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Does contraception really prevent abortion?
Spirit and Life Video Email for Friday, March 30, 2007

Hello, I am Fr. Tom Euteneuer, President of Human Life International, the world’s largest pro-life organization. Welcome to this series on contraception. I hope you can spare just a few minutes to view this important message.

This video series is a mini-catechesis about contraception from the Church’s point of view. I won’t try to cover every angle of the matter or say everything that could be said about the subject. My purpose is to deal concisely with some of the misconceptions about contraception in the general culture and offer a common sense response. I also hope that this email may be a tool that you will forward to others to evangelize our culture of death.

Now, our first topic is the question of whether contraception really prevents abortion.

It’s a common notion that if we have more contraception we would have less abortion. On the surface, it appears logical—just provide the means to more effectively prevent so-called unwanted pregnancies and that will reduce the number of unwanted babies and therefore abortions. But is this true? Has this theory proven itself, in any setting, in any society or country? My extensive travels and research in 49 countries of the world say no… but for a case study, let’s look at the United States.

We can count at least 15 types of contraception readily available to almost anyone at any time, day or night—and yet we’re faced with a staggering rate of abortion. One out of every three pregnancies in this country ends in abortion. According to the above logic, as the availability of contraception has increased we should have seen a dramatic decrease in the numbers of abortions, but 1.3 million abortions a year prove that this logic is fatally flawed. We are only fooling ourselves if we think that widely-available contraception reduces abortion.

In reality, rather than reducing abortions, contraception actually promotes and increases the numbers of abortions. Here’s how.

Let’s first consider one basic fact: Abortion is a multi-billion dollar business, and no business wants to reduce its bottom line. While you and I work towards eliminating abortion, the abortion industry has a vested interest in increasing those numbers. More abortions simply mean more profit. Granted, some embrace abortion for other reasons, but profit is the bottom line of the abortion business. In 2004 Planned Parenthood made about $90 million in revenues just selling abortion to American women.

And, their clients: women with unexpected and unwanted pregnancies.

Given this client base, there are three main reasons why the abortion industry needs contraception:

The first is that the increase of contraceptive use increases the amount of promiscuity in a culture. Contraception severs the link between sexual union and childbearing. No longer is sexual activity the exclusive domain of marriage but can be treated as a recreational activity supposedly without the responsibility of children. The so-called unwanted pregnancies that result from a promiscuous contraceptive culture are what drive the demand for abortion. Remember—the more promiscuity, the more unwanted pregnancies there are, and the more unwanted pregnancies, the more abortions there will be.

Secondly, all methods of contraception fail to prevent pregnancy a certain percentage of the time either through flaws in the method or through misuse. People have been so indoctrinated with the “safe sex” message that the potential for contraceptive failure is never even considered—until it happens of course—and then, faced with a crisis, people turn to quick fix solutions to escape the problem that was created by contraception in the first place. According to the Guttmacher Association, an affiliate of Planned Parenthood, close to 60% of all women going into abortion mills do so because their contraception has failed. In other words, they are using abortion as a back-up to failed contraception.

Finally, contraception does not prevent abortion because contraception is, in many cases, a form of abortion. Medical science informs us that all hormonal methods of contraception may actually cause abortions at the earliest stages of pregnancy due to their chemical assault on the lining of the uterus which forbids the implantation of a newly-conceived baby a certain percentage of the time. That’s chemical abortion, and in the end we have the same result as surgical abortion: the death of an innocent human being.

The moral of the story is that contraception kills not only life but also love. It teaches people to be selfish and sexually irresponsible; it robs people of the only gifts they can really give: the gift of self to another in marriage and the gift of life. This is why the notion that contraception reduces the need for abortion is an idea that has to be challenged if we are really committed to reducing the number of abortions. The way to do that is to teach people to be self-controlled, to remind them that sex belongs in marriage and that contraception is just another way of buying into the culture of death, whether married or not.

Well I'll end here and ask you to pick up the torch; please send this email to as many people as you can which you can do by clicking the forward button just below this screen, and then check out further resources on contraception on our website at www.hli.org.

Church Militant, keep up the good fight for the soul of our nation. God bless you!

Copyright 2007. Human Life International. Permission granted for unlimited use. Credit required.