Ben Jefferies is an Anglican priest who says he knows that one of his parishioners throws away all the tracts he’s written on “Marriage, Sex, and Babies” when he’s not looking. He keeps them in the lobby of his church, alongside a number of other tracts on “things Anglicans believe.” Jefferies laughs good-naturedly when I ask how his parishioners receive his teaching on contraception. His own belief on the topic, though informed, differs substantially from what most Anglicans believe, at least in practice. In fact, Jefferies’s teaching on the matter is similar to that of the Catholic Church, proffering Natural Family Planning paired with periodic abstinence as the standard means by which Christians should avoid pregnancy.
The Catholic view used to be, well, catholic. Martin Luther and John Calvin regarded contraceptive sexual acts as a grave moral sin; this was the universal Christian position until the 1930 Lambeth Conference, at which Anglican leaders gave their official opinion that contraception was not in all cases sinful. Other denominations quickly followed. But though Protestants on the whole have left behind contraception as a moral issue, a growing number of Protestant women have begun to reject the pill. I interviewed three who are discovering more than Natural Family Planning—they are discovering an embodied faith.
Kelsey Meyers, twenty-five, is a new wife, mom, and lawyer who attends an Anglican church in Washington, D.C., with her husband and infant son. We both fed our babies as we talked on the phone.
Kelsey had been prescribed the birth control pill as a treatment for hormonal acne when she was in high school, and again later when she approached her doctor with symptoms of polycystic ovarian syndrome. But she didn’t like how the pill made her feel, and it didn’t seem to address her symptoms. “Every time I came with an issue, that was the Band-Aid solution that they slapped on it.”
Kelsey’s experience isn’t unique. Women are prescribed hormonal birth control for many issues: acne, mood swings, irregular or painful or heavy periods. In the United States, hormonal birth control is prescribed to girls as young as eleven, and there are neither federal age restrictions for its use nor longitudinal studies of its effects on girls who have yet to undergo puberty.
Once she got engaged, Kelsey researched alternatives to hormonal contraceptives. Catholic friends encouraged her to read Taking Charge of Your Fertility by Toni Weschler and The Genesis of Gender by Abigail Favale. Kelsey began to use the Tempdrop fertility tracker, which uses basal body temperature to track ovulation. She felt that it helped her better understand her body, including some of the symptoms for which she had approached her doctors. “I kind of came to realize that a lot of these things that doctors had told me were wrong with my body, like these longer periods and these longer cycles, were actually just my body operating normally.”
Kelsey began to question the morality of contraception. Whereas Catholics have a well-developed teaching on marriage and sex, including a prohibition on all forms of contraception, the nondenominational Protestant churches in which Kelsey grew up never taught on contraception. Across Protestant churches and denominations, there exists little to no engagement with the morality of contraception or with the Catholic arguments against it. “I would just love to see more Protestant women discussing what a consistent ethic with this is,” Kelsey told me. “I don’t have a consistent theology right now behind it. I’m still learning. But having the conversation is important.”
Chaney Gooley, thirty-three, is one of the few Protestant women I know who refused the use of contraception on almost purely theological grounds. She attends an Anglican church in Alexandria, Virginia, with her husband. But like Kelsey, she first began questioning the morality of contraception due to questions about health: not for herself, but for her future baby.
Through her volunteer work with a pro-life sidewalk ministry, Chaney learned about the potential abortifacient effects of hormonal birth control methods, including the pill. “I would never want to do anything to cause a baby to not have the nutrients it needs to implant in my womb,” she told me on the phone as I watched my children play in the front yard on a warm afternoon in March.
Birth control pills and IUDs work in three main ways to prevent pregnancy: a primary means and two secondary backups. First, they suppress the hormone that triggers ovulation, reducing the likelihood that an egg will be released. Second, in the event of “breakthrough ovulation,” they thicken the cervical mucus that carries the sperm to the egg, providing a physical barrier. Finally, as a fail-safe, they thin the lining of the uterine wall to prevent the implantation of a fertilized egg. “In moral philosophy, that’s an abortion,” Jefferies told me. Breakthrough ovulation—the release of an egg despite the use of hormonal birth control—varies in frequency from woman to woman. Nearly half of all women on the mini-pill (a progestin-only pill) continue to ovulate. Breakthrough ovulation is somewhat less frequent in other forms of hormonal contraception, but women who use it while sexually active for several years are likely to have at least one instance of breakthrough ovulation.
Most pro-life women don’t realize the potential abortifacient effects of hormonal birth control. This is partly because medical experts have changed the definition of “pregnancy.” In 1965, roughly concurrent with the development of the pill and the IUD, the American College of Obstetricians and Gynecologists updated its definition of “pregnancy,” which was now said to begin at implantation rather than fertilization. Hormonal contraceptives were therefore classified as birth control rather than abortifacients. Previously, in medical and lay contexts alike, pregnancy had been understood to begin at fertilization, the moment when a unique organism is created. Just a dozen years before the change in definition, Watson, Crick, and Franklin’s identification of DNA as the chemical signature of a unique living being had brought new insight into that moment of beginning. The change in definition denied a reality that was being understood with greater exactness every year.
Chaney also takes issue with the way hormonal contraception changes the female body. She calls it “antifeminist” to make women’s bodies “more like the male body”—that is, unable to conceive. She thinks that fertility cycle charting should be taught to girls as they enter puberty, to foster “body literacy.” And as a woman with endometriosis, she believes that Natural Family Planning can help diagnose reproductive diseases earlier. (Endometriosis, a known cause of infertility, takes on average seven to nine years to diagnose, despite affecting 10 to 15 percent of women of reproductive age. Symptoms of endometriosis are most often treated with the pill, despite the fact that it does not cure or even curb the underlying condition.)
In addition to gaining a better understanding of her body as God created it, Chaney has realized that there is “a deeper spiritual meaning to keeping the unitive and the procreative purposes of sex united”: She and her husband practice continence during her fertile window when they prefer not to conceive, yet they leave open the possibility of children when they do come together. She compared the marital act to participation in Eucharistic union with Christ: “We are to take and eat and to be united with him, and whether we believe that’s symbolic or literal or somewhere in between, there’s a very real sense in which he has given himself to us on the marriage bed of the cross.”
Ben Jefferies, like many Protestants I’ve talked to, found his way into thinking about contraception through the writings of Pope John Paul II, which he praises for expressing a poetic and poignant view of marriage, despite “being written by a chaste man who was never married.”
Though the Anglican Communion broke with the broader Church’s position on contraception at its Lambeth Conference in 1930, Jefferies reads its resolutions as more aligned with historic Christian teaching than most modern Anglicans do. He reads them as explicitly sanctioning only condoms (since hormonal methods did not yet exist), and only when there is, in his words, a “clearly felt moral obligation to limit or avoid parenthood and . . . a morally sound reason for avoiding complete abstinence.” (Interestingly, Jefferies’s reading of the Lambeth Resolutions on contraception is similar to the stance recommended for the Catholic Church by the Pontifical Commission on Birth Control in the 1960s.) Though Jefferies thinks there are times in the lives of many married couples when both of these provisions are met, he explains that those times are few, and that abstinence (perhaps paired with a fertility awareness–based method) is the only licit means for Christians to avoid conception at all other times.
In defense of his pastoral allowance for the use of barrier methods when circumstances warrant, Jefferies told me that he believes that Pope John Paul II’s phenomenological interpretation of the body does not take “sufficient account for the degree of depth to which things have become broken and muddied by the Fall.” He mentioned specifically the emotional, financial, and health implications of a couple’s having a child “every twelve to eighteen months for a twenty-year window,” which may be the ideal in a perfect world but quite difficult to achieve in our fallen state.
He thinks the Lambeth approach of permitting certain contraceptive methods in some cases at some times is more fitting. “I do sometimes wish that we had a stronger magisterium,” he told me. But he regards “trusting the Holy Spirit to be the teacher” as a more patient and persuasive pedagogy, “so the actual pastoral outcome is comparable or better to what the Roman Catholic Church is getting with their ironclad magisterium.”
Brooks Anderson is a forty-five-year-old birth doula, graduate student, and “not-so-stay-at-home stay-at-home mom” to five children in Albuquerque, New Mexico, where she and her family attend a Presbyterian church. She and her husband have primarily used Natural Family Planning for the nineteen years of their marriage. Her youngest child was born when she was forty-three.
Brooks is the eldest of eight living children. Her parents were influenced by the Quiverfull movement, which teaches that because children are a blessing from the Lord, Christians should try to have as many as possible. Brooks remembers with awe her mom’s pregnancies and births, which impressed her with the miraculousness of the female body.
Brooks fondly described watching her younger sister’s birth when she was six years old. “The doctor put gloves on me and let me feel the placenta and explained how a baby lives and the way that God designed it.” For one of her brother’s births, she cut the umbilical cord. She remembered less fondly her mom’s last pregnancy, at forty-four, when Brooks was a junior in college: “You can’t get away from knowing that your parents are still having sex because there’s your mom, waddling around campus.”
Brooks witnessed five of her seven siblings’ births, including the ones that nearly claimed her mother’s life. Brooks’s parents’ theology has shaped her. But so has the difficulty of her mother’s pregnancies. “I really resented [that] my parents [kept] having children” despite her mother’s rare blood disorder and severe morning sickness. “I was like, ‘I’m not going to do this to myself, right? I’m going to respect myself.’”
She recalls writing a college paper on the question of whether Christians should use birth control, and in the course of writing she encountered Catholic theology of the body. She also learned about the negative effects of hormonal birth control on the female body. Though she ultimately rejected her parents’ maximalist Quiverfull approach, she realized that whether or not to use birth control was a question that merited prayerful consideration. A few years later, she discovered Natural Family Planning, and she came to appreciate the way it honored both the female body and God’s design for marriage and children.
She reflects with satisfaction on the times in her marriage when she and her husband used NFP: “We were not holding sex in a controlling way over one another, and we were both taking our desire, fear, whatever to God individually.”
A 2020 study by the Catholic Medical Association shows a 58-percent decrease in the likelihood of divorce among couples who have used Natural Family Planning. Other studies show an even greater association between NFP and marriage stability. Whether that association is correlative or causal, Brooks emphasized the need of husband and wife to be equally yoked—to be on the same page about these things, and for neither to pressure the other—especially since NFP requires self-control in the form of periodic abstinence.
As her children vied for her attention on the playground, Brooks told me that she had never heard a pastor discuss contraception from the pulpit. “Everything that I had always been taught had been geared towards me as a woman, like you submit to your husband. You don’t say no to sex. Don’t deny your husband. You make yourself available. It was never taught from a place of mutual responsibility and mutual honor.”
She contrasted that messaging with advice she heard from a Catholic priest: When looking for a spouse, look for someone with self-control, the ability to fast, because such a person “will be able to do hard things that will be necessary in marriage.” Brooks elaborates: “If you truly do Natural Family Planning, you have to say no to your own desires at times . . . and recognize that denying ourselves draws us closer to God.”
It may seem implausible that something as private and, well, human as a menstrual cycle could draw a woman into a deeper relationship with God, with her husband, with her own body. It’s no surprise that Jefferies’s tracts on contraception keep going missing. Many Christians prefer to keep God out of the bedroom. But Christians believe that Jesus submitted himself to the confines of a womb, a womb that underwent the same physical changes some Protestant women are beginning to embrace as part of their embodied faith. And as Chaney told me, it’s hard to keep God out of the bedroom when you keep a crucifix above your bed.
