Authors: Patrick Coffin
Protestants have always accepted contraception:
FALSE. No Protestant body accepted contraception until 1930, when the Anglican bishops, meeting at their Lambeth Conference of that year, overturned all previous Lambeth pronouncements to make a narrow exception to the historic Christian teaching, allowing married couples—for “extraordinary reasons”—to practice birth control. Five hundred years earlier, the Protestant Reformers to a man thundered against all forms of birth control in words more vehement than any pope’s. Today, a growing number of Protestants are rediscovering their historic roots.
1
Mahatma Gandhi approved of contraception
: FALSE. The Hindu leader, particularly in the last half of his life, fought strenuously against the introduction of birth control into Indian society. “It is an insult to the fair sex to put up her case in support of birth control by artificial methods,” Gandhi wrote. “As it is, man has sufficiently degraded her for his lust, and artificial methods, no matter how well meaning the advocates may be, will still further degrade her. I urge the advocates of artificial methods to consider the consequences. Any large use of the methods is likely to result in the dissolution of the marriage bond and in free love. Birth control to me is a dismal abyss.”
2
Sigmund Freud approved of contraception
. FALSE. The founder of modern psychoanalysis was no bosom buddy of the Catholic Church, yet he viewed birth control as the prime enabler of sexual perversion. Freud wrote that “it is a characteristic common to all the perversions that in them reproduction as an aim is put aside. This is actually the criterion by which we judge whether a sexual activity is perverse—if it departs from reproduction in its aims and pursues the attainment of gratification independently … Everything that …serves the pursuit of gratification alone is called by the unhonored title of ‘perversion’ and as such is despised.”
3
Contraceptives have always been legal in the United States
: FALSE. The legislative architect of American anti-contraceptionism was a devout Protestant crusader named Anthony Comstock, whose 1873 Comstock Act forbade the sale and distribution of obscene materials as well as birth control apparatus. These laws were passed in the context of a United States that was mostly Protestant. The last legal battle over public dissemination (no pun intended) of birth control was not fought until 1965, with the U.S. Supreme Court decision
Griswold v. Connecticut.
Estelle Griswold was a Planned Parenthood director who, along with a Planned Parenthood physician, was convicted as an accessory for giving married couples information and medical advice on how to prevent conception and for prescribing a contraceptive for the wife’s use. A Connecticut statute made it a crime for any person to use any drug or article to prevent conception. Griswold and company opened a clinic to test the law, and the challenge went all the way to the U.S. Supreme Court, the majority of which alleged that the “right to privacy” was found implicitly in the Constitution and the Bill of Rights (see next question). The path was made smooth for the
Roe v. Wade
decision eight years later.
More contraception leads to fewer abortions:
FALSE. On the face of it, it seems very plausible that encouraging “protected” sex will reduce the number of abortions, and many people—anti-abortion and pro-abortion alike—accept this argument. But this reasoning is fatally flawed. First, the choice to contracept and the choice to abort both stem from the same root: the intention to separate sex from its natural outcome, whether before or after conception. A culture that accepts contraception produces a new need for abortion as a back-up plan in case of an “unwanted pregnancy.” Birth control is like stepping out on a high wire. It’s fun and exciting, and the crowd roars its approval. Yet you know there’s a danger involved. What sane person would start out along that wire without a secure safety net below? That net is abortion.
Put another way, contraception introduces to an act of sexual intercourse an element of negation designed to thwart the coming to be of a baby prior to conception; abortion is the next link in the logical chain: the total negation of a baby already conceived.
4
The second flaw in the theory is that it ignores the most immediate and obvious effect of birth control: It has, and always will, increase the pool of sexually active people. Since all people naturally desire sex, the availability of birth control has removed one of life’s healthy fears: the fear of pregnancy. Birth control has led to a false sense of security by which hundreds of millions of couples now engage in intercourse before or outside wedlock. And since no birth control is foolproof, an additional step was made necessary to “deal with” the “mistake” made with one’s sex partner(s). In every country where contraceptive use was widely promoted (late 1960s onward), a corresponding rise in abortions followed.
5
This is not an arcane Catholic dogma; it’s the solemn opinion of the U.S. Supreme Court. In
Planned Parenthood v. Casey
(505 U.S. 833), the 1992 decision that confirmed
Roe v. Wade
(which legalized abortion at all stages of fetal life), we are told that “in some critical respects, abortion is of the same character as the decision to use contraception …for two decades of economic and social developments, people have organized intimate relationships and made choices that define their views of themselves and their places in society, in reliance on the availability of abortion in the event that contraception should fail.”
The following dialogue is taken from the transcript of the 1989 Supreme Court decision
Webster v. Reproductive Health Services
(492 U.S. 490). It is highly instructive, considering that the attorney, Frank Susman, advocated for the abortion industry:
Mr. Susman:
For better or worse, there no longer exists any bright line between the fundamental right that was established in Griswold and the fundamental right of abortion that was established in Roe. These two rights, because of advances in medicine and science, now overlap. They coalesce and merge and they are not distinct.
Justice Scalia:
Excuse me, you find it hard to draw a line between those two but easy to draw a line between (the) first, second and third trimester.
Mr. Susman:
I do not find it difficult—
Justice Scalia:
I don’t see why a court that can draw that line can’t separate abortion from birth control quite readily.
Mr. Susman:
If I may suggest the reasons in response to your question, Justice Scalia. The most common forms of what we most generally in common parlance call contraception today, IUD’s, low-dose birth control pills, which are the safest type of birth control pills available, act as abortifacients. They are correctly labeled as both. Under this statute, which defines fertilization as the point of beginning, those forms of contraception are also abortifacients.
Science and medicine refers to them as both. We are not still dealing with the common barrier methods of Griswold. We are no longer just talking about condoms and diaphragms. Things have changed. The bright line, if there ever was one, has now been extinguished.
One can be a faithful Catholic and still contracept in good conscience:
FALSE. While this stance has gained a wide following after Vatican II (a stance not supported by its documents), the condemnation of contraception is one of the most consistently, authoritatively, and universally taught doctrines by popes (and bishops in union with them), councils, and faithful theologians. See also Number 12 below.
While the Church allows some latitude among scholars engaged in high-level investigation to temporarily withhold public assent to certain positions, this is not what people mean by dissent today, which is some variation of “I want to do what I want to do despite the teaching.” Commenting on this contemporary meaning, the late moral theologian Monsignor William B. Smith noted that the word “dissent” doesn’t appear in Catholic encyclopedias until 1972.
6
This book does not examine the question of whether what is taught in
Humanae Vitae
(if not the encyclical itself ) is infallible. I am thoroughly persuaded that it is, and that theologians who argue so are correct.
7
A future pontiff may explicitate this, but it’s a moot point. A given teaching does not need to be formally defined as infallible nor proclaimed by an extraordinary
ex cathedra
statement, such as the Assumption of Mary dogma in 1950 by Pope Pius XI, to merit acceptance by Catholics.
Vatican II clarified that the threshold for assent is not a “sky high” level of formal definition:
Bishops, teaching in communion with the Roman Pontiff, are to be respected by all as witnesses to divine and Catholic truth. In matters of faith and morals, the bishops speak in the name of Christ and the faithful are to accept their teaching and adhere to it with a religious assent. This religious submission of mind and will must be shown in a special way to the authentic magisterium of the Roman Pontiff, even when he is not speaking ex cathedra; that is, it must be shown in such a way that his supreme magisterium is acknowledged with reverence, the judgments made by him are sincerely adhered to, according to his manifest mind and will. His mind and will in the matter may be known either from the character of the documents, from his frequent repetition of the same doctrine, or from his manner of speaking.
8
We must act according to our conscience, yes—our properly formed conscience. What is an unformed conscience but one more human opinion? Again, Vatican II teaches:
In the formation of their consciences, the Christian faithful ought carefully to attend to the sacred and certain doctrine of the Church. For the Church is, by the will of Christ, the teacher of the truth. It is her duty to give utterance to, and authoritatively to teach, that truth which is Christ Himself, and also to declare and confirm by her authority those principles of the moral order which have their origins in human nature itself. (
DH
14)
If “faithful Catholic” is to have any meaning, it must involve the duty to form one’s mind and heart in light of the Gospel. Even though in some parts of the world there is confusion, the norms of
Humanae
Vitae have never been in doubt by those charged with promulgating the fullness of this Gospel.
The Pill is now medically safe for women
: FALSE. Although risks vary, many dangerous or otherwise undesirable side effects of the combination birth control pill and the progestin-only “mini-pill” have been medically established. These include: blood clots, high blood pressure, breast and cervical cancer, liver tumors, migraine headaches, depression, weight gain or loss, and PMS symptoms.
9
The Rhythm Method is now called Natural Family Planning:
FALSE. The Rhythm Method was the name of the calendar-based method of family planning discovered simultaneously (and independently) in the 1920s by two gynecologists, Hermann Knaus, MD, of Austria, and Kyusaku Ogino, MD, of Japan. Ironically, Dr. Ogino used his discovery to help infertile women achieve pregnancy. Ogino and Knaus independently discovered that ovulation occurs about fourteen days before the next menstrual period. Abstinence would be gauged by a calendar estimate of infertility. Natural family planning (or NFP for short) refers to several different modern methods of fertility awareness, such as the Ovulation Method, the Sympto-Thermal Method, the Creighton Model, all of which enable, when used correctly, very high rates of effectiveness (ninety-seven to ninety-nine percent).
10
Broadly speaking, NFP methods are based on the daily tracking of biological markers, or signs, of fertility, such as the viscosity (the quality of stickiness or slipperiness) of cervical mucus and/or the position of the cervix, the presence of breast milk, and the woman’s basal body temperature. Comparing these modern methods with Rhythm is like comparing the Wright brothers’ rickety glider with a modern jet
The Church teaches that women should have as many babies as possible
: FALSE. The Church has never commanded families to propagate into poverty. What the Church teaches is the ideal of generosity when it comes to stewardship of the gift of fertility. The majority of couples today automatically assume that having three—or, horrors, more— children is imprudent and somehow threatening to the well-being of the already-born kids. Encouraging generosity is not the same as mandating numerical quotas. To a culture that aims for small or very small families, the message of generosity does not always sit well.
Stewardship is “in” these days, especially when it comes to writing checks for churchy things. What about stewardship of the power to parenthood? Are buildings, which will one day be dust, more worthy than babies of our “time, talent, and treasure”?