Birth Control – Federal Council of Churches (1931)
Christianity Today (PCA)
The article was published in the newspaper Christianity Today of PCA (Presbyterian Church of America), In mid-april of 1931
„A Presbyterian Journal Devoted to Stating, Defending and Furthering the Gospel in the Modern World.”
Samuel G. Craig, Editor, H. McAllister Griffiths, Managing Editor. Published monthly by
THE PRESBYTERIAN AND REFORMED PUBLISHING CO.
501 Witherspoon Bldg., Phila. Pa.
The Article of Birth Control Indorsed by the „Federal Council”
‘” INDORSEMENT of „Birth Control” has been given in a majority report sub-mitted after several years of study by the Committee on Marriage and Home of the „Federal Council of Churches of Christ in America.” It was issued with the approval of the council’s Administrative Committee, as was also a dissenting minority report. Twenty-two of the twenty-eight members of the committee signed the majority report, three signed the minority report and three expressed no judgment either way. The committee comprises ministers, a number of influential laymen, including George W. Wickersham; also Mrs. John D. Rockefeller and other prominent women.
The Majority Report
The majority report opens with the state· ment that „the majority of the committee holds that the careful and restrained use of contraceptives by married people is valid and moral.”
„They take this position,” the majority report continues, „because they believe that it is important to provide for the proper spacing of children, the control of the size of the family and the protection of mothers and children, and because they are of the opinion that abstinence within marriage under ordinary conditions is not desirable in itself.
„But they cannot leave this statement without further comment. They feel obliged to paint out that present knowledge of birth control is incomplete, and an element of uncertainty, although small, still remains. More serious is the fact that all methods are as yet more or less subject to personal factors for their effectiveness. Married couples should keep these facts in mind and welcome children, should they come.”
The majority report warns the public against „advertised nostrums,” which are beginning to appear in thinly disguised forms in reputable periodicals, and against „so-called ‘bootlegged’ devices at drug stores.”
„It is essential,” it states, „to consult the family physician or to go to established clinics or health centers for information or assistance.”
The Minority Report
The minority report refused to sanction the use of contraceptive measures and called upon the church, „when control of conception is necessary, to uphold the standard of abstinence as the ideal.
„The method of abstinence is to be used to meet conditions and situations in which, otherwise, contraceptives would be necessary,” it says. „This does not mean that sex relations between married people as an expression of mutual affection are wrong, but that they are to be denied when child-bearing is hazardous to the well-being of mother or child or household.”
Preceding the majority and minority reports is a statement on which the entire committee agreed.
The committee agreed unanimously that because of economic considerations and, in many cases, the welfare of the mother, „there can be no question as to the necessity for some sort of effective control of the size of the family and the spacing of children.”
The committee also agreed that, whatever the final decision of the Church may be, „the Church should not seek to impose its point of view as to the use of contraceptives upon the public by legislation or any other form of coercion, and especially should not seek to prohibit physicians from imparting such information to those who· in the judgment of the medical profession are entitled to receive it. It should be expected, that guidance will find expression through the researches and experience of physicians and men of science as well as through the corporate conscience of the Church.”
It dwells at some length on the economic considerations, noting that „very large families tend to produce poverty, to endanger the health and stability of the family, limit the educational opportunities of the children.”
The problems of overpopulation, it points out, are also involved in consideration of birth control. „Asto the necessity, therefore, for some form of effective control of the size of the family and the spacing of children, and consequently of control of conception, there can be no question,” it concludes. „It is recog-nized by all churches and all physicians.”
The committee’s chairman, the Rev. Dr. Howard Chandler Robbins, professor at The Episcopal General Theological Seminary in New York City, and for many years dean of the Cathedral of St. John the Divine, signed the minority report, together with Mrs. Robert E. Speer, president of the na-tional board of the Y. W. C. A., and Mrs. Orin R. Judd, president of the Council of Women for Home Missions.
The three who signed neither report were: Dr. Ben R. Lacy, president of Union Theological Seminary, Richmond, Va.; Mrs. W. A. Newell of Greensboro, N. C., chairman of the Bureau of Social Service of the Women’s Missional Council of the Methodist Episcopal Church, South, and Bishop Charles K. Gilbert, Suffragan Bishop of New York.
The supporters of the majority report were the Rev. Albert W. Beaven, Rochester; the Rev. Edwin T. Dahlberg, Buffalo; the Rev. Ralph Marshall Davis, Erie; the Rev John W. Elliott, Philadelphia; Mrs. Jeannette V. Emrich, New York; Mrs. John Ferguson, New York; Dr. G. Walter Fiske, Oberlin, 0.; Mr. and Mrs. Abel J. Gregg, New York; Dr. Ernest R. Groves, Chapel Hill, N. C.; Dr. Percy G. Kammerer, Avon, Conn.; the Rev. John W. Langdale, New York; the Rev. John A. Marquis, New York; the Rev. William S. Mitchell, Worcester, Mass. ; Mrs. I. H. O’Harra, Philadelphia; Mrs. J. Scott Parish, Richmond, Va.; Mrs. John D. Rockefeller, Jr., New York; the Rev. Alva W. Taylor, Nashville; the Rev. Worth M. Tippy, New York; George W. Wickersham, New York; the Rev. B. S. Winchester, New York, and Miss Amelia Wyckoff, New York.
Drs. Davis and Marquis are Ministers of the Presbyterian Church in the U. S. A.
Lutheran Council Disapproves
Declaring that „no Lutheran appears among the signers of the statement nor among the members of the Committee on Marriage and the Home,” the National Lutheran Council made public a comment on the report by the Rev. F. H. Knubel, president of the United Lutheran Church in America.
„It is of prime Significance,” Dr. Knubel said, „that the present agitation for birth control occurs at a period which is notorious for looseness in sexual morality. This fact creates suspicious as to the motives for the agitation and should warn true-minded men and women against the surrender of themselves as tools for unholy purposes.
„The duty of the Church is now possibly April 1931 more than ever to proclaim the holiness of the sexual relation, as well as temperance in the use thereof. There will then be no need for birth control.
„Even if the state should ever discover facts and conditions which could conceivably render necessary the exercise of birth control, only such an arrangement for it should be devised as would, because of its stringency, give no comfort to those who consciously or unconsciously are promoting loose morals. Anything else would serve to weaken the foundations of the home, and therefore of the state itself. There is little evidence, however, that the advocates of birth control would be satisfied with such a stringent provision.”
Roman Catholic Comment
„Father” Charles E. Coughlin, of the „Shrine of the Little Flower” near Detroit, attacked the report in a radio sermon a few days after the report was issued. He said, in part, „This question of birth control is nothing new in the annals of sociology or of civilization. It is hundreds of years older than the Federal Council of Churches in America. It was born not because of a great moral issue but because of a matter of dollars and cents. Originally, it was an economic issue. Its whole history has been tied up with the so-called science of political economy. And today it still is an economic issue.”
Speaking for the Church of Rome, he said further, „we adhere to the principle that the sacrament of matrimony was not instituted by man, but by God; that the laws made to strengthen and to confirm and to elevate it are not of man’s devisal, and that the nature of matrimony is entirely independent of the free will of man as much as is the law of sunrise and of sunset. On this question we may not be silent.”
He said that one local paper has gone on record as stating that those signers of this report speak for 23,000,000 persons. ”Those figures are grossly erroneous, but the fact of the great surrender and the greater betrayal cannot be disputed if yesterday’s news item is correct,” he added.
„The great surrender consists in handing over the fundamentals of the natural law to the ideals of Paganism. The greater betrayal coincides with the fact that once more the people of this country whom the Federal Council of Churches is supposed to represent have been traded and bartered to the god of political economy.
„One is not surprised that such a thing at last have eventuated. Those of us who are acquainted with the activities of Communistic doctrines in this country have long since breathed rather nervously at the activities of certain officials of the Federal Council of Churches of Christ in America in abetting the doctrines of Lenin and of advocating the ideals of Bolshevism.”
Resource
A Presbyterian Journal Devoted to Stating, Defending and Furthering the Gospel in the Modern World.” Samuel G. Craig, Editor, H. McAllister Griffiths, Managing Editor Published monthly by THE PRESBYTERIAN AND REFORMED PUBLISHING CO. 501 Witherspoon Bldg., Phila. Pa. Mid-April, 1931
https://www.pcahistory.org/HCLibrary/periodicals/CT/1930-31/01-12-apr.pdf
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