After it was scientifically established that the human female has a fertility cycle, it became a matter of practical research to further establish the limits of the fertile time—when it starts and when it ends. Researchers on both sides of the world pursued this, and we know two of them—Kyusaku Ogino in Japan and Hermann Knaus in Germany. In February 1930, Ogino published his system of fertility awareness in a German medical journal, and Knaus soon conceded that the Ogino system was better than his. This was the beginning of Calendar Rhythm.
In August of that year, the Anglican Bishops at their periodic Lambeth conference were either ignorant of this new reality of spacing babies or ignored it. Seeing only a dichotomy of permanent abstinence or more and more children, they gave their permission for married couples to use unnatural forms of birth control. This poured gas on the flames of the contraceptive sexual revolution that had been started in the USA in 1914 by Margaret Sanger.
In 1935 a German Catholic priest, Fr. Wilhelm Hillebrand, learned from his brother—a doctor—that other research had shown that a woman’s basal body temperature rose after ovulation. He linked this to the Ogino-Knaus calculations for post-ovulation infertility, thus becoming the originator of the Calendar-Temperature method.
It is horribly ironic that after condemning marital contraception in both 1908 and 1920, the majority of the Anglican bishops abandoned the Christian Tradition just six months after the discovery of a system of naturally avoiding or postponing pregnancy.
Tomorrow: the second German irony.
John F. Kippley
Sex and the Marriage Covenant