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Life Chain Founder Takes on Contraception

A Protestant's Confession

By Eric Reslock

Royce Dunn grew up a Baptist and his father was a Baptist deacon. Today he attends an interdenominational church in Yuba City and works full-time as a pro-life activist and researcher. Through his work and studies, Dunn has arrived at the conclusion that the Catholic Church is right in opposing artificial birth control. He knows this places him in rare company in modern Catholicism, but even more so his native Protestantism. Dunn has not always agreed with the Church on contraception, but his opposition to abortion led him to not only oppose artificial birth control but to see an inseparable link between the two.

Dunn worked as a public school teacher, a businessman and raised two kids. But in 1985 his interest in legal abortion was becoming the dominant concern in his life. He says it was an incremental progression, but the more he learned about surgical abortions, the more incredulous he became. Dunn said, "I kept thinking: I don't understand this. How is this possible? How in the world could this even be legal in the United States?" Dunn also noticed that although his church and its Protestant members would often speak out against abortion, action outside the church to oppose the practice was limited or non-existent. Dunn remembers feeling the weight of his apathy one day after hearing a pro-life talk that "fifteen minutes later, we were all ready for pizza." That year, Dunn and seven others started a pro-life organization, Please Let Me Live. Two years later, the group founded the National Life Chain, which has grown to be the largest nationwide annual demonstration against legal abortion in America. Dunn dropped his business and decided to investigate the issue of abortion full-time.

Three years later, Dunn was appointed by the Yuba City unified school district board of trustees to be a member of a committee to establish sex-ed guidelines for their public schools. "Twelve of us were pro-life and 24 were pro-abortion, the outcome was never really in doubt," he said.

One of the biggest debates centered on teaching the use of contraceptives. Dunn's pro-life group had never taken a position on contraception, but he opposed its teaching for unmarried teen-agers simply because he thought it would signal to young people that it was ok for unmarried people to have sex. He said the debate was bitterly contested. To counter the contraception proponents on the committee, Dunn said he researched and wrote a 100-word paper on family planning. In retrospect, Dunn thinks God was answering his prayer for understanding and wisdom by compelling him to seek more information from a variety of sources, including Catholic literature. Dunn said, "If you were to try to find four or five books by Protestants on this subject you would really have to struggle and search." But Dunn collected a large amount of information both pro and con. He thinks it likely he has the largest collection of Planned Parenthood founder Margaret Sanger's writings, and writings about her, anywhere.

He came to realize that abortifacient birth control kills far more people each year than surgical abortions. He also thought it incredible that he had never heard about it before. "I have never talked to any Protestant in my life-time, in any Protestant sanctuary, how Christians married couples should manage fertility," Dunn said.

The experience of serving on the school committee helped him understand contraception's grievous influence on young people. He also perceived that the practice involves a diabolical, self-directing spirit because it frees man to pursue pleasure for its own sake, apart from any natural ends. This leads to the idea that placing pleasure above children is somehow virtuous.

Dunn first noticed this atitude in Protestant thinking in the 1940s. "The emphasis changed to enjoying marriage, the pleasures of husband and wife. The emphasis should be to understand the purpose of their sexuality -- the pleasure is a part of it, but not all of it." Dunn said, "The Protestant church does a wonderful job preaching about how to manage jobs, finances, how to raise children and how to enjoy our marriages, but never about creating eternal souls."

When he began discussing family planning with Protestant ministers and others, Dunn found that it was a taboo subject. "They just went silent on me," Dunn said. "There is no word in the English language that is as feared as the 'c' word. So I wondered: When did the silence begin?"

He found that for Protestants, official approval of contraception did not occur until 1930 when the Anglican bishops in London said contraception was licit "when there is a clearly felt moral obligation to limit or avoid parenthood and where there is a morally sound reason for avoiding complete abstinence."

The next year, the U.S. Federal Council of Churches (now the National Council of Churches) issued a similar statement. The doctrinal shift has been so sweeping, Dunn says, that today, "teachings on pregnancy intervention is regarded mainly as a Catholic issue and seldom talked about." Dunn finds rich irony in this because the founders of Protestantism were against contraception or even the avoidance of parenthood. Dunn points out that contraception has been used for over 2,000 years and Christian teaching on it has been almost universally opposed, including Luther and Calvin. Even Thomas Malthus, the 18th-century population theorist who is widely quoted by anti-population activists, believed that contraception was immoral.

Dunn sees the unchecked popularity of contraception in modern life to be a sign that the transformation of a spiritual society into a material one is nearly complete. "It really is an issue of the heart," Dunn said. "The gravest threat humanity has ever faced is the contracepting mentality. Never has civilization ever faced such an aversion to children -- it is a relatively new phenomenon."

Dunn believes he has a keen understanding of its diabolical nature because of first-hand experience. "I've been so guilty of it. I'm sure that is why I feel as strongly as I do. What really had a profound impact on me -- it occurred to me one day that for a good number of years, I was writing diatribes against Planned Parenthood and family planning and our government's involvement and the U.N. when all the while I was practicing it in my own home. To a certain degree I understand that I was a victim of the deception. But because of this, I feel I can better understand people who are also victims of the deception." After completing and publishing a paper on the history of Planned Parenthood, Dunn published another, Contraception: The Tragic Deception. In it, he describes his personal loss at not having all the children God wanted him to have. He wrote, "and although we yielded no ground to abortion, we fell prey to its more deceptive partner."

Even though contraception is a dreaded topic for most people, Dunn is surprised how curious people are to learn more when he talks to them. He said, "The laity has a keen interest in this. When I talk to people, they invariably say, 'I didn't know that.' Sometimes people ask me about it and I go and on for a half hour and apologize for taking so much of their time and they say, 'No, we appreciate it. Thank you.' The silence of the laity is nothing compared to the silence of the clergy because they do not perceive themselves as victims of the deception."

Dunn thinks that his message may be resonating better with Protestants than Catholics. "I sense a greater interest and intensity among Protestants than Catholics," he said. "Perhaps it's because Catholics have heard about it before and kind of discount it. Protestants have never heard it before." However, Dunn suffers no illusions that Catholics are not practicing contraception at nearly the same rates as Protestants. He said, "I am amazed to the enormous degree that Protestants think Catholics are against contraception."

Dunn does not consider himself an academic, but he finds the information he has compiled against artificial birth control to be persuasive. Dunn said, "A man was in my home last night from Oklahoma, he had previously been in my home, and we had discussed pro-life issues kind of generally. I had sent him my pamphlet on contraception. He told me that when he received it in the mail he just put it aside. Later, he said he picked it up and read some of it and then put it down. Later, he said he read the whole thing and wept. Here was a man in his 70s who realized the deep regret that he did not have more children. Another woman said to me recently, 'I feel the church has betrayed me and I feel angry about it."

For copies of Royce Dunn's pamphlets on Planned Parenthood and Contraception, contact: Please Let Me Live, "The Life Chain People," 3209 Colusa Highway, Yuba City, CA 95993. Pamphlets are 100 for $10, 500 for $35, 1,000 for $60, and 5,000 for $55; additional 1,000s $55.

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