Word: methodism
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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...encyclical Humanae Vitae, Pope Paul VI strongly reaffirmed his church's traditional opposition to artificial means of birth control. That authoritative teaching left Roman Catholic couples with only two ways to limit the size of their families: 1) use the morally acceptable rhythm method, which was then so unreliable as to justify the sobriquet "Roman roulette"; or 2) follow their consciences rather than papal counsel and adopt such forbidden means of contraception as diaphragms, condoms or the Pill -- which millions...
Twenty years later, the Vatican's support for Humanae Vitae is as strong as ever, but with a twist. The church has now become the world's most active proponent of natural family planning, a more effective version of the old unreliable rhythm method. A new department has been set up within the Curia, the Vatican's bureaucracy, to promote birth regulation. In Rome, Gemelli Hospital houses a twelve-year-old N.F.P. clinic run by a Catholic university and headed by a nun. Since it opened, the clinic has taught N.F.P. methods to 1,660 couples, and claims that...
...prevent conception, which is the "natural" end of sexual intercourse. But a couple may licitly refrain from conjugal relations during a woman's fertile period, which usually lasts ten to twelve days during each menstrual cycle. The improved way of precisely determining those days is known as the ovulation method, or Billings mucus method, which was introduced by and named for an Australian Catholic couple in the 1970s. Using it, a woman carefully monitors changes in her cervical mucus to determine when she is ovulating, and thus capable of conceiving a child. A 1976 study by the World Health Organization...
What to do about the situation is the subject of a simmering debate. Take unwanted pregnancies. While publicly funded abortion has long been accepted as a method of birth control among Chinese married couples, the state refuses to make contraceptives available to single people. Many unmarried women are thus driven to seek dangerous back-alley abortions rather than risk the scandal that would arise from exposure of their illicit affairs if they chose legal channels. "If we teach them how to prevent pregnancies, maybe premarital sex will become even more common," frets Liu. Still, Dr. Wu labels Beijing's stand...
...than successful: some disintegrated under sunlight, unavailable at the bottom of landfills. Others came apart after contact with water, causing supermarket executives to shudder at the thought of what would happen to the groceries in a plastic shopping bag containing a leaky milk bottle. But now there is a method of adding cornstarch to some plastics. Bacteria eat the starch, causing the plastic to fall apart into pieces that can be ingested by microorganisms. Result: the plastic disintegrates in four to seven years...