The inaugural issue of the January 1971 edition of the Ensign provides a message from the then First Presidency of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints. Namely, Joseph Fielding Smith, Harold B. Lee as the first counselor, and N. Eldon Tanner as the second counselor.
Given the present social climate today - my reflection turns toward the teachings of our past leaders. Granted, when accessing the first issue of the Ensign at the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints official website a notification regarding the archive content reminds us that the articles may reflect practices and languages of an earlier time.
Examining and studying some of these teachings reflects an ongoing understanding of what earlier Prophets and Apostles were warning members of the Church concerning cultural and societal norms.
Today, I want to examine what Joseph Fielding Smith shared in the First Presidency message. His thoughts focused on some key issues that are still prevalent today. His message appeared not only as divine inspiration in guiding members of the Church, and as wise counsel about gospel principles concerning the family, but he warned members of the faith regarding the increasing trend of social and cultural issues.
My purpose is two-fold: First, is there significant relevance to what President Joseph Fielding Smith shared that we are to understand and live out today? Second, is what President Joseph Fielding Smith sharing revealing prophetic wisdom and counsel regarding what has now become more problematic as acceptable social norms?
Family and Its Social, Cultural, and Eternal Purpose
President Joseph Fielding Smith opens up with a reminder of the importance of the family unit in the Plan of Salvation.
"As you listen and read, may I remind you of just how important the family unit is in the overall plan of our Father in heaven. In fact, the Church organization really exists to assist the family and its members in reaching exaltation."
As Latter-day Saints, have we forgotten the importance of this? Have many members of our faith moved further away from the idea and understanding of how important family is about possessing an eternal perspective?
For me, the Gospel is key to not only calling people unto repentance and inviting people to come unto Christ, but it is also key in assisting individuals toward an assurance of faith and reaching their divine potential because of the Gospel. It is only through the atonement we receive grace and forgiveness of sins.
No wonder President Joseph Fielding Smith provided the following observation:
Family unity and family commitment to the gospel are so important that the adversary has turned much of his attention to the destruction of families in our society. On every side there is an attack on the basic integrity of the family as the foundation of what is good and noble in life.
Consider the following observation Rachel Allison makes in an article published on the United Families website regarding the Cause and Effect: Family Disintegration and Society Chaos:
We are hearing and reading more and more religious leaders speak up for the preservation of the family. They are seeing and understanding the destructive trends of our society for what they are…civilization killers. One such religious leader who spoke out recently was M. Russell Ballard, a leader in the Mormon Church. “Much of the world has lost its way in particular with regards to priorities and values in our homes.” “Happiness is directly related to home and family. There is no genuine happiness separate and apart from the home. No service is greater than that which promotes and preserves family life.”
Ryan N. S. Topping writes the following in his article The Long War Against the Family (Part I) published on the Crisis Magazine website calling attention to the charge that the progressive cultural elite has long perpetuated prejudices against the family... Topping provides three categories in which this occurs:
- The assertion that marriage constricts men and women where they are less free
- Assumption that children are more of a burden
- Insistence that sexual differentiation is fiction
His argument focuses on how these three ideas represent, as it were, three waves of the anti-family movement of the past 150 years. Topping also observes that the first comes from the contribution of Marxist ideology, the second focuses on eugenicist ideals, and the third is the fruit of the recent gender theorists and propaganda.
Topping goes on and observes:
Social conservatives too often play a battle of catch-up with the progressive left. We marvel at abortion; we worry over divorce; we wonder at the rise of the homosexual lobby. It is right that alarm is sounded. But even before lobbying, if the family is ever to regain its natural position of prominence, conservatives need to recover the memory of how the “traditional family” lost its way.
Does Topping have a point in what he is sharing? Has the traditional family in American Society (and for a broader aspect - within a Global society) lost its way?
President Joseph Fielding Smith addresses the social and cultural issues facing the faithful members of the church at that time. First, President Smith gave attention to how private and government efforts to limit the size of families, sometimes under the guise of saving the world from overpopulation, and how this ideology seemed to be gaining acceptance among many faithful members.
In his July 18, 1969, speech - Special Message to the Congress on Problems of Population Growth - before the Congress of the United States, President Richard Nixon remarks on the increasing frequency of population growth worldwide and presented problem:
One of the most serious challenges to human destiny in the last third of this century will be the growth of the population. Whether man's response to that challenge will be a cause for pride or for despair in the year 2000 will depend very much on what we do today. If we now begin our work in an appropriate manner, and if we continue to devote a considerable amount of attention and energy to this problem, then mankind will be able to surmount this challenge as it has surmounted so many during the long march of civilization.
According to an NPG Forum Paper by Lindsey Grant, this speech, and the dedicated resources under the Nixon administration led to the creation of Article X in the Public Health Service Act of 1970. Grant shares how this led to the creation of the Commission on Population Growth and the American Future.
The growing concern of population growth within the United States, and globally, came on the rise of contraception use within family planning services. The Center for Disease Control published a paper on December 3, 1999, Achievements in Public Health, 1900-199: Family Planning, regarding the Article X and Family Planning:
Family size increased from 1940 until 1957, when the average number of children per family peaked at 3.7 (14,15; CDC, unpublished data, 1999). In 1960, the era of modern contraception began when both the birth control pill and intrauterine device (IUD) became available. These effective and convenient methods resulted in widespread changes in birth control (16). By 1965, the pill had become the most popular birth control method, followed by the condom and contraceptive sterilization (16). In 1965, the Supreme Court (Griswold vs. Connecticut) (17) struck down state laws prohibiting contraceptive use by married couples.
In 1970, federal funding for family planning services was established under the Family Planning Services and Population Research Act, which created Title X of the Public Health Service Act (18). Medicaid funding for family planning was authorized in 1972. Services provided under Title X grew rapidly in the 1970s and 1980s; after 1980, public funding for family planning continued to shift to the Medicaid program (18).
Since 1972, the average family size has leveled off at approximately two children, and the safety, efficacy, diversity, accessibility, and use of contraceptive methods has increased. During the 1970s and 1980s, contraceptive sterilization became more common and is now the most widely used method in the United States (16,19,20). IUD use increased during the early 1980s, then declined because of concerns about intrauterine infections (16). In the 1980s and 1990s, the use of condoms increased among adolescents, presumably because of growing concern about human immunodeficiency virus infection and other sexually transmitted diseases (STDs) (21-23). Since 1991, increased use of long-acting hormonal contraception (Depo-Provera [Registered] [Pharmacia & Upjohn, Inc., Peapack, New Jersey] and Norplant [Registered] [Wyeth-Ayerst Laboratories, St. Davids, Pennsylvania])**** also have contributed to the decline in adolescent pregnancy rates (24,25). Emergency use of oral contraceptive pills might reduce the risk for pregnancy after unprotected intercourse by at least 74% (26). Noncontraceptive health benefits of oral contraceptives include lower rates of pelvic inflammatory disease, cancers of the ovary and endometrium, recurrent ovarian cysts, benign breast cysts and fibroadenomas, and discomfort from menstrual cramps (27).
Given the social and cultural climate - it is no wonder President Joseph Fielding Smith centered his message on the importance of Family. It also raises the question: What significance does this have for us today? Furthermore, it raises an additional question - do we as Latter-day Saints balance out the eternal principle of family responsibly and ethically with that of a burgeoning increase of family disintegration seen over the years?
Liberalization of Abortion
The United States Supreme Court ruled against a Texas statute banning abortion. This landmark legal decision issued on January 22, 1973, effectively legalized a woman's right to an abortion and protected by the 14th Amendment to the Constitution. On June 14, 2022, the United States Supreme Court overturned Roe vs. Wade, holding to the idea there was no longer a federal constitutional right to abortion.
According to History.com, abortion before Roe v. Wade was only legal before a woman could first feel the movements of the fetus. Early regulations concerning abortion were enacted between the 1820s and 1830's and dealt with the sale of dangerous drugs that women used to induce abortions. It was not until the American Medical Association was established in the late 1850s that the call for the criminalization of abortion.
President Joseph Fielding Smith remarked that this liberalization of abortion throughout the world suggested an existing ideal where the sacredness of life is disregarded.
Not only was there a liberalization of abortion in our nation, and subsequently worldwide, but the history of abortion is also tied into eugenics and population pruning. In horticulture, population pruning is a practice that involves the selective removal of certain parts of a plant, such as branches, buds, or roots. This pruning technique ensures healing and prevents the risk of decay and disease. Similarly, the liberalization of abortion developed out of the idea and concept of pruning unborn children, sterilization of undesirable individuals, and decreasing population in certain ethnic groups.
The founder and pioneer is Margaret Sanger. Her belief focused on a personal creed of state use of compulsory sterilization and segregation.
John J. Conley, S.J. published an article in America the Jesuit Review on November 27, 2017, titled: Margaret Sanger was a eugenicist - Why are we still celebrating her? He writes:
Sanger’s eugenics creed is clearly stated in her speech “My Way to Peace” (1932). The centerpiece of the program is vigorous state use of compulsory sterilization and segregation. The first class of persons targeted for sterilization is made up of people with mental or physical disability. “The first step would be to control the intake and output on morons, mental defectives, epileptics.” A much larger class of undesirables would be forced to choose either sterilization or placement in state work camps. “The second step would be to take an inventory of the second group, such as illiterates, paupers, unemployables, criminals, prostitutes, dope-fiends; classify them in special departments under government medical protection and segregate them on farms and open spaces.” Those segregated in these camps could return to mainstream society if they underwent sterilization and demonstrated good behavior. Sanger estimates that 15 million to 20 million Americans would be targeted in this regime of forced sterilization and concentration camps. In Sanger, the humanitarian dream of a world without poverty and illness has deteriorated into a coercive world where the poor, the disabled and the addicted simply disappear.
Conley also shares that Sanger's eugenics project carried its own racial preoccupation. This is reflected in a letter dated December 10, 1939, to Clarence Gamble. According to Conley, Margaret Sanger explains the nature of her organizations outreach to the African American community and quotes:
The most successful educational approach to the Negro is through a religious appeal. We don’t want the word to get out that we want to exterminate the Negro population, and the minister is the man who can straighten out that idea if it ever occurs to any of their more rebellious members.”
He also cites how Sanger proudly recounts her address to the women of the Ku Klux Klan in Silver Lake, N.J. This, according to Conley, is written in her autobiography.
According to a 1957 interview with Mike Wallace, Sanger stated:
I think the greatest sin in the world is bringing children into the world , that have disease from their parents, that have no chance in the world to be a human being practically. Delinquents, prisoners, all sorts of things just marked when they’re born. That to me is the greatest sin, that people can commit. (Sanger)
In her own words, Margaret Sanger preached that birth control, and abortion within that understanding, supposedly alleviate women suffering unwanted pregnancies and control the population to alleviate poverty. She also claims to be a born humanist.
Liberalization of Abortion and, the proliferation of supporting abortion without ethical boundaries and parameters has increased to the point that it has become a threat to bearing and raising children today.
Howard Kainz published an article titled Natural Law and Abortion at Crisis Magazine and addresses how natural law relates to the life principle. He cites St. Thomas Aquinas Summa:
The natural law related to the life principle, according to St. Thomas Aquinas in the Summa (Q. 94, 1a2ae), is the first specific precept of natural law, and relates to the tendency of all beings to remain in existence. As applied to humans, it is the “law of self-preservation” for each individual — the instinctive tendency we all have to nurture our existence and maintain it at all costs, unless some supervening rationale demotes this tendency to secondary importance. The corollary duty for us who observe this law operative in some other individual is to respect that tendency, and do nothing to impede it, as long as that individual does not forfeit his rights in some way (e.g., by unjust, lethal aggression).
Kainz further observes:
Aquinas then goes on to enunciate the second specific precept of the natural law, common to humans as well as other animals — namely, to nurture and make provision for their offspring. As applied to humans, who require immensely longer care and education than other animals, the requirements are proportionally more stringent. This law is associated with the instinctive desire of persons to have offspring and their willingness to invest immense energy in children’s upbringing and well-being — even to the point of personal sacrifice, and even to sacrifice of life.
The main “empirical” proof that this is indeed a law of nature is in the emotions and inclinations — the powerful love most parents feel for their offspring, often maintained in spite of setbacks and unrequited love. Parents reflecting on these appetitive phenomena might suspect that they are being subjected to something like a computer program. Nevertheless, like all instincts, the impetus to care for offspring can be interdicted or redirected, depending on circumstances — including, for humans, not only external environmental circumstances, but also prevailing ideas, ideals, and ideologies.
Kainz also addresses the exception to natural law - as it pertains to abortion - about the threat to the mother's life and health and the case of incest and rape:
Those who apply the first precept often make an exception for situations threatening the life of the mother, since there is a conflict between two rights to life. But, in light of the second precept, a conflict of rights obtains also in the cases of rape and incest. For, if every woman has a right to conceive and procreate, and if this right implies that she has a right to make that choice voluntarily, no more obvious infractions of that right than rape and incest can be contemplated.
Proponents supporting the liberalization of abortion always criticize pro-life advocates with emotional pleading related to cases of incest and rape. According to an article published in USA Today on May 24, 2019, by contributing writer Alia D. Dastagir, shares that only 1% of abortions performed were due to rape and only 0.5% were due to incest.
Political leaders, Pro-Choice advocates, and other leaders consistently argue that abortion is a reproductive right. Denying this reproductive right is a denial of women's right to proper reproductive care and health. Senator Patty Murray, speaking at the HELP Committee Meeting, challenges Pro-life politicians and advocates.
Her statement is a passionate critique of Republican policies on abortion, emphasizing the harm caused to women and families by restrictive abortion laws. It frames the issue as one of fundamental freedom, arguing that no one should be forced to continue a pregnancy against their will. The statement highlights the widespread impact of post-Dobbs abortion bans, detailing heartbreaking stories of women denied essential care and the broader consequences for healthcare access, especially for marginalized groups.
Senator Murray further accuses Republicans of seeking to control women’s bodies and points to their support for extreme measures like national abortion bans and fetal personhood laws, which could criminalize abortion and restrict other reproductive healthcare options. The statement calls these actions a threat to women's autonomy and broader health services.
Despite the dire warnings, it underscores a strong public backlash, with abortion rights winning in every vote since Dobbs. She passionately concludes with a commitment from Democrats to fight for the restoration of abortion rights, pledging to pass the Women’s Health Protection Act and protect reproductive freedoms.
Speaking on the proliferation of how abortion is liberalized, defended, and upheld in our society and culture today; President Russell M. Nelson spoke on how Abortion is an assault on the defenseless in the October 2008 edition of the Ensign.
President Nelson agrees that abortion is limited to a necessary medical intervention in the case of a threat to a mother's health or the case of rape and incest:
Concern for the health of the mother is a vital one. But circumstances in which the termination of pregnancy is necessary to save the life of the mother are very rare, particularly where modern medical care is available. Another concern applies to pregnancies resulting from rape or incest. This tragedy is compounded because an innocent woman’s freedom of choice was denied. In these circumstances, abortion is sometimes considered advisable to preserve the physical and mental health of the mother. Abortions for these reasons are also rare.
He further cautions on the medical necessity of abortion due to potential congenital malformation and harmful effects of certain infectious or toxic agents in the first trimester of pregnancy being real. His caution focuses on terminating pregnancy are of great consideration.
Liberalization of Abortion has focused more on terminating unwanted pregnancies; not because of medical threats to the mother or child, or due to incest or rape. Instead, the liberalization of abortion is focused on providing abortion on demand as a form of birth control. According to President Nelson, elective abortion is legalized on the premise that a woman is free to choose what she does with her own body. He further remarks that each of us is, to an extent, free to think, plan, and do. He points out that we are not free to choose the consequences.
President Nelson succinctly affirms this:
They have freedom of choice—to begin or not to begin that course. When conception does occur, that choice has already been made.
Yes, a woman is free to choose what she will do with her body. Whether her choice leads to an astronaut’s mission or to a baby, her choice to begin the journey binds her to the consequences of that choice. She cannot “unchoose.”
When the controversies about abortion are debated, “individual right of choice” is invoked as though it were the one supreme virtue. That could only be true if but one person were involved. The rights of any one individual do not allow the rights of another individual to be abused. In or out of marriage, abortion is not solely an individual matter. Terminating the life of a developing baby involves two individuals with separate bodies, brains, and hearts. A woman’s choice for her own body does not include the right to deprive her baby of life—and a lifetime of choices that her child would make.
President Nelson further observes that the laws of liberalization of Abortion, and present political support for Abortion as a reproductive right is in direct violation of God's divine law and commandments:
Abortion has been legalized by governing entities without regard for God and His commandments. Scriptures state repeatedly that people will prosper only if they obey the commandments of God.
In essence, liberalization of abortion, advocating for abortion as a reproductive right without healthy and ethical safeguards is a disregard for natural law and divine commandments when it pertains to the sacredness and sanctity of life.
Conclusion
Reflecting on the teachings of President Joseph Fielding Smith and their resonance with today’s cultural and societal shifts, it becomes evident that the preservation of the family is not only central to the Gospel but crucial to societal stability. The adversary’s targeted attacks on the integrity of the family reveal the prophetic wisdom in Smith’s counsel. From family disintegration to the liberalization of abortion, the erosion of moral values continues to impact our homes and communities. These trends highlight the necessity of revisiting eternal principles to fortify the family against these pervasive challenges.
In revisiting past prophetic teachings, it’s clear that the principles of family unity, moral accountability, and the sanctity of life remain as relevant today as they were decades ago. President Smith’s call to defend the family is a reminder that societal norms often diverge from eternal truths, emphasizing the need for individuals and families to anchor themselves in Gospel teachings.
In the next article, I will expand on the theme of addiction and its devastating impact on families. How addiction not only isolates individuals but also fractures relationships, erodes trust, and disrupts the family’s divine purpose. It will delve into the cautions and warnings leaders have shared about addiction’s ripple effect, offering insights into how faith-based principles can foster healing, resilience, and restoration for families affected by this pervasive issue. This exploration aims to inspire a renewed commitment to supporting family members and helping them navigate the challenges of addiction with grace and faith.
I invite you to share your thoughts in the comment section.
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