Petition Text: 22345-CS-NonDis-O

We affirm the principle of parental responsibility in families. The family in its varying forms is the fundamental unit of society and constitutes the primary focus of love, nurture, and acceptance, bringing fulfillment to both parents and children. Healthful, wholesome, and complete personhood develops as one is loved and responds to that love, and in that relationship comes to wholeness as a child of God.

Each married couple has both the right and the duty prayerfully and responsibly to control conception according to the circumstances of their family. In our view, they are free to use those means of conception control considered medically safe, including abstinence and voluntary sterilization. The decision to conceive a child must include acceptance of the parental responsibility to provide for the child's spiritual, moral, mental, and physical nurture and growth.

To support the sacred dimensions of personhood, all reasonable efforts should be made by parents, other family members, the community of faith, and the community at large to ensure, insofar as possible, that every child is born with a healthy body and comes into an environment conducive to healthy spiritual, moral, mental, and physical nurture and growth so that the child may develop his or her full potential and become a constructive and positively contributing member of society.

In accordance with the Scriptures, we believe that all sexual intercourse with anyone other than one's spouse is forbidden. Therefore, all unmarried persons should abstain from sexual intercourse, thereby avoiding conception and contributing to the development of a community environment that is conducive to healthy spiritual, moral, mental, and physical nurture and growth.

When conception takes place and pregnancy occurs, we believe that the resulting unborn life is a human being and, therefore, has a right to be born, loved, and cared for. In those tragic cases where continuance of pregnancy clearly endangers the life or health of the mother, the path of mature Christian judgment may indicate the consideration of abortion. While we support the legal right of the mother to have an abortion in these cases, we encourage her to counsel with her husband, family, pastor, and doctor to make a responsible decision concerning the personal and moral questions of ending the life of her unborn child through abortion or risking her own life by carrying the baby to full term.

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Petition Text: 22345-CS-NonDis-O
1996 United Methodist General Conference