From the point of view of reproductive health, both pregnancies are associated with extremes of risk for both mother and child. Elizabeth was an elderly woman in her first pregnancy, while Mary was a teen-ager. Even with a good health system in place, the risk of maternal and child morbidity and mortality in both age groups is 30 to 60 percent higher than pregnancies of women in their twenties and early thirties.

What is worse is that Mary did not have an appropriate birthing place for her delivery. She bore her son in a stable, surrounded by farm animals. At a time when no vaccines were available, the risk of tetanus neonatorum was extremely high. Survival of both mother and child would almost certainly have required divine intervention – which Christians firmly believe did happen.

Since most Christians do not believe that Jesus had any siblings, he was apparently raised in a one-child family. Thus it is certain that his parents, Joseph and Mary must have practiced some form of birth control. For those who believe that Mary remained a virgin even after she had given birth, the only possible mode of birth control must have been sexual abstinence – a notion that has to this day influenced the thinking of a large number of Talibanic Catholics and other fundamentalist Christians who persist in the belief that this is the only acceptable way of avoiding unwanted pregnancies.

In the minds of such extremists, it appears that there is no other sin greater than sexual union of a man and a woman without intention of procreation. Listening to these zealots, one may even get the feeling that the only important commandments of God are the sixth and the ninth ("Thou shalt not commit adultery" and "Thou shalt not covet thy neighbor’s wife"). In the minds of people such as these, stealing and cheating and even murder are all right as long as intentions are pure and religious. On the other hand sexual pleasure is at all times sinful unless it partakes of a procreative act.

Given their facility for rationalization, it is not surprising that those who ousted Joseph Estrada for plunder (defined as stealing at least 50 million pesos from the people) did not hesitate to enter into a fraudulent contract (worth 100 million pesos) with the Department of Health. Theirs was a just cause, extremists among the "Couples for Christ" claim, they were preventing government from promoting sexual promiscuity among the Filipino people. Ostensibly, the contract was to promote "natural family planning" among the poor. However, all evidence – participants’ accounts of training programs as well as the teaching manuals developed – indicates that the intention was to discourage family planning as a norm and to denigrate the other "sinful" but scientifically effective methods such as pills, condoms and IUDs. For some reason, after the initial release of 50 million pesos, the organization did not pursue the subsequent release – possibly because, in order to do so, they would be required to submit a financial accounting of the original disbursement.

Another example of such devious reasoning is the behavior of well-known religious institutions involved with an umbrella "civil society" group known as "Code NGO". These groups helped themselves to a 2 billion peso commission from a government loan without any thought of accountability to the next generation of poor Filipinos who will bear the burden of paying the loan.

Hypocrisy of Talibanic Catholic groups is more than matched by Malacañang’s posture on the expenditure of government money for family planning purposes. All policy documents assert the Philippines’ commitment to the Millennium Development Goals of the United Nations. Yet officially, the national government’s policy is to provide funding only for "natural" family planning methods. Even as this policy is carried out, national agencies enter into agreements with foreign donors to help curb the country’s runaway population growth rate.

Meanwhile, the Filipino poor are not only getting poorer even as they multiply faster than the more fortunate elite. Their women bear an average of 6 to 7 children during their reproductive lifetimes while those of the rich have a convenient two babies per family. Of course, it may be possible that the main form of family planning among the wealthy is sexual abstinence in accordance to the teachings of the Catholic Church.