HEALTH THREATS

Initially, my decision to reject artificial birth control was based on health issues.  This article on the health risks for women in the birth control mandate gives a decent run-down of the health issues pertaining to the use of artificial birth control.   I was in college and the doctor would always ask me if I wanted birth control pills whenever I went in for my yearly check-up.  I found it rather annoying since, as a person who had decided to wait until marriage to indulge in the pleasures of sex, I had no need for birth control.  Oddly enough, my insistence that abstinence meant I didn’t need it always fell on deaf ears which taught me that doctors quite often choose NOT to listen to their patients.

FERTILITY

Not being sexually active at that time was not the only reason I did not want birth control.  I grew up around farm animals, and read my way through a large number of books on animal breeding, reproduction and livestock while still in Junior High and High School.  I knew things like how important it was to future fertility that nothing mess with the normal hormone cycle.  If this was true of animals, then was it not also going to be true of humans?  Normal is a cycle that produces ovum on a monthly basis and renews the lining for a possible pregnancy once each cycle.  The birth control pill took that NORMAL cycle and turned it into an ABNORMAL cycle.  The sort of abnormal cycle any animal breeder would avoid like the plague!  It made no sense to mess with normal fertility in that manner.

MISOGYNY

Next, I started to think about male reproductive hormones.  Young guys take them to beef up their muscles and they develop heart conditions and other major killer side effects so we tell men NOT to mess up their normal hormones by adding other hormones.  This fact caused me to really wonder about our culture where we warn young men about the health risks of messing with their hormones and then tell young women that it is OK to put their female hormone cycle, which is far more complex than that of the male, into an abnormal state.  I had to conclude there was some serious misogyny going on in our culture where birth control was concerned.

I’M NOT THE ONLY WOMAN WHO REJECTS CONTRACEPTION

Today I read a fun blog post about the Secret Lives of Women Who Don’t Use Contraception.  I liked what this writer had to say, and the comments section was even better!  After coming to the realization that contraception was unhealthy and misogynist, I further recognized that there was a lack of Faith exhibited in marriages where contraception was in use.  Why would God make a woman’s fertility a problem?  My conclusion was that God did not make a mistake, but that our attitudes about our fertility had become malformed.  I chose to place my fertility in God’s care and to trust Him to know how many children I should have.

WE DO NOT WANT TO PAY FOR VIOLATIONS OF HEALTH AND FAITH

The thing is, as wrong as we believe contraception is, we aren’t arguing that it should be eliminated.  We’re arguing that we shouldn’t have to violate our consciences by paying for it.

I also deeply appreciated the sentiment over at A Woman’s Place…Depends on Her Vocation where she writes on No, I Don’t Want to Pay for Your Contraception.  Artificial birth control endangers the health and I do not want to pay for this health threat any more than I want to pay for a smoker’s cigarettes.

CHURCH TEACHING

Finally, there are the encyclicals, Humane Vitae (buy a copy) and The Gospel of Life (buy a copy), which spell out Catholic teaching about contraception from the perspective of the revelatory teaching of God. I agree with these teachings and insist on my God-given right to live and act according to that belief.  As is recorded in the First Amendment of the United States Constitution, I should not be forced to violate any part of my Faith for any reason, nor should anyone else.