Sexual Engineering and Social Consequences
As of August 2022, the Irish government has been providing contraception to women aged between 17 and 25 for free1. Will the IVF treatments be free, too ? Mark Hickey asks.
Modern Western society seems to be waging a never-ending war against nature. The sexual revolution of the 1960s brought the introduction of contraceptives – artificial means seeking to completely and artificially suppress fertility : sex without babies. More recently, Western medicine has sought to offer the high-tech lottery of reproductive procedures and treatments as a consolation prize to the lost years of fertility : babies without sex. We seed to be lurching between two extremes, throwing human nature, natural law and divine design under a bus. Why is Ireland now implementing this programme of social and sexual engineering ? I think the immediate answers come from two places.
Firstly, since acquiring our civic and political freedom as a nation, we have been perpetually on the look-out of how the wider world sees us. Since we’ve been pegged in the past as being in thrall to servile obedience to Catholic morality, we appear to be going out of our way to show that we have a new master – the secular, socially liberal framework of hedonistic individualistic autonomy, isolated from consequences or the common good. Secondly, we tend to import the bad aspects of foreign cultures. Consider the good influence of the good cultural aspects of putting the customer first in retail from the USA. The influence of this is probably not as popular as the popularity of junk food, another import from the same country. It’s not surprising that the bad aspects of our culture of pub-going and drinking has made its mark as an export from Ireland. We are, in the meantime, catching up with the latest and the worst, as the rest of the world, in its turn, is gleaning examples from our bad habits. It could be said that, when an Irishman docks into a foreign town, he looks for the nearest pub, and when the Americans land abroad, they look for the nearest pharmacy. Chemicals and materials are sometimes used to suppress the body’s proper functioning. The warped and unnatural mechanics of birth control (the term birth prevention, with its connotations of population control is more accurate) were best described by John F. Kippley in his book “Sex and the Marriage Covenant” 2 where he likens the use of a prophylactic in obstructed sexual intercourse to the use of a plastic bag to trap and discard ingested food by a bulimic. Maybe this description can help to realise that it is disordered enough, in bodily terms, as to make David Cronenberg blush.
Secondly, the regarding of contraception as necessary seems to have been part-and-parcel of feminism from the very beginning of the modern version (from the late 1950s) of the movement, which, in its original form could perhaps have been considered as a reaction against male chauvinism, but which has come to mean a determined equalisation of the sexes in a way that is detrimental, I think, to the welfare of the fairer half of humanity. There are some things worth saying about social and personal consequences of contraception. Postponing a woman’s most fertile period to some uncertain future indicates the presence of a particularly ideology that puts work, career and individual freedoms above children, family and marriage. According to the economist Timothy Reichert, in his article “Bitter Pill” (First Things)3, the introduction of contraception has bifurcated the dating market in which men and women would otherwise find each other. There are two markets – one is the short-term relationship market and the other is the marriage market. Contraception enables short-term, deliberately sterile and commitment-free relationships in which women have all the bargaining power (women, especially when they are young and free are the gate-keepers of sexual relations), but have little to gain in terms of what they ultimately want. I’m going to go out on a very short limb here and state that women want commitment. But they are not going to get it in the short-term relationship market. They will only get breakups, hook-ups and heart-ache. The sexually-transmitted diseases that come with the territory have much more serious consequences for women than men. Take for example the fact that the majority of human papilloma viruses are undetectable harmless in males but can lead to cervical cancer in females. Contraceptive technologies don’t prevent them, quite the opposite. Health Minister Stephen Donnelly surely knows all of this, yet why does he promote a lifestyle which endangers women ? This lifestyle promotes promiscuity by signalling to every lusty male around that hook-ups are ok. It’s as if the government started handing out recreational bullet-proof vests. It would encourage, not dissuade, recreational shooting. In fact, two Arkansas men were arrested for shooting each other while wearing flak jackets (after a night of heaving drinking, admittedly). Ironically, the contraceptive mentality likely encourages the bad behaviour whose consequences its promoters seek to avoid, such as, for example, out-of-wedlock pregnancies. According to the National Vital Statistics Report of the United States, there has been an eight-fold increase in the number of out-of-wedlock teenage pregnancies since the early 1950s (when teenage marriage was more common).
There’s no biological clock for most careers but there is, in every case, and expiry date of female fertility. The government’s programme ignores that completely and only looks to the short term goal of increasing the participation in the work-force outside the home (and the corresponding tax-take). How expensive, both financially and personally, with its low success rate, does IVF and other treatments have to become for the government to realise that making an enemy of nature is a bad idea with bad consequences ? The female body is geared towards bearing and nursing the young. Government policy flies in the face of that fact and works on the premise of a radical equality of sameness between the sexes – a concept with no bearing in reality, plucked completely out of thin air.
The widespread instruction of contraception doesn’t serve even the short-term goals of women. The consequence and commitment-free promise of the contraceptive mentality enables sexual predators the likes of whom we have heard so much about in the MeToo movement. It’s perhaps a simplification to say that men want sexual activity and women want commitment, but there is something to it. The contraceptive culture robs women of that commitment by ensuring that there is no danger of a baby coming along. A certain kind of man will say to himself ‘why commit ?’ Contraception makes it far more easy for men to treat women as objects of sexual gratification and facilitate a kind of misogyny that says ‘Why buy the cow when the milk is free ?’. Instead of questioning the usage of sexual relations purely for recreation and personal fulfilment, the feminists of that movement pointed the finger of reformation and correction to men in general (“toxic masculinity”). But it is contraception which is toxic. Taking the sexual act out of marriage is toxic. It’s bad for women, it’s bad for men, it’s bad for babies caught up in the middle of it all. I don’t know when we are going to learn this.
Simone De Beauvoir famously stated that the capability and responsibility for bearing children in the womb made them a “plaything of nature”. One could update that to say that contraceptives make women into “playthings of men”.
- “Minister Donnelly secures free contraception for women aged between 17-25 years in Budget 2022”. Gov.ie. Department of Health. October 22, 2021. Retrieved June 7, 2022.
- “Sex and the Marriage Covenant : A Basis for Morality”, John F. Kippley, Couple to Couple League International, 1991 ISBN : 0960103694, 9780960103690
- “Bitter Pill”, First Things, May 2010, https://www.firstthings.com/article/2010/05/bitter-pill
- National Center for Health Statistics, “Births to Teenagers in the United States, 1940-2000,” National Vital Statistics Report, 2001, Vol. 49, No. 10.
Phyos 