Does threat of excommunication by church for use of contraception in Catholic countries cause

[clear eye]

major suffering? Is the lack of affordable contraception and its use in places like Mexico a result of enforced opposition by the Catholic church? Is this threat a cause of economic hardship on the family level and does it result in the inability of the economies of Catholic countries to create jobs in proportion to the workforce? Other faiths oppose contraception but as far as I know Catholicism is the only one that threatens the follower w/ not being allowed to worship alongside the rest of the community.

How do Catholic and other fellow religious DUers see this issue?

[Donnachaidh]

1. my mother was threatened with excommunication

She kicked out a drunken abusive husband. She had no choice, he was abusing the first child and she was pregnant with the second. She couldn't go to church or receive the sacrament until she was on her deathbed, when a local priest took pity on her. It was horrible for a devout catholic.

Things may have changed here since then, but the threat is very real. AND very painful.

[gateley]

4. Is using birth control grounds for excommunication? I know that abortion is,

but I thought BC was just a big sin...

[quiller4]

6. No. It is not.

[jenniferj]

13. Cherie Blair has been open about taking BC and

she is well known as a famous Catholic... She is not ex-communicated though some tradionalists may suggest that she should be...
If you look at Catholic families in the UK or the USA most of them are now small families of two or three children...Not like it used to be with huge families...It seems the fundermentlists are less likely to use BC than most practicing Western Catholics... Many practicing Catholic uses BC and see it as private matter....Plently of priests seem to operate on a don't ask, don't tell policy.

[rurallib]

11. Used to be when I was catholic. Never heard it was changed

Funny thing is that the guy who developed the birth control pill was Catolic. He thought he had done Catholics worldwide a great favor by developing a method where they could have unprotected sex and not reproduce.
He was crushed when I believe it was Pope Paul condemned the artificial birth control and excommunicated the developer - can't remember his name.

[HysteryDiagnosis]

2. Why would the church want to take away someone's

cellphone privelages and what do cell phones have to do with contraception?? Oh I remember, it's the phone sex.

[Xipe Totec]

3. I spent three years in a Catholic Institute in Mexico

First grade through third grade elementary.

I learned that devils can dress like a penguins (nuns).

You want to talk about major suffering? There it is.

I did not lose my faith in God, but I definitely lost my faith in the Church.

I will be forever grateful for those three painful years that opened my eyes to the difference between faith and Church.

[quiller4]

5. I've never heard of anyone threatened with excommunication

for using contraceptives. Most Catholics "agree to disagree" with the Pope about this. Surveys show that Catholic couples use family planning to the same degree as non-Catholic couples in the US and Western Europe. Affordable contraception is more widely available to poor women in large cities in Mexico than it is in large cities here in the US.

[clear eye]

8. Interesting.

Especially about the availability of contraception in Mexico. I don't think public opinion is so relaxed about this issue in many majority Catholic countries. Are you including Ireland and Italy in that survey? Is the treatment of contraception (a sin but no excommunication) the same everywhere in the Catholic world?

[clear eye]

9. Vatican affirms bishop's excommunication of Call to Action...

http://www.catholic.org/national/national_story.php?id=22281

LINCOLN, Neb. (CNS) – The Vatican has upheld Bishop Fabian W. Bruskewitz's decision 10 years ago that membership in Call to Action 'is totally incompatible with the Catholic faith' and results in automatic excommunication....

"Call to Action, founded after the U.S. bishops' national Call to Action conference in Detroit in 1976, works to change church teachings in such areas as mandatory celibacy for priests, the male-only priesthood, the selection process for bishops and popes, and opposition to artificial contraception."

And that's in the RC minority U.S., though it's not clear in the article which aspect of CtA's work was the cause of the ruling.

[MichiganVote]

7. The RCC will never get serious about this. They fudge their membership numbers as it is.

[virgogal]

10. I'm old. I was told no contraception by a priest in the early sixties, I walked

out and never looked back.

No man was tellin' this woman how to live.

(rant off)

[jemelanson]

12. The underlying principal is whether or not the "Church" has the

right to control women.
"In most primitive societies it was unthinkable that male sexual desires should take precedence over the needs of mothers and their children. Patriarchy everywhere sought to change this, through religious sanction. Women were to serve men's sexual urges even when preoccupied with motherhood. This was the meaning of God's announcement to Eve: 'I will greatly multiply thy sorrow and thy conception, in sorrow thou shalt bring forth children; and thy desire shall be subject to thy husband, and he shall rule over thee' (Genesis 3:16). In this context, "sorrrow" meant labor pangs, as well as the harried life of a mother with children too close together, and the illnesses and injuries caused by spreading a mother's care too thin.
The Judeo-Christian culture insisted on men's control of women's bodies. Wives were not to imitate sexual relations, but they were never to deny their husbands. The Catholic church laid down the law that no wife could accuse her husband of rape even if he forced her with accompanying brutality. Sexual "release" was his conjugal right ( but not hers).
The church interpreted the fable of Genesis as God's mandate to compel women to bear as many children as possible, even at the cost of the children's or the mother's health and welfare. Men refused to deal with the problem of over-production and women were forbidden to do so, by the church's tradition. In pagan times, women used some fairly effective birth-control devices, ranging from vaginal sponges to abortifacient drugs. Many churchmen believed the witches inherited secret knowledge of such things, which contributed to the vigor or witch- and midwife-persecutions." this was taken from the book by Barbara G. Walker "The Woman's Encyclopedia of Myths and Secrets"
pages 13-104. Along with this Birth-control was considered as nothing else than mutual masturbation. The church did not view sex as masturbation when it was for a husband's benefit as long as it was not mutually satisfying. In the 17th century the church said that the only purpose of marital sex must be conception and that if the woman receives too much pleasure she cannot conceive.