A global partnership called Family Planning 2020 was launched in 2012, in conjunction with the United Nations Population Fund, USAID and the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation. The partnership’s goal is to “add 120 million contraception users across 69 target countries by 2020”. Who are their target countries? Poor and developing nations.
Dr. Babatunde Osetimehin, co-chair at Family Planning 2020 and executive director of United Nations Family Planning, says in a November 2015 press release: “Access to voluntary family planning saves and transforms lives. It empowers women and offers a pathway out of poverty.”
I cannot think of anything less empowering to a woman than contraception. A society that promotes contraception says to women: we don’t want all of you; mind, body and soul. We just want your body. Leave your mind and your soul at the door.
Contraception falsifies the conjugal act of love between husband and wife, by preventing the gift of life. The Catechism of the Catholic Church says:
Thus, the innate language that expresses the total reciprocal self-giving of husband and wife is overlaid, through contraception, by an objectively contradictory language, namely, that of not giving oneself totally to the other…The difference, both anthropological and moral, between contraception and recourse to the rhythm of the cycle…involves in the final analysis two irreconcilable concepts of the human person and of human sexuality. (COC 2370)
Contraception is not a solution to poverty. Anyone who honestly believes that is lying to themselves. It’s a quick fix band-aid to a much more deeply rooted issue. The dignity of the human family, as the most important institution God has gifted us, must be respected and preserved.
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