Pope Francis made international headlines on Monday by explicitly endorsing efforts to control family size, saying that Catholics don’t need to breed “like rabbits.” But his comments, which come in the midst of evolving attitudes toward contraception within the Catholic Church, ultimately fail to move the dial forward for women in developing nations pushing for more access to reproductive health care.
“Some think, excuse me if I use the word, that in order to be good Catholics, we have to be like rabbits — but no,” the Pope told journalists during a flight back from the Philippines, concluding that about three children per family is about right.
“God gives you methods to be responsible,” he added, alluding to natural family planning (NFP), which is the method of non-hormonal birth control that’s sanctioned by the Catholic Church. Francis recounted meeting a woman pregnant with her eighth child after she had already had seven babies via Cesarean section, criticizing her for potentially risking her life and implying that she could have used NFP.
Practicing NFP involves tracking a woman’s fertility — through biological markers like taking her temperature, examining her cervical mucus, or counting the days between her menstrual cycle — and then abstaining from sex on the days when she’s most likely to conceive. It can also be a useful tool for women who want to get pregnant. NFP has recently gained some popularity among American women who want an alternative to hormonal contraception.
But the method also comes with some downsides. There’s a lot of room for potential error, and many couples struggle to use NFP perfectly. Some women’s biological markers are more difficult to track and this method won’t work as well for them, no matter how careful they are. Plus, for women in abusive relationships, or simply in marriages where the power balance is tipped in favor of the man, it’s not necessarily realistic to trust their partner to always abstain from sex during “off limits” days.
Those factors contribute to the fact that, according to federal researchers, NFP has about a 24 percent failure rate — which means that about one in four women who attempt to use it as their primary birth control method end up getting pregnant. For that reason, the American College of Obstetricians and Gynecologists does not recommend NFP for women exactly like the one admonished by Pope Francis: Women who could be placed in medical danger by a pregnancy.
Placing the responsibility on Catholics to avoid procreating “like rabbits,” while reiterating the Catholic Church’s opposition to a range of artificial birth control methods that are much more effective than NFP for many women, ultimately reinforces the status quo — even though it’s one that isn’t working well for Catholics around the world.
That conflict is on sharp display in the Philippines, the country where Pope Francis recently spent five days. There, the birth rate has skyrocketed, partially thanks to the Catholic hierarchy’s fierce opposition to hormonal contraception and dogged promotion of NFP. Women have recently started demanding access to long-lasting birth control like IUDs. And lay Catholics have increasingly bucked the Church leadership to join those calls, advocating for greater access to birth control as a way of alleviating poverty.
Last year, the Philippine Supreme Court approved a landmark law that cleared the way for the government to give free contraception to nearly all residents, putting an end to the Roman Catholic Church’s 15-year opposition campaign to state-sponsored birth control in the country. News outlets across the world reported that Filipino Catholics were “evolving” away from the Church’s strict teachings on reproductive health.
“We believe that you can advocate reproductive health and practice family planning, and still be a good Catholic,” Bicbic Chua, the executive director of Catholics for Reproductive Health, one of the groups instrumental in advocating for the country’s new law, recently told the Wall Street Journal. “For us what is immoral is to bring children into this world without love, proper care, and nourishment.”
Similar dynamics are playing out across the world. A recent global poll of self-identified Catholics found that the vast majority of them disagree with the Church’s prohibition against hormonal birth control. Seventy eight percent of Catholics across all countries surveyed said they support the use of modern birth control — a number that rises even further in European and Latin American countries, where Catholics tend to be more progressive. More than 90 percent of Catholics in France, Brazil, Spain, Argentina, and Colombia have no problem with artificial contraception.
Preliminary results from the Pope’s own survey of Catholics on “family issues” like birth control and divorce have returned similar findings. Catholics in Germany and Switzerland, the countries that have publicized the survey results so far, largely reject the Church’s conservative teachings on birth control and same-sex marriage. The Vatican has acknowledged that the evidence suggests its position on contraception is “commonly perceived today as an intrusion in the intimate life of the couple.”
Here in the United States, more than 80 percent of Catholics say that hormonal birth control is morally acceptable, and they have no problem using it. According to the Guttmacher Institute, nearly 90 percent of Catholic women of reproductive age currently use artificial contraception. Meanwhile, Guttmacher reports that just three percent of the married Catholic women in the United States rely on NFP to avoid pregnancy.
During his trip to the Philippines last week, the Pope gave an address that has been described as his “strongest defense yet” of the Church’s ban on birth control. Although his “rabbit” comments have largely been received well (except among rabbit breeders, of course), they actually fall along the same conservative lines.