The Protestant Reformation was in significant part a protest against the perceived antinatalism of the late Medieval Christian Church. It was a celebration of procreation that also saw contraception and abortion as among the most wicked of human sins, as direct affronts to the ordinances of God. This background makes the Protestant “sellout” on contraception in the mid 20th Century all the more surprising, and disturbing.
As the Augustinian monk, theologian, and “first Protestant” Martin Luther viewed his world in the second decade of the 16th Century, he saw a Christianity in conflict with family life and fertility. Church tradition held that the taking of vows of chastity—as a priest, monk, or cloistered sister—was spiritually superior to the wedded life. In consequence, about one-third of adult European Christians were in Holy Orders.
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