What Do Religions Say About Birth Control and Family Planning?

The nation’s largest Protestant denomination, the Southern Baptists, uphold the use of some methods of family planning by married couples. The denomination’s Ethics and Religious Liberty Commission helps ensure that the church can find ways to apply biblical truth to moral, public policy, and religious liberty issues. This creates a biblical model as a framework through which Christians can evaluate the moral and religious liberty issues confronting families in modern culture. The church believes that the use of birth control, as a means to regulating the number of children a couple has and as a means to space out the ages of the children, is a moral decision that is left up to each couple. However, Southern Baptists stipulate that a couple uses a form of contraception that prevents conception.

The United Methodist Church:

Methodists, the nation’s second largest Protestant denomination, preach that every couple has the right and the duty prayerfully as well as the responsibility to control conception according to their circumstances. The United Methodist's Resolution on Responsible Parenthood dictates that as a means to uphold the sacred dimensions of personhood, all possible efforts should be made by the community and parents to ensure that every child enters the world with a healthy body and is born into an environment prepared to help the child to reach his/her fullest potential. That's why Methodists support public funding and participation in family planning services.