What my grandfather, my father’s father, way back in the late 1940s was told by his priest as the doctors believed that if his wife got pregnant again she would die giving birth confined him to a life of celibacy. Not wanting to put his wife’s life in jeopardy … “my dear Nellie” he called her, and at the advice of the priest was told he had to stop having sex with his wife. Condoms condemned. He stopped going to church … I can still hear him cursing and swearing at the Church and God … angry, oh so angry.

I give thanks that my wife and I lived in a time when more highly effective birth control was available. We are both Catholics … educated in the matter of reproductive sex. The church’s teaching in the matter of contraception at least 200 years out of date. Sex a matter of ordinary teaching subject to primacy of conscience.

Who is to say I would not have become like my angry grandfather … unnecessary suffering cause by an outdate teaching of conception prevention imposed on me by a church ignorant in matters of sex? And I think of women all over the world forced to endure their husband’s "rights to sex" ... amounting to approval of rape ...   It is not right that they have no control over their reproductive life ... a message I believe Jesus would approve.

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