"Therefore We base Our words on the first principles of a human and Christian doctrine of marriage when We are obliged once more to declare that the direct interruption of the generative process already begun and, above all, all direct abortion, even for therapeutic reasons, are to be absolutely excluded as lawful means of regulating the number of children. (14) Equally to be condemned, as the magisterium of the Church has affirmed on many occasions, is direct sterilization, whether of the man or of the woman, whether permanent or temporary."
Simply put, you cannot use birth control as a means to control the population. Population growth, itself, is a huge issue especially since we recently hit the 7 billionth person mark recently, but here, Pope Paul VI is stating that any form of birth control is wrong in regulating the population, whether it is through a vasectomy or just a condom.
I have to disagree with the Pope's claim for a couple reasons. Population growth is an economic issue. With the rising number of people, we face the issue of how we plan to accommodate the rising numbers with food, shelter, water, and other resources, especially in more affluent countries like the United States where energy consumption is a big issue.
Not only is the issue an economic issue, but a human rights one too, which face bad social and psychological
consequences. The liberties of using birth control to manage family size/population are taken away with Pope Paul VI's claim and that in itself would bring uproar to the people of the United States, due to the structure of feeling that has been created through time when addressing human rights and the right to privacy. Pope Paul's claim implies that sex between two people, male and female, is natural..... when in reality, because humans have agency and they aren't animals and therefore sex is not natural. We have constructed ourselves through history to be able to make a choice in whether or not they want to have sex, when they want to have sex, and who they want to have sex with. Makes me think back to the differences between sheep sex and "human" sex.
This brings me to the two child policy in China. We had Pope Paul VI's claim where there shouldn't be ANY birth control during sex, whereas in China, they place a strong law on how many children a family can have at a time. Although they do adjust it according to where in China you are located...(typically you can have slightly more children if you live in rural parts of China) if you are caught violating the implemented policy, they do force the women to get sterilized. In the case of China, it seems to be the opposite extreme to Pope Paul VI's claim. It also violates human rights, especially women's rights. In the case of a communist country, it would make sense to have a law like this in place to control the people and the country's resources, but that does not make it right. One social consequence that arises with China enforcing this policy is the way the child/children will grow up to be like. Studies have been shown that single children don't have the childhood that their parents did being able to grow up with multiple siblings resulting in slightly socially awkward and less independent children, obviously we can't pinpoint that every child will be one specific way, but we can follow trends and see where that leads us to.
Overtime, humans have developed more and more of their sense of agency... the ability choose what they want to do and how they want to feel while doing it. In the case of Pope Paul VI's claim, I agree that in cases like China where abortion is required if the govt discovers that you may have be having an unannounced child, abortion should not be used, but I disagree that it shouldn't be used at all. I believe that we have developed well enough through time to be able to decide when we want to stop having children, if we never want children in the first place, etc, and we have the choice to choose which birth control method we want to use in order for one thing to happen. In places of overpopulation, I think if we can educate women who are willing to be educated about sex and birth control methods, we can lower the risk of having unplanned pregnancies, especially with the technology that we currently have.
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