The
Guttmacher report also claims 98 percent of sexually-active American Catholic women use contraceptives:
Among all women who have had sex, 99% have ever used a contraceptive method other than natural family planning. This figure is virtually the same, 98%, among sexually experienced Catholic women. ...
Only 2% of Catholic women rely on natural family planning; even among Catholic women who attend church once a month or more, only 2% rely on this method (not shown). Sixty-eight percent of Catholic women use highly effective methods: sterilization (32%, including 24% using female sterilization,) the pill or another hormonal method (31%) and the IUD (5%). ...
Data were gathered using in-person interviews with 7,356 women aged 15–44 between June 2006 and December 2008. All data used for this analysis were weighted, and the findings are nationally representative. ...
Current contraceptive use was measured only among women who had had sex in the three months prior to the survey and refers to the method used in the most recent month she had sex. Among women who reported using multiple methods in the survey month, priority was given to the most effective method. The category of “other” methods mainly consists of withdrawal but also includes less common methods, such as suppositories, sponges and foams. Natural family planning includes periodic abstinence, temperature rhythm and cervical mucus tests.
The Guttmacher Institute was originally in 1968 a creature of Planned Parenthood, and became independent from it in 1977. Alan Frank Guttmacher was once the president of PP.
The 4-6 year old study on which the data are based is described as "weighted," which means some data points count more than others. Which ones no one knows. I'll leave it to statisticians to decide if 7,356 women comprise enough of a data set to draw sweeping religious conclusions about any religious group, Catholic or otherwise.
From what I know of Catholics, however, the religion is "orthopractic" more than it is orthodox, emphasizing religious obligation more than religious belief, which would help explain why US Catholic women apparently routinely ignore official teaching.
Protestants have tended rather to emphasize correct belief, but in truth are not really less likely to practice otherwise.
Catholicism is a much bigger tent than Protestantism, which is a sea of tents. The strength, and the weakness, of Catholicism is its ability to co-opt pre-existing belief and absorb it.
The present struggle over reproductive issues in America highlights a struggle against an ideology not unlike that which the church faced in the Soviet era in the Eastern Bloc.
This may be a long war which doesn't end until America does.
Catholicism, however, will still be here when America is gone.
