Here is a thought = was the law of chastity/ no sex until marriage an old form of "birth control" ? What do you think?
Withholding birth control has always been a way to wield power over women, and to keep them submissive...or at least too busy to do anything else.
No one did it better than religion, which convinced people it was their holy obligation and honor to die bearing children.
I'm relieved that there is a growing number of people (maybe more atheists than before?) who are willing to take back control of their reproductive rights no matter what the church/old white men in power try to do to them.
The church Abhors birth control, always has.
What the church & state wanted then, & still does, is the rights of men (lords/owners) over the lives & bodies of women (chattel/handmaiden/heifer)
No it was property rights.
You were promised to someone else, how dare you give "His" pleasure to another, you slut.
Men seem to look for reasons that do not hold their gender accountable for their controlling behavior, don’t they?
No, remember the church frowns on birth control. More babies is better, and with the history of infant mortality, families had to have lots of kids to make sure at least some made it to maturity. And then there is the issue of farm hand/workers that don't have to be paid for their labor except in food and lodging. In some instances having a child without a spouse was advertising that the woman was fertile and could bear babies.
I believe that, in the Catholic and Mormon churches, the objective is simply MORE Catholics and Mormons. However, “I” believe the simple reason that men have simply long sufferered from control issues.
In early societies children were welcome because they were potential workers and many workers were needed to survive in primitive times.
When pregnancy was finally understood, men became very possessive because they wanted only to raise their own children.
In Simone de Beauvoir's book 'The Second Sex", she speculated that early civilizations were matriarchal and women were free to have sex with anyone until men figured out where babies came from and wanted to be able to claim and care for only their own offspring. Before that birth was a miracle and women were truly magical goddesses.