Living Humanae Vitae in Poland

Humanae vitae remains alive, if not entirely well, fifty-eight years after its promulgation. When Pope Paul VI released the encyclical reinforcing the Church’s prohibition on artificial forms of birth control, it was poorly received in many quarters, having diverged from the majority report of the Pontifical Commission on Birth Control. The majority report had made a detailed case for wide reception of artificial contraceptive technologies, not as an endorsement of the contraceptive mentality, but on the basis of admiration of human ingenuity, respect for couples’ decision-making amid personal circumstances (“conscience”), and the challenges posed by regular marital sexual abstinence.

The minority report carried the day. Even the Francis pontificate did not revise the document in favor of the sensus fidei fidelium. True, during a conversation about responsible parenthood, Francis counseled against “breeding like rabbits”—advice no Catholic rejects, so long as it remains vague. Paul VI himself used the phrase “responsible parenthood” nine times in his encyclical. Popular sentiments, however, remain contrarian: Social scientists regularly remind us that Humanae Vitae’s counsel is neither widely endorsed nor observed by most Catholics.

Today’s dissenters include innumerable married couples who resemble sloths more than rabbits. Fertility is receding at a pace unforeseen a mere decade ago. Poland, long a pillar of the Catholic world, sports one of the lowest of low fertility rates in Europe—around 1.1 children per woman. Deaths have outnumbered births for the past twelve years. Beleaguered neighbor Ukraine, whose fertility has suffered from a dearth of young adult males and a lack of confidence in the future, sports a barely lower rate (around 1.0). In wartime, the loss of the will to reproduce may be rationalized. But Poland! Twenty-nine percent of the population still attends Mass weekly—a strong showing, though it is down sharply from near 50 percent in the 1990s. Marriage rates have plummeted more than 50 percent in some dioceses in the span of just four years. (In no diocese have they risen.) There were twice as many weddings in Poland in 1983—when the country was under martial law—than in 2023.

In late 2024, I set out to study how lowest-low fertility affects observant Catholics in a country long noted for its affection for the Church and for a pope who, out of concern for marriage and family, originated a theology of the body (though it is better known in the United States than in his native land). The subjects were seventy-five married, observant Polish Catholic mothers and fathers. A Polish colleague of mine, a married mother of four, administered our questionnaire. We asked our interviewees about their fertility desires, their attitudes toward and use of contraceptive methods, their sexual behavior patterns, their experiences with natural family planning (NFP), what they believe other Catholic couples think and do, their regrets, their infertility concerns, and a variety of other matters. Seventy-five accounts may not seem like many, but they are more than enough to establish patterns.

Among the interviewees were fifty-four men and women representing both sides of twenty-seven marriages. An additional twenty-one married women were interviewed without their husbands. (All interviews were one-on-one.) The interviewees represent ten of Poland’s sixteen voivodeships (provinces) and twenty-eight cities, towns, and countrysides. The group was about as diverse as we could get while focusing on the religiously serious. All but a few of our interviewees were “communicants”—among the half of all Polish Mass attenders who typically receive the Eucharist at Sunday Mass. The average age was thirty-five for men and 33.5 for women. Among the forty-eight families represented in the data, there were eighty-four children (1.75 per family), with seven more on the way. Eleven couples were childless. Those with children averaged 2.2 of them—double the national fertility rate. Thirty-one couples lived in apartments; half of those were rentals, and half of the renters were in the process of becoming owners. The size of the apartments ranged from 540 to 1,000 square feet. Seventeen couples lived in houses, which were more sizable and tended to be suburban or rural. The marriages were, on balance, stable. Some were more harmonious than others.

Many of our interviewees—seven in ten—had refrained from sexual intercourse prior to marriage. Nearly all had been taught NFP in some form, though the best instructed were those who first heard about it in their families and again in school religious education (now a politically embattled sphere) rather than in the Church’s marriage prep courses, where the topic is discussed with widely varying degrees of skill, rigor, and winsomeness. Hewing to Humanae Vitae is hard, and it became more difficult the longer our interviewees were married. Some eventually came to terms with contraceptive use. How many? What kind? Why? And to what ends? Good questions.

Thirty-seven of the forty-eight couples had ever employed a form of NFP. Of those thirty-seven, just over half (nineteen) currently did so with no contraceptive supplementation. Only four of forty-eight couples professed never having used either NFP or any form of contraception. You might think these four couples were parents of many kids, but the opposite is true: They were recently married, older when marriage, or infertile. Other couples employ one or another form of contraception, sometimes combining it with an NFP method, with the strongest preference being for condom use (sixteen couples), followed by “coitus interruptus” or withdrawal (eight). In other words, contracepting Polish Catholics display a strong preference for simplicity and episodic use over deliberate planning or altered natural function. Indeed, almost no couples chose hormonal, chemical, mechanical, or surgical efforts to prevent pregnancy. Most of our subjects perceived these methods as an obvious harm to a woman’s body and fertility, in a manner few American women have since the FDA approved the pill in 1960. Only one couple (out of forty-eight) noted current use of the pill.

Nonetheless, perpetual, literal “openness to life” for the entirety of a married woman’s fertility career was rare. Only a handful of couples were pursuing it (to date), and most of those got married after age thirty. More common were mothers so exhausted with small children that they traded months of longed-for sexual intimacy with their husband for a simple guarantee that another child would not soon be on its way. Many seemed to be good mothers making do in small two-bedroom apartments.

Magdalena (a pseudonym) was fortunate. This thirty-six-year-old worked in Catholic religious education and lived with her husband and four children (the oldest is seven) in a 1,000-square-foot apartment. The kids slept in what most of us would call the living room. Neither rich nor poor, Magdalena and her husband simply couldn’t afford a house, and larger rentals were pricey and seldom on the market. A devout wife, mother, and educator, Magdalena had dutifully consumed encyclicals and exhortations and long disagreed “clearly and categorically . . . with any form of contraception under any circumstances.”

When she was interviewed, she and her husband had been faithful to Humanae Vitae. But her commitment to it had begun to waver. She wondered about one of the wishes of the majority report—that of giving preference to overall fruitfulness on the part of the couple. Though there are Polish priests who would no doubt sympathize with this shift of emphasis, Magdalena wasn’t yet ready. “I still follow [Church teachings]. . . . But it tires me and it’s hard.” And: “I’m no longer as inclined to judge whether [others] use condoms or not. I would have clearly opposed it before, but now I’m more likely to tell myself that I don’t know all the circumstances fully, and maybe there are some that justify it.” At the time, she and her husband had been practicing celibacy for six months and anticipated the possibility of “another six months or longer.”

When I visited her several months later, their situation had improved. After a lengthy spell of breastfeeding her fourth child, she’d started ovulating regularly again and could therefore get back to predicting “safe” times for sexual intimacy—even if those times were less frequent than both desired. What they desired above all, for now, was to avoid conceiving a fifth child.

One could downplay the difficulty couples face, responding with advice of the sort that counsels others to “do hard things.” But people are more apt to do hard things when they have help. Parenting is made more challenging by an era of mobility wherein many of us live far from family. As one respondent in an earlier study of Polish couples lamented, “We badly need a babcia!” Her plea for grandmotherly help resonates. My own wife looks after two of our granddaughters for six hours every weekday, enabling their parents to eke out a living and afford a home in suburban Austin.

Polish grandparents, however, have their own ideas about family size, forged in a climate of centralized control and—until the mid-1980s—suppression of dissent. Most of our interviewees’ parents endorsed no more than two grandchildren, sometimes fewer. The more children our interviewees had, the more they sensed a lack of approval from their parents. One mother (Monika) recounted a bizarre incident that occurred during her second pregnancy:

I was at my in-laws’ house and the grandma came over, pulled me aside, and told me that I should ask for a C-section during delivery, that I should make a deal with the doctor, bribe him, and have him tie my fallopian tubes. (Sterilization is illegal in Poland.) [She said,] “That’s what girls here do. Women do that. And that’s how it’s done here.” I should just arrange it with a doctor. I refused to talk about it, I kept repeating that it’s not a conversation to have with her, that it’s between me and my husband. . . . She just kept repeating the same thing over and over.

Monika had five children at home, and yet she was hardly a traditionalist. (She endorsed, for instance, the notion of future female priests.) Her husband pines for greater flexibility in Church teachings. They remain observant, though they do not expect the same of others.

As evident in the remarks of Monika’s grandmother-in-law, the Polish health system is there to assist with fertility control. Few of our subjects spoke well of hospital birthing experiences, particularly the first one. Accounts of insensitive doctors, abrasive nurses, or problematic public hospitals were not few. Krystyna, a mother of three, told this tale of her first birth:

We went in too early. . . . And there were a lot of unpleasant things—including a doctor telling me, “Your baby will rot inside you if you don’t take oxytocin.” My husband and I still remember that. . . . [The labor] lasted two days. And after those two days, I had no strength left, so they did a C-section. [Then] I had a hemorrhage because my uterus went into atony [that is, a failure to contract]. After the birth, I was emotionally very low.

She summed up the experience: “Honestly, if I hadn’t really wanted to have more kids, I would’ve never done it again.” But she did—twice, with experience and forethought leading the way, revealing something that many women knew or else found out: They had to take as much control of the birth experience as possible, even if that meant accepting elevated risk and elevated cost. Expenses involved in birthing at home are not reimbursed by the National Health Fund.

Poland also sports the highest episiotomy (51 percent of first vaginal births) and C-section rates (55.1 percent) in Europe, according to studies from 2021 and 2025. These facts matter for couples’ willingness to adhere to Humanae Vitae. Such procedures make the return to sexual intercourse slower and more painful. A severe cut to deliver a 9.5-pound newborn left one mother in pain not just during sex—only three times in the following year—but even when she walked long distances. “When the weather changes, I can feel the scar,” the twenty-six-year-old mother of one from Poznań noted. 

After new mothers are discharged from the hospital, physicians step in again, offering the pill. The idea of becoming pregnant at any point in the next twelve to eighteen months seemed like madness to many of them. Periods tended to return erratically during or after breastfeeding. These post-pregnancy months were the most predictable time to consider augmenting NFP. And if their doctors had strongly warned them not to get pregnant anytime soon—as many did—anxious women and their husbands tended to accord medical professionals the moral authority for what happened next. One mother who was offered and accepted a prescription for birth control pills—and took them for the following year—found herself stunned at her own trajectory: “Suddenly what mattered more to me was how I felt after giving birth than what I had been taught for many, many years.” This woman was one of relatively few interviewees who talked openly about refraining from the Eucharist while contracepting.

The far more numerous condom users among our subjects—one in three couples—were much less likely to mention or discuss their contraceptive use with a confessor or spiritual director. Many perceived or believed that the condom—alone among contraceptives—could be a religiously licit option, even though most acknowledged that the Church did not approve. They held that conscience, plus the knowledge that some priests would quietly back them, licensed a supplemental bit of latex for those days of peak pregnancy risk. It would bring welcome relief to their marriages, they reasoned.

Indeed, the term “conscience” was on the lips of twenty-four interviewees (including both spouses in five couples). By contrast, Humanae Vitae was independently named by five interviewees, and John Paul II by only three. (We introduced none of the terms.) All but a handful of those who invoked “conscience” in the context of condom use attended Mass weekly and partook of the Eucharist. A few did not. Joanna and Tomasz were one of those couples. Convinced that they would not receive absolution in confession, they have reduced their Mass attendance. For a few months, their children would ask:

“Why aren’t we going [to Mass]? Why aren’t we going to Communion?” Now they don’t ask anymore. And [our son] is at that age where next year he would be receiving First Communion, but we’re not attending, and everything’s falling apart. So, we stick to the rule—I didn’t get absolution, so I don’t receive Communion—but that creates a big disconnect [with the Church], you know?

The employment of condoms was generally not the result of joint decision-making by the couples. Women were more likely to call the shots. If the woman favored premarital chastity, it tended to happen. And if she decided that pregnancy in the near term was a bad idea, then some form of contraception typically followed. If it had been up to men, most of those we interviewed would have bedded their wives before marrying them and had more children after. Instead, husbands largely followed their wives’ lead, even when the decisions were characterized as mutual.

Artur, a forty-two-year-old father of two, held that “being a mother or father of a big family, or starting a big family, or being open to having a big family” was “heroic.” So, why use condoms? It’s complicated: “You can’t force anyone into heroism. . . . I’d like to have that kind of heroic courage. I don’t have it, but I’d like to.” When Artur was asked whether he had any regrets in this domain, the plot thickened:

Yes, yes, I do. . . . I still carry [grievances and regrets] now. . . . I think about how I lacked agency and didn’t establish my own terms and priorities. . . . We refrained from having sex before marriage. That led to a lot of frustration for me. I think it changed me. We were really committed to it because [my wife] was very firm on the issue and deeply committed to the teachings of the Church and so on, so we went along with it. Then later . . . we moved on to practicing NFP, and then, when [my wife’s] perspective shifted, we transitioned to using condoms. And I had this sense of just being, well, like a trailer being towed wherever the truck goes.

Mateusz, a thirty-two-year-old physician and father of four, could commiserate. When he agreed to use condoms, he went to confession with a priest. “Somehow we came to this position to allow it,” he recounted. “It’s a bit like when there’s a mess in a room, right? I mean, you have a mess, you live in that room, the mess bothers you, but for now, you live in it.” Given that his wife longed for intercourse but was anxious about pregnancy, he felt he had little choice.

Women consistently appeared more bothered by curbed sexual access to their spouses than the men were. It’s possible this asymmetry was the product of our subjects’ being interviewed by a woman; perhaps the men would have been more vocal about marital desire when speaking with a man. Regardless, many women independently lamented the collision of heightened libido during ovulation with the yearning to avoid a pregnancy. (In the United States, oral contraceptive use is so high that remarks like this may be rarer, given that the pill prevents ovulation.) Many women reported that the decline in desire after ovulation was so considerable—or their cycles were so inconsistent, or both—that intercourse had vanished from their marriages for months. It should be no surprise, then, that women were apt to feel that the problem of unmet legitimate desire was more unfair to them than to men, whose libidos are less fickle.

The turn toward condom use often followed a marital “crisis.” Szymon, a thirty-three-year-old father of one, married for seven years, used the term when discussing how he and his wife gave up on NFP:

So, we decided to use condoms because we were going through a crisis in our relationship. And we were also taught and guided towards the idea that our intimacy and sexual connection is very important. . . . We decided that it was simply more important [than our scruples]. . . . For any person, intimacy is needed. And you can lose that due to rules or moralism. But I think the most important thing is to be with each other. I’m also learning this in therapy, that my wife and I should be the closest to each other, closer than anyone else. If this is truly the closest relationship of all, then it’s very important that it stays close. And if that’s the case, I think everything is reasonable.

Marital crises, though real in their consequences, are social in their construction. How do couples decide that they are “in crisis”? Though one might surmise that every crisis is couple-specific, that would be naive. A marital crisis occurs when one or both parties decide that, in contrast to how they perceive that “normal” couples function, their marital union has particular and besetting problems that are abnormal and require correction, and soon.

The crisis in Szymon’s marriage led the couple to seek marital psychotherapy. This is an important distinction in the data. Mention of therapy by our interviewees was consistently associated with a positive perspective on contraception. Just as the physician serves as an external moral authority in the postpartum months, so the Christian psychotherapist becomes an authority on sexual morality for couples who perceive that their marriage is in trouble. (For the record, all of the forty-eight marriages in these data remain intact.)

It is human to empathize. A significant minority of our interviewees hold that there is a good here—companionate marriage—in need of protection against the conjugal vulnerabilities that Humanae Vitae unwittingly fosters. Hence, a pivot toward a different definition of “openness” makes sense to many. “I think the goal is fertility, having children,” asserted Adam, a thirty-three-year-old father of three. “So, what’s more important is whether we are open to having children, rather than whether we use contraception.” Coincidentally, his wife, Joanna, is herself a therapist and seems on a mission to share her dissent with friends:

Actually, I believe that since I started using contraception, I have a much better relationship with God. . . . It might sound absurd, in the sense that I understand it could offend someone. . . . I just think the Church shouldn’t focus on how people don’t want to have children, but rather on what can help [couples] to consider with each cycle whether it’s time for another child.

Magdalena, the Catholic educator and mother of four, felt that her own situation had become paradoxical. Introducing condoms would open her marriage to life, since condoms, like every form of contraception, have a documented failure rate. By contrast, the decision to avoid sexual intercourse for months had made her marriage completely closed to life. The act, she reasoned, seems more important to the Church than the mindset. Though she now dissents from the Church intellectually, Magdalena still formally obeys, “because there is a large space between disagreeing with the Church in one’s mind and doing the same in action.”

Lest we leap to the conclusion that condoms save marriages by securing access to sex, I am unaware of any quality social science evidence suggesting that slightly more frequent sex between husband and wife helps to prevent divorce. Assumptions abound that smaller families (and fertility control) lead to richer sexual satisfaction, which in turn will lower the likelihood of divorce. In the United States, there is simply no evidence of this.

The introduction of contraceptive use does seem to have generated more calm and less anxiety among the couples who chose to contracept, though without producing an obvious increase in marital happiness. Strikingly, the introduction of condoms did not yield an obvious disparity in the frequency of intercourse. The average frequency of intercourse over the past two weeks reported by those couples who used condoms was 1.77 instances, compared to 1.72 among those who didn’t. A small number of interviewees who reported four or more instances of intercourse drove both averages up; without them, the means were closer to 1.65 and 1.53. I had anticipated a more evident, and perhaps statistically significant, difference. The only notable distinction was among the eleven childless couples, most of whom were not using condoms: They averaged 2.1 instances of intercourse over two weeks. None of the four most prolific couples—in terms of recent sex—used contraception; two of them were childless. Abstainers remain, no doubt. Among eleven couples who reported no sex in the past two weeks, only two were condom users. Hence, though crisis “breakthroughs” may bring new practices into Polish Catholic marriages, normal life has a way of pulling couples back to their historic sexual activity patterns. 

Nor is desire absent among those who decline to contracept. Agnieszka, who was forty and married for eighteen years and had five children, described the decision to abstain when her libido peaked as “really challenging.” It’s a familiar account, but for Agnieszka it was no reason to change course. Karolina, a thirty-six-year-old mother of three, married for twelve years, likewise understood the relational stress caused by periodic abstinence and chose to address it head-on:

I think I’m really in a very, very, very small minority . . . that [believes] waiting for each other—if conception is [being] postponed—is really valuable. . . . I don’t know, it seems to me that in today’s sexualized times, this wildness, this indulgence—here, now, everything—it’s not just about sex. It’s valuable to wait, and there’s a time of joy. And we always joke about it for us; it’s always such a humorous stage: “Oh, finally we’ve got the green light!” . . . [B]ut you appreciate it, and I know that even if something happened with me, if any pregnancy was difficult, my husband would still wait. It’s awareness of trust. It’s incredible. That’s why . . . it’s hard for people today to experience that.

Karolina had built a bridge to her husband, cutting tension with humor.

Even some conscientious objectors can see that contraception doesn’t address the root cause of their situations. When asked about Poland’s very low fertility rate, Paulina claimed that it was not about a lack of housing or money. Despite her dissent from Church teaching, this thirty-one-year-old mother of two surprised me when she proclaimed that “the key issue is culture. Having children is no longer really associated with social prestige or being looked at with respect.” She fears the reaction of strangers in church, restaurants, and public spaces. As for the solution, “I think it’s really about supporting parents—making them feel socially important and that they have help.”

Family size is socially infectious. What we desire is powerfully affected by our peer groups, even by strangers. You can imagine (and then want) more children when you see others with more children. The reverse is also true. When I was a Presbyterian, I was aware of only one thirtysomething couple in our congregation with four children. Accordingly, I thought of four kids as “a bit much.” When my wife and I became Catholic, what we wanted changed in step.

Like the original creators of contraceptive technologies, the Majority Papal Commission Report trusted couples to discern what was best for their own unions and families. (Never mind that the technologies are largely responsible for creating a market in shorter-term relationships that is characterized by deception, manipulation, longsuffering, anxiety, and loneliness.) The report’s authors believed they were not contradicting “the genuine sense” of the Church’s tradition and of previous statements like Casti Connubii by affirming “the regulation of conception by using means, human and decent, ordered to favoring fecundity in the totality of married life.” The report’s authors could have stopped there, leaving the “human and decent” part up for interpretation. But they didn’t. Instead, they claimed that the “condemnation of a couple to a long and often heroic abstinence as the means to regulate conception . . . cannot be founded on the truth.” Might not? Maybe. “Cannot” is too firm. Recall that Artur, the forty-two-year-old father quoted earlier, yearned for the heroic.

The 1966 report pressed for a radical change, motivated in part by the sensus fidei fidelium as well as by “social changes in matrimony and the family,” a diminished infant mortality rate, “new bodies of knowledge” in the natural and social sciences, a shifting understanding of “the value and meaning of human sexuality and of conjugal relations,” and, above all, our duty to aid and advance human life through scientific discovery and development. The paragraph in which these reasons are articulated is the most ironic and damning in the document, revealing just how overconfident the postconciliar Church’s bishops and consultants were in knowledge-driven social change. Sixty years later, we’re witnessing the endgame: collapsing fertility rates, delayed and extended adolescence, the death of dating, a preference for socially mediated matching, and a sexual recession among married people and cohabiters alike, along with surging rates of masturbation across the life span. We’re increasingly alone, gazing at each other through glass darkly. None of this can represent the “deeper understanding” of marriage the majority report claimed to discern.

Humanae Vitae isn’t just about human life. It’s about the discipline and faith of lifelong unions in an era in which image is king and attention is everything. The encyclical’s claims are not easy. But neither are they faulty. The more antagonistic a Catholic community, parish, or nation becomes toward reproduction, the tougher Catholics will find it to abide Humanae Vitae and, eventually, marriage. When even the dissenting faithful say that their problem is less with doctrine than with the ambient culture, maybe we should believe them.