Plain Words on Birth Control

The Archbishop of Canterbury last week returned to the debate with Roman Catholics over birth control and suggested that there is room for agreement in principle. Recalling that "for some time past," the Anglican and Episcopal churches have formally favored artificial birth control (the position most recently affirmed at the Lambeth Conference of 1958), Dr. Fisher explained in the Canterbury Diocese Notes why he considered "wise and controlled" family planning "an evident Christian duty."

That duty, wrote the archbishop, springs from the need to keep too-large families from putting an unfair burden on the mother, an unfair handicap on the children, or '"any unreasonable liability upon society." The trouble with too many Catholics, argued Dr. Fisher, is that they will not concede this duty, but "tend rather to suggest that family planning springs only from fear of overpopulation or prudential and selfish desires."

Actually, Dr. Fisher pointed out to his own readers, Catholic doctrine "concedes that there are circumstances when it is right and proper that the size of the family should be restricted." This, Dr. Fisher seemed to suggest, constitutes a Catholic approval in principle of family planning. In this light, "there need be no difference" between Protestants and Catholics as to policy. The remaining differences, he suggested, are about method--the "safe period and abstinence" endorsed as the only permissible ones by the Catholic Church, and "other methods" approved by Protestants. The temper of the debate in the U.S. might be very different if it took its cue from Dr. Fisher's conclusion: "It is wise to leave the decision as to what methods are seemly to the conscientious judgment of Christian married couples."

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