Leith Anderson Quotes
Most associate evangelicals with Catholics in their steady leadership in pro-life advocacy, and rightly so. But it may come as a surprise that unlike the Catholic church, we are open to contraception.
In America (and Europe) while the Roman Catholic Clergy oppose contraception but the majority of Catholics did not agree and used artificial contraception. There is a small proportion of the Evangelical churches who oppose contraception, but at this time over 90 percent of Evangelical clergy did not.
Leith Anderson, President, National Association of Evangelicals, Evangelical Leaders are Ok with Contraception, 2013, http://www.nae.net/resources/news/452-evangelical-leaders-are-ok-with-contraception
Sourced by: Eigen's Political and Historical Quotations
Not all abortion opponents object to birth control, but many do believing the two practices to be morally sinful. While the abortion conflict is given more publicity there are many in America who would return to the pre 1963 era when birth control was criminalized.
Churches are political organizations too and are subject to the forces of their membership. In the case of the Southern Baptist Convention in 1971 they passed resolutions to assure the right of a woman to have an abortion to protect her health. The position on abortion changed steadily thereafter to even pass Constitutional amendments to ban abortions except to save the life of the mother. See {614356},54122, {614358}, {614359}, {614360}, {614361} for the dynamic history of the change.
He was referring to Eisenstadt v. Baird in which the court had just ruled on the quoted passage. Some opponents of the Court’s Roe v. Wade decision claim that the opinion came out of left field and had no logical chain from past jurisprudence, but as this quotation pointed out, Roe was the inevitable logical conclusion of an entire line of Supreme Court thinking. Opponents mostly sought reversal on fundamentally moral grounds, not legal.
At the time, condoms and other forms of contraceptives were illegal to buy, sell, possess or own. As late as 1963 a Connecticut druggist was sentenced to jail for filling a doctor’s prescription for condoms and selling them to a married couple even thought the woman might die if she again became pregnant. The Supreme Court (Griswald v. Connecticut) established that a woman had a right to control her own reproductive cycle and the government had no business interfering with a privacy right possessed by a couple. Roe v. Wade established the right to an abortion. The same moral compunctions used with abortion were, and still are used by some to oppose any form of artificial birth control. They argued: preventing a life was as serious a moral failure as taking one. Many Catholics, many evangelical and fundamentalist protestants, and some orthodox Muslims are today morally opposed to birth control and believe that the government should ban birth control as it once was in the United States.
Leith Anderson (born 1944) is president emeritus of the National Association of Evangelicals and pastor emeritus of Wooddale Church in Eden Prairie, Minnesota, after serving as senior pastor from 1977 through 2011.
