Contraception
Contraception is one of those subjects that Catholics today are very reluctant to talk about, not because of shame in a society where sexual explicitness is no longer seen as particularly shameful, but more probably out of embarrassment at being thought out of step because the Catholic Church continues to condemn as morally wrong what most of the rest of the world sees as an unalloyed boon and benefit. Ever since Pope Paul VI's 1968 encyclical Humanae Vitae ("On Human Life') reaffirming the Church's traditional teaching concerning the immorality of contraception, Catholics have been on the defensive about contraception - no doubt in part because, if current polls are to believed, a majority of Catholics also dissent from the Church's teaching on this subject.
Even while Pope John Paul II is being applauded by the crowds, the media commentators never fail to cite the same polls indicating that large numbers of Catholics no longer believe and follow either the Polish Pontiff's teachings on sexual morality or his continuing steadfastness against contraception. Nor do many Church leaders or spokesmen seem eager to rush to the defense of the Pope on these issues. It is an embarrassment for Catholics and the Church that the Magisterium continues to insist on one thing, while too many of the faithful are thinking and acting otherwise.
As a result, the subject of contraception has long since become a "sleeper" subject where Catholics are concerned: it is always there, but beneath the surface; everybody knows it is somehow important, but it is nevertheless generally left aside.
Meanwhile, the "family-planning" people never cease talking it up and promoting it, though usually with little or no opposition, since few who might be thought to oppose it even want to talk about it. When, for example, was the last time any Catholic politician spoke against the huge government subsidies supporting contraceptive practice today? Similarly, even most pro-life organizations "prudently" take "no position" on contraception. But contraception is beginning to get more attention from other sources: from those monitoring some of the sexual pathologies of our society. There has been no lack of attention given by the experts, of course, to such contemporary social pathologies as our high rates of divorce, illegitimacy, fatherlessness, the feminization of poverty, teenage pregnancies, sexually transmitted diseases and even abortions (although this last subject, inexplicably, also seems to be an embarrassment for some of the experts). Somehow, though, almost nobody ever wants to talk about the thing which has been most instrumental in the modem separation of sex from marriage and children, and which is therefore necessarily related to all of the above pathologies---namely, contraception.
Family Policy, a publication of the Family Research Council in Washington, D.C., has published several notable articles examining the social and moral consequences that have followed in the wake of our society's near universal acceptance of contraception over the past generation (September/ October 1999). This acceptance came about in the 1960s when contraception came to be justified in society at large as a legitimate method of "family planning." In fact, contraception is usually employed precisely in order to "plan" against having any family; those who resort to it frankly do so in order to prevent a pregnancy, not to plan for one. And the common assumption and received opinion in society today is that there is nothing at all wrong with doing this.
The lead article in that issue of Family Policy, however, speaks of what it calls "The Empty Promise of Contraception," an article by Teresa R. Wagner, a Family Research Council policy analyst. Wagner shows that while contraception promised sex without consequences---that is, without any pregnancies resulting---this promise has instead proved to have had rather drastic and mostly negative consequences for both individuals and society.
Broadly speaking, the consequences have been increased rates of illegitimacy, out-of-wedlock pregnancies, abortions and so on during the very years when contraception became available virtually universally, as well as being steadily promoted nearly everywhere by multimillion-dollar government "family-planning" programs.
Among the reasons contraception seems to have aggravated the social pathologies it was supposed to help remedy, according to Wagner, is that, in fact, no form of contraception is really foolproof, and none is as reliable as the promoters of so-called family planning claim, and as most contraceptors wishfully think. All existing forms of contraception fail to a greater or lesser degree, and the consequences of these failures are, inevitably, viewed as "accidental" or "unwanted" pregnancies.
Meanwhile, the promise of "safe sex," without consequences, which stems from the very existence and availability of modern contraceptives, encourages more and more people to engage in sexual activity without regard to the possible consequences---and hence exposes more and more people to the inevitable failures.
Moreover, the prior settled expectation in the minds of these people is that contraceptive use is going to prevent pregnancies, which in fact it then often fails to prevent; and so these failures help create a demand for a preventive remedy "after the fact." This is how reliance on contraception, rather than cutting down on abortions, can actually lead to more abortions.
Statistics cited in the Wagner article show that half of all the women seeking abortion were using some form of birth control at the time they became pregnant. Far from being an alternative to abortion, then - what most people unthinkingly believe is simple common sense - contraception instead creates a mentality and expectation that pregnancy is something that can be, and must be, "controlled." When this proves to be wrong in a given case, the mentality persists and the original aim of "controlling' continues to be thought necessary, whatever it takes - even if the "control" in question has to be exercised by means of abortion - that is, by killing the child who has been conceived.
That contraception is causally related to abortion in this fundamental way is a point strongly emphasized by Pope John Paul II in his encyclical Evangelium Vitae ("The Gospel of Life").
As Wagner points out, most commentators generally fail to face up to the U.S. Supreme Court's decision in Planned Parenthood vs. Casey (1992) that explicitly justified the continuation of legalization of abortion in the United States on the grounds that there was a need for "the availability of abortion in case contraception should fail." These are the actual words of the Supreme Court decision: abortion is seen by the Court as a necessary backup for failed contraception.
This position is wholly consistent, of course, with the legalization of abortion by the U.S. Supreme Court in its 1973 Roe vs. Wade decision, based on what it called a "right to privacy." That "right" was first implied in a 1965 case, Griswold vs. Connecticut, removing legal restrictions on the availability of - nothing else but, again - contraception.
If the U.S. Supreme Court is now officially justifying legalized abortion as the necessary back-up for failed contraception, it is hard to see how people can go on, as they do, denying the intimate and obvious connection between contraception and abortion. Nevertheless, considering that some 80 percent of all adult Americans now make use of some form of contraception, according to another statistic quoted in the Wagner article - and there is no indication that the percentage is any less for Catholics - it seems likely that today's denial of the evil of contraception is going to go on for awhile.
Wagner chronicles some of the other consequences of separating sex from marriage and children - of considering sex as a "right," as she puts it, instead of as a "gift" to be used in marriage; or of considering pregnancy as an illness and children as burdens instead of the blessings which Christianity and the Bible have always found them to be. The upshot of her article seems to be that healthy family life in America is not going to be restored as long as contraception goes on being considered a boon and a benefit instead of the evil that it demonstrably is.
This issue of Family Policy devoted to the subject of contraception contains other interesting articles. Allan Carlson, president of the Howard Center for Family, Religion and Society in Rockford, Ill. Carlson, a Lutheran, provides an informative short history about how virtually all the Protestant churches eventually came to accept the legitimacy of contraception, beginning with the Anglican bishops at their Lambeth Conference in 1930; the Anglican bishops decided then that contraception could be allowed in "difficult" cases within marriage, not foreseeing that their acceptance of contraception would help open the door to a vastly greater acceptance of sex outside marriage (since, once again, contraception would prevent any unwanted "consequences').
The Carlson article recalls how the moral condemnation of contraception was once the universal teaching of all Christian churches and denominations, not just the Catholic Church; this was the case up to the year 1930. Martin Luther, for example, was as vehemently opposed to birth prevention as any pope, then or now.
This important issue of Family Policy concludes with a piece by Dr. Patrick Fagan of the Heritage Foundation in Washington, D.C., showing how the original separation of sex from marriage and children first brought about by the acceptance of contraception has now literally dissolved the very idea of sexual deviations or perversions. In point of fact, a wide variety of such deviations or perversions once considered unmentionable are readily tolerated today; people generally cannot think of any reason why homosexual liaisons should be condemned, for example, if the point and meaning of human sexuality is now confined merely to what people are attracted to or take pleasure in. Fagan quotes Sigmund Freud himself to the effect that "the abandonment of the reproductive function is the common feature of all perversions."
So, not to put too fine a point on it, what all this inescapably adds up to is: Pope Paul VI was, and Pope John Paul II is, right about birth control. Catholics who ignore the Church on this matter are leaving out an important element of their Catholic faith: trust in God's plan in the matter of sex, marriage and children. The essential rightness of this plan is now being increasingly verified by policy analysts, social scientists and other commentators holding no necessary brief for the Church and independently of any doctrinal or theological considerations.
So we find that those who take on a serious examination of contraception are now discovering what the Catholic Church has known and taught all along. This subject is now being awakened by the sheer force of contemporary circumstances.
(To obtain a copy of the September-October 1999 issue of Family Policy, write to: Family Research Council, 801 G Street, NW, Washington, DC 20001; or call (202) 393-2100; or check the Internet at www.frc.org.)+
ABOUT THE AUTHOR Dr. Kenneth 0. Whitehead is the author, among other books, of "Political Orphan? The Pro-life Movement after 25 Years of Roe v. Wade" (New Hope Publications, Now Hope, KY 40052, 1998).
ACKNOWLEDGMENT.---This article appeared in the January/February 2000 edition of "The Catholic Answer" Published by "Our Sunday Visitor Inc." 200 Noll Plaza, Huntington IN 46750