Doctors ‘Shocked’ By Encyclical

Press, Volume CVIII, Issue 31761, 19 August 1968, Page 1

Doctors ‘Shocked’ By Encyclical

(N.Z. Press Association) AUCKLAND, Aug. 18. Roman Catholic doctors in New Zealand were shocked by the Pope’s encyclical on birth control, the head of the PostGraduate School of Obstetrics and Gynaecology (Professor D. G. Bonham) said today. Speaking on birth control at a meting in Auckland, while Roman Catholic doctors met at Wairakei, Professor Bonham said: “I don’t think that’s letting out a secret.” He said the doctors were meeting to decide what to do about the Pope’s ban on artificial birth control. “It is now up to the Catholic medical group to try to find something which can be accepted,” he said. Professor Bonham was one

of three speakers in a panel discussion on birth control. The other panel members are Dr Alice Bush, president, of the Family Planning Association, and the Rev. W. J. W. Rosevear, sub-warden at St John’s Theological College. The discussion was organised by the Auckland University Students’ Association and was held in the Auckland Town Hall concert chamber under the chairmanship of Mr D. M. Robinson.

About 115 people attended. Many ages were represented and only a small proportion of the audience was students. The Roman Catholic Bishop of Auckland (Archbishop J. M. Liston) had forbidden any representatives of the Catholic Church to take part in the discussion.

Mr -G. Gotlieb, president of the Students’ Association, said to the meeting that no lay member of the Catholic Church could be persuaded to sit on the pa'nei. Mr Rosevear said the Pope had placed the emphasis in

his encyclical on the procreative and not on the unitive function of sexual intercourse in marriage.

Since the end of last century the Anglican Church had slowly changed its view of sexuality, to give more recognition to its unitive function. Mr Rosevear said this function of sexuality had become something which the Anglican Church now neither undervalued nor overvalued. Dr Bush said that all families should have the opportunity to choose when they would have children.

The Family Planning Association was anxious that the community be aware of the needs of its less fortunate citizens.

Some women were barely aware that they could live in normal married relationships with their husbands without having babies every year. All New Zealand mothers should have access to reliable methods of birth control. Most Protestants found it hard to understand how the Pope had concluded that artificial birth control was theologically wrong, she said.