One thing I have to constantly deal with among my students is the tendency to think only in predefined “issues,” that is, to take a whole subject matter and to be “for it” or “against it” in the manner of mass-market democracy’s constant abuse of rational discourse.
One can divide the people between “pro-immigrant” and “anti-immigrant,” to take just one such case, only in an illiterate, barbarian discourse that proceeds as though immigration and its consequences have never been encountered, legislated, and discussed before. Take two seconds to ask simple questions, and this “issue” dissolves into (a) a number of separate issues, and (b) a set of willful distortions used to exclude solutions that serve no advertising-selling, constituency-building role. (For example, someone might love to promote legal migration, and make it easier for more people, and also think that robust local language and culture assimilation is a necessity for citizenship, and that illegal immigration is a fundamental danger to legal migration and citizenship, and think that charity for illegal immigrants requires compassionate resettlement efforts rather than paths to citizenship for the majority–and thinking that will ensure that one is never heard on the shouting contest that is so meretriciously sold as “news” and public discourse.)
A similar problem comes when we encounter terms like “contraception” and the cluster of issues that hide behind this abstract noun often used to refer to a diverse group of items which, except for their best-known application, are quite unlike each other. More to the point, though, all debate about the things is misleading if it does not deal with the essential matter. As the clear-thinking Ed Peters says in a slightly related conversation:
For a morals clause to focus on actions is one thing; for a morals clause to focus on status is quite another.
(source: Distinguishing between actions and status is important | In the Light of the Law)
The law, and moral reasoning in particular, is concerned with acts more than with things. Even laws proscribing the possession or use of things are addressed to humans capable of possessing or using them, that is, to human acts concerning the things. So a discussion of the “issue” of contraception is essentially modern primarily in the confusion of language intrinsic to the word, not really in which of the diversity of instruments and techniques are adapted to facilitate the act. The etymology of the word shows its modern, abstracting formation:
contraception (n.) “birth control,” coined 1886 from Latin contra (see contra) + ending from conception.
(source: Online Etymology Dictionary)
It is important to notice that Christian teaching has not condemned certain things or descriptions as “modern” or even as “not ‘natural’ in comparison with unreasoning creatures” (which is the ludicrous comparison people untutored in “natural law” commonly make), but has continued to state the difference between intentional acts that are consistent with the dignity of each human involved in the act and others that are not.
When we discuss “contraception,” then, we are actually discussing “having sex” while also taking actions which alter the nature of the conjugal act itself. We are asking at what point the use of marriage ceases to be the good proper to a husband and wife, and is changed into something which, rather than having the power to convert concupiscence into chastity and charity through fidelity and fecundity, is instead feeding concupiscence and allowing the act to be perverted, leading us to consume each other and so to be consumed.
This clears up the issue considerably, although it does not remove every difficulty (no merely verbal response ever does). When anyone attempts the use of marriage–“has sex”–outside the bond of marriage, for example, or in a pretense of marriage between people not capable of marrying each other (priest and woman, for example, or two men, or with a civilly divorced person lacking any decree of nullity), that person is not making use of marriage. Objectively, that behavior is damaging to all involved, to the life of the Body of Christ in the world, and to society as a whole. It is especially damaging to any children of such unions. Personal guilt (culpability) for such damage may be mitigated, but the damage is done; it is done by an intentional act; and that act is wrong for good reasons, and knowable reasons. It is not possible to really set right that damage–including the damage done to one’s own conscience, and that of others, by the scandal of such actions–without admitting that such an action was wrong, and that forgivenness (not dismissiveness) and healing (not mere hand-waving) are required.
Thus it is really important to understand what is really taught, here:
excluded is any action which either before, at the moment of, or after sexual intercourse, is specifically intended to prevent procreation—whether as an end or as a means.
(source: Humanae Vitae (July 25, 1968) | Paul VI, emphasis added)
Notice that what is prohibited–as it has been throughout Church history–is an action which, juxtaposed with “sexual intercourse” in any order, cuts off the act “having sex” from one of its basic purposes (“procreation”).
Understanding that, here are three brief rebuttals to misconceptions about Catholics, and many others, who oppose having sex while preventing reproduction:
- We are not afraid of science. Like any debate in the present state of our culture, the debate over having sex while preventing procreation is easy to miscast as a contest to claim the latest technological breakthroughs or experimental results for one’s cause. Examples of this misconception abound, but of course the greatest examples come from the long run-up to the 1930 Lambeth Conference resolution of the Anglican Communion, and the extensive exploration of the issue in Catholic circles before Humanae Vitae was issued in 1968, much of which turned on the idea that modern technology and modern problems had asked an essentially different question than had been considered before. Lambeth decided to separate “Christian principles” from the facts of the case, making a “felt moral obligation” more important than the nature of the action and its consequences for the people involved. It made human feelings more important than human dignity. Nothing in the science of male and female reproductive organs, of embryology, of human development, has changed in a way that presents an essentially new situation; and nothing in the logic of technological change engages directly with the actual reasoning of Christian opposition to having sex while preventing procreation. One speaks to what we might be able to do about certain natural processes; the other speaks to what the consequences for real human creatures will be when we act on that understanding in various ways. It is not possible to decide whether to use a tool by asserting that the tool works; Catholics do not believe that knowing how to make a nuclear bomb makes it only a question of “when and where,” rather than whether, we should use one; and we do not believe that knowing how to “prevent babies” makes it inevitable, or even reasonable, to do so. We think that “baby prevention” reflects a profound misunderstanding of men, women, and children that is hostile to human dignity, and that you cannot put “felt moral obligation” in the place of real information about what humans are–real science.
- We are not superstitious about this or that substance. Catholics do not think that some sort of object or chemical is going to magically harm them in ways not suggested by the science of natural processes and of human nature; we do not think some part of the body, or some pill, or some device, is going to suddenly “curse” us. Now, modern culture is rife with superstitions about genetic modifications, chemicals, and medical treatments, and half-baked accusations fly fast and thick about them. Indeed, twentieth-century feminists and Progressive eugenicists like Margaret Sanger have spent considerable capital to mythologize “The Pill” and create a superstitious presumption in its favor. But Catholics realize perfectly well that a chemical or device that can be used in one wrong way may also be used in some other way, and that use may be right. We do not reason based on some fear of taint, but on the way that a certain instrument, used a certain way, ends up being harmful. Hormones and chemicals that are used in “The Pill” have other, actually therapeutic effects that may be worth the risks in some cases. What we object to is the use of the research and resources devoted to “baby prevention” for that specific purpose–the purpose of disconnecting sex acts from baby-making and from marriage, where they are intelligible acts that are reasonable for humans. We object to the way that this superstitious and anti-human project diverts that research and those resources away from efforts to achieve the same therapeutic results without harm to human reproduction and human relationships. If researchers and pharmaceutical salesman want our support for honest work, they should get involved with finding ways to diminish harms caused by actual problems in our bodies, not by asking us to ignore the big picture and focus on what we all know are the incidental therapeutic side-effects of dangerous instruments that truncate our bodies.
- We are not driven by “moral panic.” Even allowing for slight windage at some times and places, the Christian tradition on this subject has been remarkably uniform and on-point for the entire history of the religion; and it participates in a broader religious consensus on “baby prevention” that is quite a bit older. Yes, most Protestants have fallen off from the faith, and even are unfamiliar with the Church’s actual teaching on the subject, since the Anglican defection from the faith on this point at Lambeth in 1930. (Lambeth’s defection even sounds very traditional to an ear jangled by the confusing noises of 2016!) Even in terms of the twentieth-century argument on this subject, it should be clear that the Christian position circa 1930 was not the result of an idealization of the 1950s. Pius XI’s response to the Lambeth defection was swift and abundantly clear, in Casti Connubii, issued the same year. Paul VI’s 1968 Humanae Vitae was the result of several years of discussion (one which revealed how widespread the misunderstanding of this teaching had become), and does not have in view any “back to the 1950s” nostalgia. It is a reassertion, drawing on the history of the Church’s faithful reception of the natural law and divine revelation concerning the purposes of marriage and its proper use, of teachings that are not novel or reactionary. Our culture has a way of intentionally misrepresenting any assertion of the “traditional” as an aggression against the “inevitable,” but it is neither true that tradition is nostalgia, nor that the “inevitable” views of contemporary progressives are more accurate than the Church’s capacity to predict results based on experience with humanity.
It comes to this, then: when we speak of “contraception” clearly, we are not talking about being scared of sex, or about running from chemicals in favor of a primitive state, or about resistance to real understanding of human bodies and relationships, but precisely about how to embrace human sexuality as it is and focus our efforts on how to heal sickness and damage of all kinds, rather than truncating human sexuality or insisting that it must be other than it is while treating bodily functions as pathological, babies as preventable harms, and insisting that the pretence that every wish can come true is a more serious matter than real damage to bodies and relationships.
We are talking about actions. We are calling on people not to damage their bodies and souls and marriages, not to avoid the real joys and struggles of marriage and child-rearing, not to turn each other and even children into consumer goods. We are calling on researchers to quit touting therapeutic side-effects, inadequately tested and peripheral to the original design, irrelevant to the funding and marketing of the product, as though they were unanswerable justifications for providing harmful drugs and devices which are marketed based on lies about human bodies and relationships.
We are calling each person to act in a truly “pro-life” way by refusing to treat babies as preventable harms, refusing to treat the life-giving potential of human sexual biology as a flaw, rather than an important feature, of every human creature.
With that in mind, then, contemplate the important difference between these two positions, the defection and the faith, and choose life:
