David on Christian views on birth control

“The prevention of pregnancy when feasible by birth control with pre-fertilization methods is acceptable.”

“Though opposition to contraception is now widely thought to be a “Catholic thing,” the great Reformers rejected it as strongly as any modern Catholic. For earlier Christians, children were such a great gift from God and sterility such a curse that the evil of willed sterility was self-evident. As Martin Luther wrote in his Lectures on Genesis, in Genesis “fertility was regarded as an extraordinary blessing and a special gift of God,” but we do not regard this so highly today.”

“Recently leaked Vatican papers suggest that Humanae Vitae had little to do with the morality of the pill itself, and everything to do with the Church’s own claims to authority. A clandestine report, drafted by two commission members and slipped to the Pope in the days after the commission closed, was based purely on the idea that the Church could not admit to having been wrong in the past: If the Church could err in such a way [change its teaching], the authority of the ordinary magisterium in moral matters would be thrown into question. The faithful could not put their trust in the magisterium’s presentation of moral teaching, especially in sexual matters.”