| ABSTRACT: Janet Smith explains why the Catholic Church keeps insisting, in the face of the opposite position held by most of the rest of the modern world, that contraception is one of the worst inventions of our time. Thirty years ago the case in favor of contraception seemed eminently reasonable. So much so that Pope Paul VI's encyclical Humanae Vitae, which strongly reiterated the Church's teaching against artificial contraception, sent shock waves through an unbelieving world and even through much of the Catholic world in 1963. But as Janet Smith shows, the widespread use of contraception has had so many devastating effects on marriage, the family, and society as a whole, that the Pope's predictions about it make him now look, it retrospect, like a modern day prophet. The following is a transcript of a talk given by Janet Smith in 1994. |
