On July 8, 2020, The Supreme Court ruled that employers can opt out of providing their workers with free birth control based on "religious and moral" reasons. Catholics are the primary religious group behind this anti-contraceptive movement. Yet, other Christian sects are in support of birth control, and the majority of Jews of Muslims are as well.
So how did we get here?
Let's look at the Hebrew Scriptures first. The biblical story that anti-contraceptive Catholics seem to quote is that of Onan from Genesis, who was killed by God for "spilling his seed on the ground." Taken out of context, this sounds like a warning against intercourse for pleasure. However, a quick look at the story as a whole will reveal why this action would have angered God. Onan was ordered to bear a child to his brother's wife, but he pulled out because he decided he didn't want to give the child to his brother. He wasn't killed because he "wasted" seed, but because he broke his covenant with God (Genesis 38:8-10).
In other places of the Hebrew Scriptures, we see people use birth control with positive results. Esther uses myrrh, a common birth control of her time, before seducing the Persian king (Esther 2:10). Her actions ultimately save the Jewish people.
Because of stories like these, Jews have been widely accepting of contraceptives. Although Jewish culture places an emphasis on family life, there's also plenty of encouragement to raise a family responsibly and to never jeopardize family members by bearing children who you cannot support.
Do the Christian Scriptures preach otherwise? The short answer is no. The Scripture doesn't mention birth control directly. It shares the emphasis on family life that we see in the Hebrew Scriptures, but it doesn't dictate what to do when birth control is used to protect the family from financial or social ruin.
What actually developed in the Catholic culture was a hatred towards physical pleasure. This idea roots all the way back to various saints, who all endured self-induced starvation and flagellation in an attempt to connect with the suffering of Christ. It was frowned upon to engage in any "matters of the flesh," as the emphasis became focused on the otherworldly and spiritual rather than earthly. We see this mindset in many other Catholic ideologies, such as the "Jesus take the wheel" mentality in which believers separate themselves from earthly matters because they believe that God will handle things and that the afterlife matters more anyway. Birth control allows couples to engage in sex without any repercussions, which distressed many Catholics.
These ideas were recently popularized by televangelist Jerry Falwell in 1968.
Falwell's anti-pleasure mentality led to an enormous distaste for sex and all instruments that permit it, such as contraceptives and abortions. Complete abstinence outside of marriage became the answer. In theology, we call this concept asceticism.
Asceticism exists in many faiths outside of Catholicism, such as Buddhism and Hinduism. Other faiths, such as Judaism, are more focused on solving worldly matters and making the earth a good place to live than disconnecting from the body.
Falwell's son, Jerry Falwell Jr., is a close ally of Trump's. Falwell Jr. is an Evangelist, just like his father, and he's expressed his support of Trump a number of times. On Twitter, he's said that Trump "has proven beyond a doubt that he's worthy of the support of the entire Evangelical community."
I believe that a lot of factors have come into play with this recent Supreme Court ruling, but one major player in the anti-contraceptive movement is the asceticism that's so deeply rooted in the Religious Right.