Why Humanae Vitae is right and why contraception is wrong
(preliminary note : Happy birthday Humanae Vitae ! Although I was delighted that the Google doodle recently celebrated the contributioons to our understanding of natural science by Fr. Georges LeMaitre, the Belgian priest who was a colleague of Albert Einstein’s and who first formulated the theory of the big bang, I somehow doubt Google would put a doodle honouring the 50th anniversary of the publication of Humanae Vitae. Although the social ills of ignoring this great and prophetic encyclical are many, I am not going to dwell on them in this article, I am merely addressing why artificial contraception is wrong. )
It’s been exactly fifty years since Pope Paul VI sat down at his type writer and wrote out what the philosopher Peter Kreeft called the most controversial, ignored, despised, ridiculed and rejected papal encyclical written in modern times – Humanae Vitae. It affirmed the existing magisterial position against artificial contraception. It landed with a tremendous impact that left a quake in its wake, causing a virtual schism within the Catholic Church, splitting those who, consciously or otherwise, take an integrated view of the body and the spirit from those who wish to assert control over the body’s natural design in matters of the transmission of life, separating those who wish to work with nature from those who set the mind against the body through technology, to further the dualist rift in Western thinking between the spiritual and the material, probably set in motion by philosophy of Decartes.
Faithful Catholics, who accept and strive to practice all that the Church teaches as essential are often characterised as being fundamentalist or extreme. Either they are right, or it is the Church which holds extremes in balance, and it is the world which lurches this way and that about the truth of the matter. Balance, in most contexts of life, is held to be a good thing. A balanced diet is said by nutritionists to be very healthful. The automation of monotonous tasks by artificial machines is held in high regard and is seen by most to be of value. Totally artificial clothing is perhaps less desirable. Artificial food is positively frowned upon by most decent people who care about physical well-being and the proper functioning of the body. That something is artificial is not in and of itself bad. Artificial limbs help recover what was lost. Artificial optics enhance and extend eyesight. Contraception is bad because it is ‘contra’ nature, natural design and therefore it is against the designer of nature. Selfish intentions seek to override and frustrate the design. Furthermore, the closer we get to the personal, the more we eschew artificial things which go against nature, except when it comes to the really personal, the really intimate – the sexual act. Our designs over-rides natural design, if natural design is even admitted or recognized. But nature is a mold in which we live and move, if not perhaps have our ultimate being. It is a basis for growth, both spiritually and physically. It is a book of words, but we have been ignoring and confounding it, and we ought to take heed of the words of the Smiths’ song Ask, Ask, Ask – “Nature is a language, can’t you read ?”
There is the very reasonable assumption abroad that the use of technology has, in general, made our lives better and that the technology itself, however ingenious, has no moral dimension to it, that the goodness or otherwise, comes from its intended use, what it’s directed towards and the circumstances of it’s use. The intended use of most things is well understood. The intended use of our sexual faculty is less considered. When people speak of reproductive technologies, whether it be sterilisation, contraception or abortion, there is a violence and a contradiction, because our selfishness and weakness refuses to be at peace with nature and therefore with nature’s designer when it comes to something so intimate and personal as sexuality even though we are in the context of something so precious and important as the essence of human biological life.
For many, the encyclical reads like a prophecy, logical and beautiful, and its widespread rejection has led to much heartbreak, despair, sorrow and even bloodshed. There is bloodshed because the demand to make the sexual act sterile is insisted upon, even after the fact in the case of abortion and because, as the encyclical predicted governments would use abortion and sterilization to control population growth. When G. K. Chesterton asked, in the face of the advent of modern “birth control”, (which he more truthfully called “birth prevention”) when would those in favour of it ask for any unwanted babies to be killed, I’m sure he was dismissed as a cantankerous curmudgeon, leaping to wild conclusions. But in reality, he already saw the latent evil behind the movement. Indeed, anywhere abortion-on-demand has been legislated for, it was hot on the heels of legislation or institutional approval for access to artificial contraception as witnessed by the U.S. Supreme Court decision of Griswold Vs. Connecticut 1965 prior to Roe Vs. Wade 1973. In Britain, the Abortion Act of 1967 followed the approval for dispensing oral contraceptives by the Family Planning Association in 1961. Ireland didn’t follow the legislation for contraception in 1980 with an Abortion Act because of something called the Eight Amendment, proposed by and voted for by people who were able to connect the dots. The expanding culture of promiscuity and contraception has unconsciously collaborated with lethal amounts of sympathy for women in crisis pregnancies to ensure its recent repeal.
For many, although the encyclical was an re-affirmation of perennial Catholic teaching, the encyclical was a moral bridge too far – too far into our private lives and bedrooms, too far into the most intimate physical act, the most pleasurable shared experience, a realm in which decent people cannot and should not be told what to do. Shining the light of truth, of reason, of revelation might unsettle, embarrass, re-evaluate, and stir our conscience into realizing that there is a third party in the sexual act, if only through the silent design of our bodies, and realizing that to act in discord with the body’s design is to act in discord with the body’s designer, that the body is not an object, but a subject. The unitive nature of marriage and the procreative nature – the openness to new life – makes marriage and family a kind of icon of God’s love, showing especially the diffusive character of that love. The proponents of the sexual revolution and those of the “have-it-all’ mentality, the two career spouses who feel they have to freeze eggs or in-vitro fertilize are rallying around on opposites sides of a central truth. As Peter Kreeft again pointed out – the former want the sexual act without any possibility of babies, the latter want babies without the sexual unity.
The philosophical truth behind the encyclical is clear. It’s clear because it’s not an abstract philosophy (i.e. it is not bad philosophy), it is philosophy based on truth, a personal truth, and a personal reality. A denial of that truth reveals something truly wrong and truly ugly. The acceptance of deliberately sterile acts has left us powerless to defend our regard for marriage and the human body against those who promote a whole slew of sterile acts, such as masturbation, sodomy or homosexual activity.
Like bad architecture, the ugliness can become acceptable, and therefore difficult to perceive. The reason for the difficulty for many of not being able to seeing the wrongness of artificial contraception (and therefore the rightness of Humanae Vitae) is because of the lack of willingness to look at the problem of the act itself in all of its gory detail. The unnaturalness and disorder of it can be seen with an analogy to another natural appetite – the desire for food. The following analogy was put forward by John F. Kippley in his book “Sex and the Marriage Covenant”. Imagine that a bulimic were to employ a certain technology, a plastic bag, to allow him or her to forego the nourishing aspects of a repast by shoving a plastic bag into the stomach, collecting all of the food there, and pulling it out afterwards. Surely everyone, except perhaps the bulimic, would have no trouble seeing the wrongness of this act and disordered mentality around it. Imagine if these bulimia bags were on sale at ever pharmacy, convenience store and airport shop. We would do well to conclude that things had gone awry for us as a society in matters of eating, food and the body. Yes, when these become little rubber bags which are used to do for those engaged in the sexual act, what the plastic bag would do for the bulimic. The context of sexual engagement consists not of bread or milk or cereal, as important as these things are, but of our biological essences, our fertility – the very stuff of life. They ought therefore to command our greater respect.
What the Church is proclaiming is a respect for our nature and the directedness of the sexual unity towards life. We cannot guarantee that a new life will result, but neither should we artificially extinguish the procreative or unitive dimension of the sexual act. We respect natural cycles eating and resting. We don’t respect natural cycles of fertility. That there are natural cycles imply that natural methods of planning a family or regulating gaps between births cannot be equated with artificial contraception. When it comes to food, we promote the natural and reject the unnatural. We don’t do that when it comes to sex. Many will insist that the sexual appetite is good because it is natural. But if it is natural, the design should also be respected for the same reason. If we are respecting the design, we are respecting the intention of the designer, who knows us better than we know ourselves.
If we bury this encyclical, we are going to be further dulling the conscience of humanity and become less aware of the painful questions of today for which the Gospel is the healing answer. In the refusal to act in harmony with nature, a reliance on technology has developed that resembles the selfish and closed via the use of artificial contraception, and one that relies upon it as it were a near miraculous intervention such as sterility treatments. If we frustrate natural design’s good ends by technology, we are not giving grace the chance to perfect that which was also given by grace – our bodies, our selves (as Simone De Beauvoir would not have put it).
The Catholic Church is unfairly castigated for proclaiming the truth about natural law. But it is natural and predates the Church, as much as the electron or the atom does. The Church merely points the way. But it would seem that a Sola Natura approach is insufficient and that we need is an interpretive authority to make plain the language of nature and of natural design. That interpreter could be the instructions on a packet of Durex. The amount of truth there might be limited as their motivations are largely monetary. The interpreter could be the man opening the packet or more pointedly his lust, libido and his momentary objectification of a woman. Or it could be St. John Paul II, the pope who wrote Theology of the Body in which he shows that marriage consists of a mutual gift of self, without anything held back, without any lies, physical or verbal. It is a surrender of control to God of the big things in life and of life itself.
The fact that much of the world rejects and mocks the Church for these doctrines and that the Church upholds a supernatural perspective on mankind, confirms another thing Chesterton said – “When you remove the supernatural, what’s left is not the natural, but the unnatural”.
Phyos 