Rethinking the Sacredness of Life: The Christian Medical Association of India, NGO Nurses, and Family Planning in India, 1930–72

During the 1930s the Christian Medical Association of India (CMAI), an organization of Protestant medical missionaries and Indian Christian doctors, cautiously sanctioned birth control for its Indian Christian constituency. The CMAI’s endorsement was circumspect: it had acted in the context of a world-wide economic depression and, within India, a perceived “epidemic” of birth control propaganda.  But even such cautious approval was opposed by many Western and Indian Protestant Christians, who essentially shared the Roman Catholic position that interventionist contraception was un-Christian.  Given such objections, and the tumultuous circumstances of India’s 1940s, the issue of birth control received scant attention in CMAI deliberations until the early 1960s, when it returned as a major priority for the now largely Indianized organization. The CMAI’s zeal for what was now called family planning both anticipated and reflected the national government’s commitment to this cause; it also benefitted from the abundant support available from Western governments and NGOs.  The paper shows how quickly traditional theological objections to artificial contraception were put aside or dismissed by the CMAI in the changed circumstances of the 1960s. The paper argues, however, that the CMAI was not simply in thrall to the new obsession with population control in this first development decade.  Rather, motivated by a broadened understanding of the “sacredness of life” and increasingly conscious of India’s high rates of maternal and infant mortality, the CMAI’s family planning project  focused on the quality of the lives of India’s mothers and their living children.  Canadian nurses, provided by a secular NGO (Canadian University Service Overseas, “Canada’s Peace Corps”), became enthusiastic participants in this project.  The paper, then, provides an opportunity to consider changing understandings of the sacredness of life in a cross-cultural context.