Family Planning

By Tony Campolo and Gordon Aeschliman

The idea of family planning rings a lot of negative bells for some folk because the idea is sometimes linked with helping teens secure abortions or encouraging the use of birth control as a means to prevent pregnancy among teens.

We need to get beyond these stereotypes. The world’s population is growing at a staggering rate. We will soon have a globe that is packed with ten billion people and an earth that is unable to support that many mouths. It is thoroughly a prolife issue to ask the question of how to keep the globe at a sustainable growth level. We venture the opinion that it is irresponsible of the church to avoid this debate.

Several issues need to be broached. We would encourage you to form a study group to investigate how you can become involved in this area of concern. Order materials from WorldWatch Institute and ask your local library for resources. World Vision International and Bread for the World are two good Christian sources of information. Here are some of the issues we face:

How do we interact with governments (such as the Chinese) that are farsighted in their policies of population control but require abortions as a chief means?

How do we interact with cultures (such as the Kenyan) where there is virtually no birth control in place and families easily reach fifteen members?

How do we ensure that reliable, inexpensive, moral birth-control mechanisms are available to every global citizen who wants to have power over the size of his or her family?

How do we find the appropriate balance—providing sexually active youth with birth control help while also calling them to a biblical standard of living?

We cannot allow ourselves to sit around mouthing simplistic slogans. The world is on a crash course toward poverty and violence because of overpopulation. If we feel the sharp need to end abortions-as-birth-control, we need to plan now for other means of birth control. If not, we will soon be living in a world where abortions are tallied by the several billion annually.

(Published in 1993, 50 Ways You Can Be Prolife is now out of print. Used by permission of the authors, 9/27/01.)