The Commission and the Decision

John XXIII created a small commission on population and family in 1963. Paul VI inherited it, enlarged it repeatedly until it held around seventy members including married couples, and kept the question out of the Second Vatican Council so that the commission could finish. By 1966 it had reported. A large majority held that the Church's teaching on marriage could accommodate methods of regulating birth other than periodic abstinence, and that the moral question should be assessed over the whole of a marriage rather than act by act. A minority held that a change was impossible without conceding that the Church had taught error for centuries.

Paul VI did not take the majority view. Humanae Vitae, dated 25 July 1968 and released four days later, restates the inseparable connection between the unitive and the procreative meanings of the marriage act and concludes that each and every act must remain open to the transmission of life. Recourse to infertile periods is permitted; direct interruption of the generative process is not.

The encyclical also contains a passage of prediction, arguing that widespread contraception would lower moral standards, encourage infidelity, and lead men to regard women as instruments rather than as companions. That passage is quoted by its defenders as vindicated and by its critics as unproven, and it has become a proxy for the whole argument.