BIRTH CONTROL: CHRISTIAN ETHICAL PERSPECTIVE

Abstract

Rwanda continues to face rapid growing population though its government did not cease to call upon all

Christian churches to be involved in educating citizens on the advantages of smaller families as we look

forward the 2020 vision. The intent of this study was to find out the perceptions of Rwanda Christians on birth

control in ethical perspective. The cor-relational and descriptive research designs were chosen for this study. A

questionnaire was designed in way it can meet three dimensions of birth control (general acceptance, natural

methods and artificial methods) and distributed to 62 respondents selected randomly among Christian

community of AUCA. The findings showed that birth control is viewed as ethical by Christians (mean=3.48),

but among the natural methods of birth control none of them has a significant relationship with birth control,

while among the artificial methods, the Barrier method (including male condoms and female condoms) and

pills method have a weak but significant relationship with birth control. However, given that respondents see

any method that brings an end to the embryo's life as unethical and that accept pills method as ethical means

that they do not have enough information concerning the functionality of the pills because among them there

are those which make an end to the life of the embryo. From the above findings we recommend that further

explanation relating to the functionality of each and every method of birth control be given to the Christians to

allow them to exercise their ethical choice.