There is no
question I am asked about more than Church teaching on contraception. It is the
thing that either bemuses or confuses my questioners most about
Catholicism: “Catholics and contraception, it’s just so weird. What’s the
deal with you people?”
The “deal”
has to do with the Church having a certain view of how sex fits into a healthy,
flourishing human life. The Catholic Church teaches that sexual intercourse is
best reserved for a long-term committed relationship open to the procreation of
new life. Why? Because, as I’ve suggested before, sexual intercourse
involves the planting of seed in potentially fertile soil.
If the
partners in this act are not ready for the potential consequences of the act –
that is, if they’re not prepared to accept the child that is the fruit of their
union – then they’re courting some serious unhappiness. Sex, the Church
believes, should involve a selfless gift of oneself to another in a
relationship of mutual self-giving, love, and concern.
Now, to be
quite honest, this positive vision seems utterly unrealistic to many of my
interlocutors: “That sounds nice, but it’s not doable.” So let’s be
clear: The Catholic teaching on sex requires not only the virtues of prudence
and temperance, above all it calls for hope.
I’ve found
over the years that the problem isn’t that people want too much, it’s that they
settle for too little. What God and the Church envision for couples is a
relationship of mutual love and concern. Too often they settle on so
much less.
Our first task,
then, is to convince young women in particular that they’re worth more,
and should demand more, than the kind of cheap sexual using of them that
society currently encourages.
The
Church’s message to women is basically this: Don’t let anyone convince you to
treat your fertility as a kind of disease, as a pathology that needs to be
“treated” with drugs or “cured” by surgery. What sort of odd mentality causes
us to consider a perfectly healthy function of the human being as something
that needs to be dis-abled? We don’t consider cutting off someone’s legs, do
we, except in the direst circumstances?
The
“problem” in the case of contraception isn’t some dysfunction. The
“problem” is precisely that the human organism is functioning perfectly. If it
weren’t, there wouldn’t be any need for drugs or surgery!
When
spouses insist on this particular “intervention,” they are saying (with their
actions, if not with their words) something like this: “I accept you totally
and completely in this sexual act, except for that troublesome fertility
thing. So, before we have sex, could you please take care of
that?
To my mind,
this is like saying: I accept you totally and completely in this sexual act,
except could you first please put on this blond wig for me, or could you first
lose thirty pounds? If you accept a person for who they are, then you
accept them. You don’t force them to agree to an operation to “fix” themselves
first. This is why John Paul II repeatedly taught that to insist on the
disabling of fertility as a precondition for having sex is to destroy not only
the procreative dimension of the sexual act, but the unitive
dimension as well.
Granted,
one needn’t always be intending to have a child (why insist on that?),
but what do you want honestly to be able to tell your child?
(1) “Well, Billy, we did everything humanly, medically possible to prevent your
existence, but somehow, you squirmed through anyway. So, when we found you
existed, we cried a bit but decided in the end not to terminate you. So here
you are!” Or:
(2) “Granted, son, we were not intending you when you were conceived, but
we were always open to new life. Thus, when we found out about you, we were
filled with joy, because we never intended to prevent you.”
The sexual
act is not meant to involve fear – specifically, fear of the natural
consequences of the act actually occurring, which is a bit like being
frightened that the nail might actually go in the wood when you hammer it. The
notion of “safe sex” implies that sex itself (apart from the drugs and
prophylactics they sell you) is somehow “dangerous,” which is like allowing
people to convince you that eating is dangerous – perhaps even deadly – unless
you take an expensive drug first.
We all know
that under the current regime of sexual “liberation,” one of the most
fear-inducing, toxic substances on the face of the earth is unwanted male
sperm. You can’t spill a drop. One drop could kill you or destroy
your entire life: “Oh God, my contraception failed last
night”? The sad irony is the conviction that one’s life might be over if
a new life has been created.
It is
important to note that a couple can adopt a “conceptive mentality” even when they
are not using contraception. If the sexual act is done in fear of a
child, then the couple is in the wrong place mentally and spiritually. There
are few things more tragic than two human beings doing that most miraculous
thing two humans can do with one another – creating a new human life together –
and then having one partner say to the other: “O dear God, no. Anything
but that!”
That tragic
reaction is possible whether or not a couple has been using contraception if
they’re not open to the natural consequences of the act in which they are
engaged: thus the importance of always remaining “open” to God’s creative act,
even when not intending to have a child.
Is the
Church’s teaching really so foolish, then? Or are we? Have women in
particular allowed themselves to set their standards too low? Aim
higher, declares the Church.
