Contraception Wars

“It isn’t about contraception, it is about religious liberty!” is the chant from the right. This is like saying that the Civil War was not about slavery. Just as the Civil War was about slavery (as well as states’ rights vs. the union) this Culture War is about contra-ception, as well as liberty. But the battle for religious liberty is one that we must fight and we can, possibly, win. The war over contraceptives is so one-sided that no one dares voice a word in the public square against their use.

During this controversy, I have not heard or read a single word about the many negative biological risks for women, of the pill…nor of the fact that Natural Family Planning and periodic abstinence has absolutely no such risk. Yet, the contraceptive-fanatics rage indignantly about “woman’s health.”

If contraceptives are as good as liberals think…liberating, healthy, empowering, safe, healthy…than we as a society really do have a duty to provide them, free of charge, to all “female reproductive agents.” If they are as bad has the Church claims, then we really need to, non-coercively, discourage their use.

“Contraception is about a woman’s right to control her own sexuality and reproductive capacities.” This statement is intelligible to every knowledgeable 12-year-old. “Contraception is inherently evil.” This statement is incomprehensible to about 99% of our university professors, lawyers, doctors, judges and journalists…including liberal Catholics. Nor do they want to understand what is intended here.

Bishop Lori, testifying before Congress, compared the contraception mandate to a hypothetical requirement that kosher restaurants serve pork. This comparison works as persuasive rhetoric in defense of liberty in the marketplace of ideas, but it badly distorts the issue. The case against contraception is not cultic, like pork prohibition specifically for Jews or the Lenten fast and abstinence for Catholics. Rather, by the natural law, which is to say “the nature of things, specifically persons,” we see that it violates the purpose of sexuality and is toxic for women, family and the entire society. Contraceptive use, in this view, is objectively harmful like bulimia, inhaling tobacco or gorging on Tran’s fats, only much worse since it harms relationships, the soul, the emotions, and the community even more than it does the body. Recourse by Bishop Lori to such a mistaken analogy shows that the bishops entertain not the slightest hope of advancing their viewpoint, on contraception, in the public square. Increasingly, orthodox, “thick” Catholicism is becoming a marginal, counter-cultural, Amish-like community within American society.

When I taught high school religion, I exhorted the young ladies: “Should any man, boyfriend, husband, doctor or whoever, as much as suggest that you ingest that toxic pill into your precious body, kick him to the curb!” Now that is what I call woman’s liberation!

Yes, I am every bit as passionate and intense about contraception as the Clintons, Obama, Sibelius, Planned Parenthood and the fanatics who would impose this mandate upon everyone and who work tirelessly to export contraception and abortion all over the world, using our tax money.

The contraception empire is an alliance of the Democratic Party, Planned Parenthood, Hollywood, Madison Avenue, the pharmaceutical companies, the unions, most of the medical profession, academia, the eugenicists, and all the cultural elites…to name just a few. The Catholic bishops have as allies: No One, except a few eccentrics who think and care deeply about the meaning of sexuality. No institution or elite will benefit from the practice of NFP: the ones who will benefit are women, children, the family, local communities and society.

Contraception is the threshold, the linchpin, the key to the hegemonic culture of sexual license. For Catholics, baptism is the basis, the foundation for the sacramental life. For the liberal, contraception is the rite of passage that leads to a system of rituals: cohabitation, abortion as back-up, serial polygamy, gay intercourse, euthanasia, embryo-experimentation, and the litany goes on.
When the pill became available in the 1960s, instantaneously a mimetic, contagious pandemic overcame our society: 99% of our women succumbed. It was as irresistible as a tsunami. No wonder that the Church…the Vatican, theologians, the clergy… all backed down rather than confront it. None of us are uncontaminated. By some strange irony of Providence, it was a full, disastrous decade after the Pill that we attained the good science supporting Natural Family Planning and the inspiring Theology of the Body.

Compare:
- The pill induces the man to objectify and use the woman, NFP encourages reverence, specifically for her in her distinctive physicality.
- The pill emphases pleasure; NFP insists upon sacrifice.
- The pill is toxic for the woman’s body; NFP is entirely harmless.
- The pill ends conversation; NFP depends upon ongoing communication between spouses.
- The pill exercises technocratic, mechanical control over “reproduction;” NFP is natural, is based on good science, and is personalistic.
- The pill excludes God from the act of intercourse; NFP opens the couple to God as partner in the Mystery in which faithful love and procreation mutually infuse each other.

Perhaps the best consequence of the Obama violation of religious liberty is that the Church, which is to say the bishops collegially, have been aroused to clearly affirm and defend their position on contraception. The voice of the Church on this pivotal issue has been muted, if not entirely silent, and cowardly since the clarification with Humanae Vitae in 1968. It is time for us Catholics to recover the courage of our convictions.