Friday, April 15, 2011

Newsflash: Catholic women use birth control!

Honestly, is anyone surprised? The Roman Catholic laity exists in a state of Don't Ask, Don't Tell with the hierarchy not only on LGBT rights but on sex generally. From LiveScience:
Catholic women overwhelmingly use birth control, despite an official ban by the church, a new study finds.

The study, conducted by reproductive health institute Guttmacher, finds that 98 percent of sexually active Catholic women use or have used birth control other than church-approved natural family planning. Only 2 percent of Catholic women have used natural family planning, which involves tracking the menstrual cycle to avoid sex during fertile periods.....

Overall, the survey found that 99 percent of women have used birth control, and almost all of of those who don't want to get pregnant use some method of contraception. Eighty-nine percent of Catholic women, 90 percent of mainline Protestants and 91 percent of Evangelicals who are not currently trying to conceive use birth control, Jones and her colleagues reported.

About 68 percent of Catholic women use a highly effective method of birth control, meaning hormonal methods, the IUD or sterilization, compared with 73 percent of mainline Protestants and 74 percent of Evangelicals. More than 40 percent of Evangelicals use male or female sterilization as birth control, outpacing other religious groups by about 6 percent to 9 percent.

Even Catholic women who attend services more than once a month use natural family planning at a rate of only 2 percent, the researchers found.

The study also found that regardless of religion, at least 75 percent of women are sexually active by their early 20s, whether they're married or not. That number was 75 percent for Evangelicals, 86 percent for mainline Protestants, 89 percent for Catholic women, and 79 percent for women as a whole.
You know, prohibition is known to be quite ineffective, generally. Just think of bathtub gin. And apparently Billy Joel was wrong--about Catholic girls starting too late. BUt at least they are being sensible about it!

6 comments:

JCF said...

They were agonizing (!) about this last night on EWTN. Boo hoo, EWTN sob sisters (of the male variety)! Boo hoo!

Anonymous said...

And most Catholics don't want to live with or send their kids to schools with poor people; neither do most Mainline Protestants. Both of which positions are condemned by the governing bodies of both groups.
Which means what? Religious believers pick and choose? Wow. What a revelation! No wonder religion is increasing in both membership and respect among people under 35; its public positions and the actions of most of its members are in such close harmony.

Brother David said...

IS this a new troll or an old troll with a new name?

Malcolm+ said...

In college, I took a class called "Ministry in the Sacrament of Penance" offered by one of the Roman Catholic colleges. I was the only Anglican in my tutorial.

The structure of the tutorials was to have one of us be the penitent ad one the confessor. The penitent would go outside with the professor to be told the "sin of the week."

One particular week, the sin was *masturbation.*

During the critique, a fellow from Antigonish diocese said that he would have asked the penitnet how long he'd been married and how many children he had. The penitient said he would have answered ten years and two children. The fellow from Antigonish said, "there, you see?" and everyone else in the room nodded.

Of course, it took me two days to realize what he meant. The RC students all assumed that the penitents wife would be following Humanae Vitae and so, if the man only had two children in ten years, the reason he was masturbating was that he wasn't getting any.

As an Anglican, that just never occured to me.

IT said...

What's interesting is how many Catholic deny this sort of thing. See, for example, the comments to this post. Denial is a river in Egypt....

JCF said...

Thanks for trying (to get through the Popoid denial), IT.