As a matter of fact, “by the turn of the [twentieth] century, the [average] birth rate among white middle-class women had fallen dramatically to two children or less.”64 This was in spite of broad opposition to contraceptives from those in the medical profession, as well as laws banning their sale and distribution. In the United States, Anthony Comstock persuaded Congress in 1873 to legislate against the distribution and sale of contraceptive devices in federal territories. Many states followed suit, and the resulting anti-contraceptive legislation became known as the Comstock laws.65
Following closely on the heels of women winning the right to vote in the United States in 1920, Margaret Sanger and others began to wage open war on the Comstock laws. In 1921, Sanger founded the American Birth Control League, working out of an office provided by the American Eugenics Society.
The eugenics movement had grown out of the Malthusian (Malthus) movement. These two movements had much in common, but they differed in that the Malthusians wanted to decrease the total number of people being born, while the eugenics movement mainly wanted to limit the fertility of the poor and the unfit.66 Specifically, “Eugenics is the belief that some people (the ‘unfit’) are genetically inferior and should not perpetuate their ‘subpar’ genes by having children.”67 It is an open secret that Margaret Sanger, the mother of the birth control movement, was a eugenicist.
Sanger, born in 1879 in Corning, New York, “was raised in a stridently socialist, feminist, and atheist home. Her father ‘deplored’ the Roman Catholic Church.”68 She was the sixth of eleven children, and Margaret believed that so many pregnancies took a toll on her mother’s health, contributing to her early death at the age of forty-two. Margaret became a nurse, and the thing that got her out of bed every morning was her unbridled passion for the availability and use of contraceptives. She had her own reasons for choosing to serve the poor and marginalized, but it is safe to say that her writings never indicate any concern for poor children. In 1914, “she launched her publication The Woman Rebel, under the masthead, ‘No God, No Masters.’ The same year, she popularized the phrase, ‘birth control.’”69
For seven years, Margaret kept her office at the American Eugenics Society, years that included the 1929 stock market crash and the worldwide depression that followed. These events placed great economic, social, and psychological strains on the average family. Millions of people lost their savings as numerous banks collapsed in the early 1930s. During this time, Sanger’s ideas became more and more appealing.
Although Sanger had left her original organization over an ideological dispute, the organization eventually reunited in 1939, under the name Birth Control Federation of America. Within a short period of time, the words “birth control” became a public-relations nightmare, and so, in 1942, the organization was renamed the Planned Parenthood Federation of America.70
No one can deny the tremendous influence Margaret Sanger had on the practices and moral thinking of her day, and even more so today. The pressures she generated were highly influential in removing the legal, religious, and social barriers to contraception and then abortion. The contraceptionists frequently advocated a whole new concept of marriage.
John F. Kippley, founder of the Couple to Couple League, talks about this in his article “Casti Connubii: 60 Years Later, More Relevant Than Ever”: “They denied the divine origin and the permanence of marriage and made efficient contraception the technological cornerstone of ‘companionate’ marriage — a serial polygamy consisting of legal marriage, efficient contraception, divorce when boredom set in, and then remarriage to start the process over.”71
Eventually, the Comstock law was repealed. Even so, to finally succeed in her march to legalize birth control, Margaret Sanger needed to focus on a larger and more influential enemy. The Catholic Church fit the bill perfectly. In an article entitled “Sanger’s Victory,” Allan Carlson, president of the Howard Center for Family, Religion & Society confirms this:
Opposition to Catholicism suited Sanger personally. Her father had tutored her on the presumed evils and dangers of Rome. Moreover, her study of and involvement in socialist activities before the war had taught her the value of a clearly identified foe when launching a social-political movement. Already marginalized in American life, Catholics were the obvious choice. In her desire to gain a sacred canopy for birth control, she could easily play on four-century-old [hostilities] between Protestants and Catholics to bring the former to her side.72
Here it is interesting to note that for four hundred years after the Protestant Reformation in the sixteenth century, birth control was never seen as a Catholic versus Protestant issue. As a matter of fact, the Comstock laws were essentially passed by Protestant legislatures for a basically Protestant America.
Few people realize that up until 1930, “all Protestant denominations agreed with the Catholic Church’s teaching condemning contraception as sinful.”73 However, at its 1930 Lambeth Conference,74 the Anglican church, swayed by growing social pressure from Margaret Sanger and others, announced that contraception would be allowed in some circumstances:
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 discipleship 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 records its strong condemnation of the use of any methods of conception-control for motives of selfishness, luxury, or mere convenience.75
The Anglican bishops reluctantly accepted marital contraception as morally licit without even elaborating on what they meant by “Christian principles.” In spite of this, they could not hide from the fact that, in previous years, they had always taught that marital contraception was immoral, as evidenced in this statement from the 1920 Lambeth Conference: “We utter an emphatic warning against the use of unnatural means for the avoidance of conception, together with the grave dangers — physical, moral, and religious — thereby incurred, and against the evils with which the extension of such use threatens the race.”76
These statements from the 1920 and 1930 Lambeth Conferences show how quickly the culture had changed in just ten years. In fact, soon after the 1930 Lambeth Conference, the Anglican Communion completely caved in, allowing contraception across the board. “Since then, all other Protestant denominations have followed suit. Today, the Catholic Church alone proclaims the historic Christian position on contraception.”77
This sudden change in Anglican teaching was so upsetting to Pope Pius XI that he responded by writing his encyclical letter Casti Connubii (“Of Chaste Marriage”), which was released on December 31, 1930, just four months after the Lambeth Conference. “Those who had thought Pius XI was only a dry historian were surprised to discover that the passionate tone of the encyclical revealed the heart of a true father of peoples, a priest, a human being, full of feeling and love for mankind.”78
The document covers a wide range of topics concerning Christian marriage and reproductive rights, and in doing so it gives us an interesting window into the Church’s perception of the social and religious situation surrounding marriage and procreation at the time. Casti Connubii, which describes point by point the characteristics of a Christian marriage, is perhaps the Church’s most complete teaching on the subject of Christian marriage.
Pope Pius XI was a serious man, this was a serious time, and, as we will see, this is a serious document. Responding to the Anglican resolution at Lambeth, Pope Pius spoke forcefully and in no uncertain terms about the Church’s unchanged position on contraception:
Since,