5. If that is you, your worth before God is not measured by a family photograph.

What I would ask of congregations who talk easily about family planning is simple. Stop asking couples when they are going to have children. Ask instead how they are, and be ready to sit with an answer that has tears in it.

Deciding well as a couple

Decide together and decide out loud. A great deal of resentment in marriage grows from decisions that were assumed rather than discussed, and family planning is a common site for it. Talk about what you actually believe, not only about what is practical.

Pray about it, which sounds obvious and is routinely skipped. Ask the Lord for wisdom about timing, about your capacity, about the season your marriage is in. And hold your plans loosely, because Scripture has a good deal to say about the man who says he will do this and that, and about the God who quietly rearranges it.

Take counsel from an older believer who will be honest with you. Not to be told what to do, but because most of us are worse at seeing our own motives than we imagine. My answer on dating and marriage may help alongside this one.

So, now what?

If you are married, have the conversation properly rather than by drift. Write down what you are actually deciding and why, and see whether the reasons stand up in the light of Psalm 127. If they do, proceed with a clear conscience and stop apologising to anyone, including the relative who keeps asking.

If you are grieving, whether over a loss or over a child who has not come, take it to the Lord plainly. He is not offended by lament, and Scripture is full of it. Ask an older believer to carry it with you, because grief kept private tends to harden into something else, and there is no prize for enduring it alone. And if you are in a church where this subject is never mentioned, be the person who mentions it gently to someone who needs it mentioned.

Are your decisions about family planning shaped mainly by the culture’s fear of interruption, or by the Lord’s habit of giving good gifts?

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

Psalm 127:3, ESV