(LifeSiteNews) — Melinda French Gates, ex-wife of Bill Gates, shared in a recent interview that a “very liberal” priest confirmed to her, in contradiction to Church teaching, that a Catholic can be pro-contraception.

Gates, who has been heavily involved in providing contraception to women in underdeveloped areas around the world, echoed her past narratives about birth control on an April 17 episode of The Jamie Kern Lima Show.

“(If) they could limit and decide they were only gonna have three or four instead of six or seven, they knew they could then feed their kids, their kids could go to school. They had a chance, those kids, of maybe growing up and, you know, living their dreams,” Gates told Lima.

She said that during her world travels, an “astounding” number of people said they knew a woman who had died during childbirth and even more knew of babies who had been lost during childbirth. According to Gates, the women were losing their children prematurely because they were having them “too close together,” and “the birth was too quick and her body wasn’t ready.” She blamed this in turn on lack of access to contraceptives.

Blaming stillbirths or neonatal deaths on failure to “properly” space children ignores more important reasons underlying such deaths, including lack of treatment for infections, overall health infrastructure in these countries, and deficiencies in mothers’ own health and nutrition.

Nevertheless, Gates focused on lack of contraceptives as a cause of danger to women and children, as she has done so throughout her life. For example, over a decade ago, she said, “When I travel and talk to women around the world, they tell me that access to contraceptives can often be the difference between life and death.”

In her April 17 interview with Lima, she continued, “I started to realize, I believe in life. I believe in these children’s lives. The worthiness of them, the inherent beauty on the day they’re born. But because of a man-made rule in the church that I am in — the Catholic Church — we’re not allowing women to have access to contraceptives. And so talk about an incongruency, right? And I had to really then reckon with my faith.”

The Catholic Church’s doctrine that contraception is “intrinsically evil” is not a “man-made rule” as Gates claims but the law of God, who designed the conjugal act so that its primary end is children. Dr. Janet Smith, in her acclaimed talk “Contraception: Why Not?” helps show how unnatural and perverse contraception is by comparing it to bulimia. 

“We have this phenomenon now of bulimia. People eat and they throw up. That’s a bit like contraception. You want the pleasure, but you don’t want the consequences. You engage in the act and you violate the act,” Smith explains.

When humans violate natural law, they suffer consequences, whether they are immediately apparent or not. The birth control pill is no exception. The destructive ripple effects of contraception are massive and have included increased adultery, divorce, and (paradoxically) abortion, since the birth control pill is only about 90% effective in practice. 

Human Life International has further elaborated on the morally poisonous effects of contraception:

Contraception contributes to a culture of death by creating an environment in which children are treated as an unwelcome burden, an impediment to personal goals, or even worse, an enemy to be avoided at all costs. This negativity toward new life is part and parcel of the ‘contraceptive mentality,’ and is why so many children conceived are considered an ‘accident,’ ‘unplanned,’ or ‘unwanted.’

Gates went on to tell Lima how she sought to learn more about why the Catholic Church teaches that contraception is immoral, consulting with “some Notre Dame scholars” as well as the teachings of dissident priest Richard Rohr, who is known for his rejection of Catholic teaching and even natural law, and his acceptance of LGBT ideology.

Rather than touching on why the Church teaches contraception is immoral, Gates said that once she consulted Rohr and other resources, she decided she needed to reject official Catholic teaching on contraception.

“I realized, ‘Wow, I need to actually unlearn some of these things because I can’t square the circle,’ ” Gates said.

Contraception is not just morally and socially harmful, it is often physically harmful. The Gates Foundation itself actually funded a study that found women using hormonal contraception, especially injectable methods like Depo-Provera (the kind favored by Ms. Gates), were at increased risk of contracting and spreading HIV, which continues to decimate many African nations. 

A Swedish study published February 12 in the British Medical Journal found that current hormonal contraceptive use doubled and even tripled heart attack and stroke risk.