“You don’t have to agree with the Pope.”
My ears twitch whenever they hear that sentence, and never are they more mobile than when the subject of contraception arises. For you see, I do agree with the Pope. Further, my husband and I, both former Protestants, decided to bring ourselves into line with Church teaching, thereby joining ranks with the minority of Catholics who are in obedience to the magisterium on this issue. Taking that move made our good marriage even better, and the two of us as individuals much happier, but, no matter what I say or how well I say it, contraceptionists refuse to believe me.
They say it can’t be true, for several very good reasons. First, I’m a reasonably young woman with heart problems, a history of blood clots, and a cardiologist who told me not to risk another pregnancy. Second, since I spent ten years, some as a child, some as an adult, in different parts of Africa, I’ve seen the problems that are supposed to have their roots in overpopulation, and my conscience shouldn’t let me be so selfish. And if all that fails to move me, since I hold an advanced degree, I am simply supposed “to know better.”
Of course, I used to do all of that. In the occasionally-practicing Protestant family where I grew up, my sister and I were zealously taught that Planned Parenthood was good, abortion was necessary and licit (frequently a good thing), contraception was unquestionably beneficial, population growth evil, and the Catholic Church all wet. My husband, John, had been indoctrinated similarly, but, despite all this, we managed to have three children before he had a vasectomy, motivated largely by my serious health problems. It wasn’t until a couple of years later, when we finally fell out with theologically bankrupt Protestantism and found ourselves on a course for Rome, that we applied ourselves to Humanae Vitae and Familiaris Consortio and started to understand how wrong and unchristian we had been.
The Church’s teaching was remarkably simple and remarkably irrefutable. Conjugal love was ordained by God “to realize in mankind his design of love” and “to collaborate with God in the generation and education of new lives.” Marriage between baptized persons “represents the union of Christ and of the Church” (HV 8) and is a “real symbol of that new and eternal covenant sanctioned in the blood of Christ” (FC 13). Married partners are the “permanent reminder to the Church of what happened on the cross” (FC 13). Sexual acts between husband and wife are representations of God’s love for his created, and when God, the author of all love, expresses his love for his Church, the act may not produce fruit, but it is never deliberately sterile. Consequently, the expression of love that takes place between married people also must never be deliberately sterile.
As I read the encyclicals, all the pro-contraceptive arguments I had ever heard collapsed in a heap. The reason for this was that they all started with the end product — children — and worked backward. But in Humanae Vitae Pope Paul had done it right by starting with the conjugal act itself, what it means and what it was intended for, and progressing to children, the natural and God-ordained result of God-ordained sex. As he points out, the two cannot willfully be separated any more than Christ’s suffering can be separated from our redemption.
Whump!
As usual, understanding was the easy part. The more difficult problem was what we should do? Every priest we talked to correctly said that we were not obligated to undo what we had done. After considerable guilt and prayer, John and I decided to pony up the five thousand dollars and have his vasectomy reversed. Because of this decision, which seemed logical enough to us, we discovered what a tenacious hold contraception has on the minds of Americans. The urologist thought John was insane and couldn’t accept our desire to obey Church teaching, even if he would accept our money. Our families — ardent pro-choicers, all of them — were even less tolerant when they found out. Evidently “pro-choice” means a woman has the right to do whatever she likes about reproduction except abandon contraception or have a baby, particularly if other people think she shouldn’t. What was most surprising was what happened when John was cornered into explaining his anticipated sick leave from work. Word spread around his office like the watery contents of a smashed bottle, and co-workers who routinely excoriated pro-life protectors for failing to respect “choice” came to his office and tried to talk him out of what he had chosen to do. So did one or two Catholics in the group. It wasn’t long before we half expected to be stopped in the street by little old ladies and told, “So you’re the ones who . . .”
But John went through with it, and things are back to the way God intended them to be. And since they are, I want to address next the question of what impact the Church’s ban on contraception has on a married couple. The reason I want to address it is that on this point I must concede that detractors of the Church have a valid criticism. Priests are not in a position to address from their own experience the question of how contraception affects a couple’s sex life, the consideration contraceptionists seem to believe is paramount. I, however, am in such a position. Given the range of my experiences over thirteen years of marriage, I can say unequivocally that there is a vast difference between sterile sex and potentially fertile sex. Sterile sex is bad sex, and not only because it contravenes a divine mandate. Deliberately sterile sex makes women feel used, which ultimately leads to an unsatisfying experience. This happens because when the link between sex and conception is broken, the wife realizes that her husband can pretty much do as he pleases, which he usually does.
Why shouldn’t he? There are no consequences to him from a sterile sexual act. He will not have another child to support, rear, and answer for. He will not have the knowledge that, if there is, he has discommoded his wife. He will not have a period of pre- and post-childbirth abstinence to endure. The developers of contraceptives believed that this makes life better and marriages stronger, but the opposite is true. When barrenness is assumed, sex is taken out of the realm of conscious acts committed in the knowledge of the possible consequences attached to them and dropped down among the list of risk-free things a man might as well do when he has the chance, like going to McDonald’s for a cup of coffee. His wife becomes the drive-thru, and, soon enough, she feels like it.
Even more worrisome, women who are chronically ill get no more consideration when contraceptives are used. They are merely told, “Don’t worry, you won’t get pregnant,” and are expected to cooperate, preferably with enthusiasm. Americans are trained to see pregnancy as deleterious to health, but somehow they can’t recognize that the frequent, rhythmic pummeling of a weakened frame by two hundred pounds of husband can be less than salutary. The result is that respect for women decreases, as the high incidence of sexual harassment shows.
Sex without contraceptives is a different matter, as I found out. Our willful severance of ourselves from God’s grace had turned sex, for me at least, into something close to drudgery. But with fertility restored, it became, suddenly, a true expression of committed love, a true gift of self. The drudgery was banished. Something else it did was that it allowed me to imitate our Lady in her gift of herself to God when she told Gabriel, “Let it be done to me according to your word.” Submission of oneself to God’s design is a great gift. Unlike mysticism, it is a joy that can be obtained by the common Christian through the sacrament of matrimony, properly used.
At this point someone is bound to object, saying, “This is fine and good in theory, and maybe sheltered, myopic, masochistic, religious fanatics deserve it. But what about other women, like the poor?” Let me address the very important point of the lot of poor women. During my time in Africa, I observed plenty of misery and came face-to-face with bone-crushing poverty. I have seen, walked through, smelled, and slept amid filth. I have watched dirt poor women bleeding rivers of blood after miscarriages. I’ve pitied sons and daughters left outside their houses to die from ghastly illnesses. I’ve seen crippled people crawling along the roads and malnourished children too weak to stand, all of which is a good deal more than most Planned Parenthood workers can say. And what I’ve seen is part of the reason I’m against contraception.
Africans are poor, and they’re becoming destitute. But the reason isn’t “overpopulation.” Indeed, as the populations of many African countries decline, so too do their standards of living. In Malawi, for example, one-fourth of the population has some degree of HIV infection. All over the continent, life expectancy, the usual yardstick of prosperity, is getting lower. The National Research Council states that Zambia’s life expectancy, sixty-six just a few years ago, is expected to be thirty-three by 2010. In Uganda it is expected to drop from fifty-nine to thirty-one. Infant mortality, already high, is expected nearly to double. Undoubtedly, this is a debacle of the highest order. How would contraception improve it?
The answer is simple: It won’t. Even a cursory review of world history shows that no society thrives when its population decreases and that prosperity can arrive only when births increase. After the Black Death killed half of Europe, it took two centuries of hard work to return the economy to the status quo ante. For this reason modern, gray-headed Europe is growing scared about its abysmally low birthrate, and France and Germany (also Japan) are waging campaigns to encourage their citizens to have more children. They have figured out, a little too late, that babies are the only means to survive, the only hope for prosperity.
Demographics and numbers aside, the eighteen-year-old mother of four in a rat-infested, third-world slum is a very real concern, and the specter of her is often used to pluck the heartstrings of rich Americans. Of course, there is natural family planning, which can be ninety-nine percent reliable, but that is usually dismissed out of hand by government officials. Interestingly enough, these same government workers routinely decry illiteracy among women and girls, not realizing that NFP classes would be an ideal place to teach women basic reading and counting skills. NFP has a major advantage that officialdom ignores — it’s very cheap. The only materials necessary are thermometers and charts. But NFP does not fit into the pro-sex, anti-birth mentality of the UN and other agencies, so it is not even considered for funding. As usual, women are the losers. So are the children they might bear at even intervals, if their bodies were respected instead of shunted automatically into the “pelvic medicine” of aid organizations.
Still, one reason commonly given to justify the neglect of NFP — and one which has some substance — is that it won’t work for a woman with a husband who habitually forces himself on her. It’s true that it won’t work under those circumstances, either here or in Sudan. But will contraceptives really help? To a woman in this unenviable situation. A doctor will encourage contraceptives, his thinking being, “at least she won’t have a baby this way.” (The assumption is that a pregnancy and a baby are automatically bad things.) But if the same woman comes to a doctor with her arm broken by her husband, I doubt he merely would set the arm in plaster and congratulate himself on sending her thus “protected” back to her lout of a husband. No, most doctors would realize that nothing will improve unless the husband changes his behavior and develops some respect for his wife. Unfortunately for her, barren, a-consequential sex does not beget respect; it diminishes it. The complaint used to be that women were regarded as mere baby factories (as though that were a waste of time). Thanks to contraception, they aren’t even that anymore. They’re now pleasure machines for men, available on demand.
Closely akin to the woman saddled with a brute are those women whose health will not “permit” a pregnancy — women such as I. While I don’t claim a strong desire to exit this world before age forty and leave my children motherless, I realize full well that I may wind up doing just that. The cause, however, may not be childbirth. Statistically, it’s much likelier to be something else. Every year forty thousand people die in automobile crashes alone, many of them women. Others are killed by other kinds of accidents, homicide, drug abuse, alcoholism, and AIDS, none of which are respecters of age. If society and the medical profession were to protect women from all causes of early death, women would be forbidden to drive or ride in cars, work and drink, at the very least. But even if we forbade these things, how would women be prevented from dying of heart disease or kidney failure?
America does not like to accept that people die, even lovely, young people who leave little children behind them. I sometimes wonder if society pushes contraceptives not because it so greatly values the life of the mother of four other children (America sent many brand-new mothers off to the Gulf War when it needed reservists), but because it does not want to be burdened with caring for the little ones she leaves behind. Saying that sounds ignoble and selfish, so instead society speaks of “preserving the life and health of the mother.” It prefers not to notice meanwhile that Mother Church is truly concerned about life — so much so that she allows for drastic measures to save the imperiled life of a pregnant woman, as long as that, not getting rid of the child, is the primary goal (HV 15). Still, it’s true that childbirth deaths, like battlefield deaths of strong young men, do happen. They will continue to happen, no matter how many contraceptives are used. We are not immortal.
It has been seventy years since the Anglican Church allowed contraception in cases of “dire necessity,” and it is hard to see how contraception has made our collective lives better. Humanity still has wars, starvation, strife, disease, pestilence, oppression, persecution, and inequity, just as Jesus said we would. In addition to these ancient problems we now have epidemic divorce, the collapse of families, and a virulent new venereal plague. Promiscuity has become the new and acceptable norm, at least in the West. In Humanae Vitae Pope Paul said that these calamities would result if contraception were to become widespread and regarded as acceptable. They would happen because the institution of marriage would be broken and sex would be depraved. It looks like that celibate bachelor was right.