Of all the Catholic Church’s moral teachings, it is its stance on contraception which is the most counter cultural. For whereas on issues such as abortion and same-sex marriage you can still find many Christians (and non-Christians) who agree with the Catholic Church, it is a sad fact that on the issue of birth control the Barque of Saint Peter stands virtually alone. But it was not always so.
Historically, all decent members of Christian society would have viewed artificial contraception as distasteful and immoral. Indeed, the Protestant reformers were far more outspoken about the evils of birth control than most Catholics are today. At the Lambeth Conference of 1930, however, the Anglican Church decided that birth control was permissible after all, and it was not long before other denominations followed suit. But the Catholic Church, unlike the Protestant churches, is built on rock, and so its teachings have endured.
Since the time of Christ, the Catholic Church has opposed all methods of artificial contraception (or birth control, as it is also known) as intrinsically immoral. This teaching finds approval implicitly in Sacred Scripture (cf. Gen. 38:8-10) and explicitly in the writings of the Church fathers. It is a doctrine which has been held throughout the Church’s history, and which has been reaffirmed in our own times through the papal encyclicals Humane Vitae and Evangelium Vitae, as well as in the Catechism of the Catholic Church.
So what exactly is Catholic teaching on this issue? The first thing to note is that, on the Catholic view, sex should only take place between a married couple who truly love one another and who have committed themselves to one another for life. From this starting point, the Church says that such couples should be open to life and should welcome the prospect of having children. Indeed, the Catholic view is that it is only natural for a married couple to have a desire to raise children and build a family together. As they strive to practice selfless, self-sacrificial love, there is a very real sense in which the love of husband and wife “overflows” to those offspring who are a product of their union and a living embodiment of the love they share. Here, as elsewhere, the Catholic Church is simply teaching common sense: children are gifts from God and they are to be cherished.
In addition to love, the Catholic Church also teaches responsibility. If God wanted couples to have babies all the time, He wouldn’t have created the female body to be fertile only a few days each month. Couples can and should exercise prudence in deciding how to space out pregnancies. Here the Church trusts couples to make the right decision; spouses are asked to be open to life and be as generous as they can, while at the same time showing responsibility in how they go about building their family together. Under Catholic teaching, couples who have a legitimate reason for avoiding pregnancy at a particular time can practice moral birth control using what is known as natural family planning (NFP). As well as working in harmony with the woman’s body and in accordance with the natural law, natural family planning is also 99-100% effective.
Why Contraception is Wrong
Having reviewed what the Catholic Church teaches about contraception, we can now turn our attention to understanding why it is wrong. I shall make the argument that it is wrong in principle and in practice. The practical arguments should appeal to people of all faiths and none. The in principle argument should appeal at the very least to people who believe that life means something, because it was created that way by God. (This latter kind of argument might not appeal to atheists, but that is due to the moral insolvency of atheism rather than to any deficiency in the argument.)
Contraception is wrong in principle because it contradicts the nature of the human body and of the sexual act. Sex has a twofold purpose: the unitive and the procreative. Now clearly the cycle of a woman’s fertility means that sex won’t always result in pregnancy. This is perfectly natural. But even though a woman is not always fertile, nonetheless there exists an obvious and inextricable link between procreation and union, babies and bonding, life and love. Where contraception stands in opposition to the moral law is in the way that it denies this link, thus perverting nature by saying that sex should never have to result in pregnancy. In addition to this, there are certain methods of birth control (most notably the pill) which can in principle be gravely wrong because they may, depending on the timing, work as abortifacients, thus destroying a newly-conceived human being.
We turn now to some of the practical arguments against contraception. For as Dr Janet Smith has pointed out, “The Church teaches not merely that contraception is wrong, but that because contraception is wrong, it will have bad consequences.” Here we shall mention five such consequences.
First, popular methods of contraception such as the pill have been linked to a number of different health problems, including breast cancer, infertility, alterations in sexual attraction, and depression (for a non-Catholic perspective on all this, see here). This is hardly surprising when you have women consuming unnaturally high levels of estrogen and other synthetic hormones on a daily basis, effectively tricking their bodies into thinking they are pregnant. This in turn has an effect on the environment; because so many women are on the pill, the hormones they consume are being excreted into our water systems in vast quantities. One known consequence of this has been gene alteration in fish, leading to problems with reproduction and in some case wiping out entire marine populations. Clearly, there is much that can (and should) be debated over the issue of different methods of birth control and the links to various health issues. In some instances the science is still scarce. But for what it’s worth, I am of the opinion that we haven’t seen half of it yet, and I think future generations will look back and realise the havoc that the contraceptive pill played with women’s bodies, with babies in the womb, and with the wider environment.
Second, contraception treats pregnancy (and fertility) as a disease. The contraceptive mentality says that pregnancy must be avoided at all costs. As a result, children begin to be demonised, and the woman’s fertility disrespected. Moreover, whilst abortion is a much graver evil than contraception, the mentality that embraces the latter will often seek to justify the former. Widespread use of contraception leads to widespread acceptance of abortion as just another means of “emergency contraception”.
Third, the use of contraception results in a lack of self-control. When a couple decide that they can have sex whenever they want without having to exercise responsibility (by taking into consideration the fact that they might conceive a child), this leads to an erosion of the virtue of temperance which is so essential to living a chaste life and having healthy relationships. Another way to think about this, particularly if you are a Catholic, is that in life it is important that we are able, on occasion, to give up even those things which are good for thus. Thus on Fridays we might abstain from meat, and during Lent we might give up certain pleasures. Similarly, it is important for couples to be able, on occasion, to give up the pleasure of sex. This is important, firstly, because by practising saying no to that which is good, we get better at saying no to that which is bad. And secondly, it is important because there is so much more to marriage than sex, and therefore couples need to learn to express their love for one another in different ways.
Fourth, contraception leads to the denigration of women. In order to see this, we need to go back to basics. Everyone acknowledges that in life there is this amazing thing called sex, and that this is linked to the creation of babies. Now the Church believes, taking as it does the view that life actually means something, that sex and babies are linked because they are interconnected goods. The world, on the other hand, takes the view that the babies aspect of sex is an enormous inconvenience, a cruel predicament for mother nature to have inflicted on the human race. Imagine modern man’s delight, then, upon realising that is now within his power to fundamentally reverse the course of nature and ensure that sex need no longer have anything to do with procreation. From here it doesn’t take long for sex to be dehumanised; it loses its moral profundity and it becomes much less clear why it must only take place within marriage. In short, rather than being about union and procreation, sex comes to be perceived as being primarily (in some cases, entirely) about pleasure. It is from this basis that the denigration of women begins to occur. Men, who are naturally more sexually driven than women, start viewing women as objects for sexual pleasure. Gone is the dignity and beauty of sex; gone is the need for love and commitment in relationships. And it is primarily women who suffer as a result.
Finally, fifth, contraception is a key factor in the breakdown of the family. In a way, this is just the four previous arguments merged into one. Contraception devalues fertility, sex, human life, children, spousal responsibility, and women. This has been one of the main causes of the widespread family breakdown that pervades our culture today.
Given all of the reasoning above, I am firmly of the belief that contraception is wrong. And I like to think that I would have the sense to believe this even if I wasn’t a Catholic. In an age in which people are increasingly obsessed with living healthy, natural lifestyles, I find it bizarre that something as anti-natural as artificial contraception remains so popular. Frankly, I have yet to hear of a method of contraception which I do not find utterly disgusting (never mind immoral), and I think it absolutely perverse that something like one in five British adults have undergone clinical sterilisation.
Some Objections…
Passionate as I may be in my advocacy of Catholic teaching on contraception, it is still very important that one engages with alternate viewpoints. With that in mind, in this section I shall briefly address five common objections to the Catholic position.
Objection 1: We need contraception to prevent overpopulation.
I have considered this issue in detail elsewhere, and I would refer the reader to what I wrote there. Suffice to say, overpopulation is by and large a myth, and it is not something humanity need worry about anytime in the near future, if ever. Besides, the Catholic position isn’t that couples should mass produce children, but rather that they should show both love and responsibility.
Objection 2: Condoms are essential to preventing the spread of HIV / AIDs.
The Catholic Church has received a lot of hate on this issue. Regrettably, he haters are morons. Given the restrains of this article, I shall here confine myself to making a few broad points of principle rather than delving in depth into all the relevant reports and statistics. There is no another institution or group of people on the planet that cares more about sufferers of HIV / AIDs than does the Catholic Church. Not only is the Church growing at a tremendous rate in Africa, where the crisis has been worst, but it is also the largest provider HIV / AIDs care in the world. Certainly it is rather odd to hear the Church blamed for the spread of these diseases when it is virtually the only organisation in the world which is encouraging people not to engage in the kinds of activities which cause these diseases in the first place. (Perhaps our only recourse in these circumstances can be to quote the illustrious Captain Jack Sparrow.) The world has a sick, twisted view of sexuality; it is a view so blindly accepted that even when the kinds of behaviour that it seeks to legitimise as “normal” result in the deaths of millions, its response is none other than to encourage more young people to engage in such behaviour, and to lambast those who dare to suggest that happy, healthy, monogamous, lifelong relationships might be a good alternative. As Obelix would say, “These humans are crazy.”
Objection 3: Why does the Church allow some artificial things but not others?
The Church is fine with things which are a legitimate extension of nature, as in the case of bicycles extending our natural ability for locomotion, and with things which restore nature to its proper state, as in the case of contact lenses which allow a person’s sight to function as it should. Where the problem arises is with things which contradict nature, and that is what contraception does.
Objection 4: Not all couples want kids!
Whilst I have some sympathy with this objection, I have to say that I think it represents a fundamental misunderstanding of what sex and marriage are about. Life and love go together, and it is unnatural for a couple’s sexual, marital relationship not to be oriented towards family life. Of course, many people today find this idea horrifying, but in my experience they invariably tend to be much less happy, less fulfilled people than those who faithfully live out the Church’s teachings on marriage and family. In general, when a spouse habitually practices selfless, self-sacrificial love, then he or she will not only accept the possibility of having children, but actively embrace it as a joy, an adventure, and an experience of love.
Objection 5: Natural family planning is just the same as contraception.
Even if contraception is wrong, how is natural family planning any different? This is a an excellent question, but a few things can be said in response. First of all, on the Catholic view, natural family planning can be wrong if used in a selfish, contraceptive way. NFP shouldn’t necessarily be the default position for couples. But more than that, the key to understanding the difference between contraception and NFP is that even though the end may in some cases be the same, the means is radically different. Jason Evert makes the point that whereas NFP is about conforming your desires to work with how God has created the human body, contraception is about conforming the human body to fit your desires. He uses this analogy: Imagine two people who are seeking to get into shape; the first person decides to exercise self-discipline and commits to keeping to a healthy diet; the second person, on the other hand, decides to practice bulimia, gorging on fine foods and then vomiting it up. Both persons in this scenario have the same end, but there is a world of difference in the morality of the methods they adopt. Similarly, whilst natural family planning and contraception may on some occasions be used for the same end, nonetheless they are about as similar to one another as healthy dieting is to bulimia.
Conclusion
In 1968 Blessed Paul VI shocked the world with the publication of his encyclical Humane Vitae, in which he reaffirmed the Church’s longstanding opposition to artificial contraception. In the encyclical, Paul VI made four predictions about what would happen once contraception began to be widely used: first, it would lead to marital infidelity and a general lowering of morality; second, it would lead to the denigration of women; third, it would lead to governments tyrannically enforcing birth control in certain parts of the world; fourth, it would lead men and women to think that they have unlimited moral dominion over their own bodies. All four of these predictions have come true, and we are suffering the consequences of them today. Much more could be said on every one of the topics raised in this article, but we have run out of space. I end, then, with a positive note, by quoting from section 21 of Humane Vitae:
The right and lawful ordering of birth demands, first of all, that spouses fully recognize and value the true blessings of family life and that they acquire complete mastery over themselves and their emotions. … Only then will the expression of love, essential to married life, conform to right order. This is especially clear in the practice of periodic continence. Self-discipline of this kind is a shining witness to the chastity of husband and wife and, far from being a hindrance to their love of one another, transforms it by giving it a more truly human character.
This article is the sixth in a ten-part series of apologetics articles written by Clement Harrold here at Plastic Hippo.
Never Trust a Plastic Hippo 