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Why Does The Catholic Church Put So Much Emphasis On Contraception?: An excerpt from 50 Questions on the Natural Law

My wife Krista and I, in an effort to educate and evangelize several Protestant couples that we know and love, have been thoroughly researching the topic of contraception. Contraception, as we have seen on this blog, is a pivotal issue for many, if not most, Protestants. Yet the wisdom of the Catholic Church on this crucial issue is hard to ignore or deny. I say crucial because this all-important matter deals with why the human person exists and, in essence, the meaning of real love. The following is an excerpt from Charles Rice's book 50 Questions on the Natural Law: What It Is & Why We Need It, I highly recommend this book (it is laid out in a question/answer format). Enjoy!

42. Why does the Church put so much emphasis on contraception? I think it enables people to exercise responsible free choice. Why does the Church oppose it?

In Humanae Vitae in 1968, Pope Paul VI said that the law of God prohibits “every action which, either in anticipation of the conjugal act, or in its accomplishment, or in the development of its natural consequences, proposes, whether as an end or means, to render procreation impossible”. This teaching “is founded upon the inseparable connection—which is willed by God and which man cannot lawfully break on his own initiative—between the two meanings of the conjugal act: the unitive meaning and the procreative meaning.” In Familiaris Consortio, John Paul stressed the “objective standards” that govern here as in other areas: “The Second Vatican Council clearly affirmed that when there is a question of harmonizing conjugal love with the responsible transmission of life, the moral aspect of any procedure does not depend solely on sincere intentions or on an evaluation of motives. It must be determined by objective standards. These, based on the nature of the human person and his or her acts, preserve the full sense of mutual self-giving and human procreation in the context of true love.”

In his audience of Sept. 17, 1983, the Pope added to the above reasons the fact that the contraceptor usurps the role of God by making himself (or herself) the arbiter of when life begins:

At the origin of every human person there is a creative act of God. No man comes into existence by chance; he is always the object of God’s creative love. From this fundamental truth of faith and reason it follows that the procreative capacity, inscribed in human sexuality, is—in its deepest truth—a cooperation with God’s creative power.

It also follows that men and women are not the arbiters, are not the masters of this same capacity, called as they are, in it and through it, to be participants in God’s creative decision. When, therefore, through contraception, married couples remove from the exercise of their conjugal sexuality its potential procreative capacity, they claim power which belongs solely to God: the power to decide, in a final analysis, the coming into existence of a human person. They assume the qualification not of being cooperators in God’s creative power, but the ultimate depositaries of the source of human life.

In this perspective, contraception is to be judged, objectively, so profoundly unlawful as never to be, for any reason, justified. To think or to say the contrary is equal to maintaining that in human life situations may arise in which it is lawful not to recognize God as God.

The teachings of John Paul II have stressed relation to others as an essential element of personhood. In this context the practice of contraception is essentially degrading to the person: “When couples, by means of recourse to contraception, separate these two meanings that God the Creator has inscribed in the being of man and woman and in the dynamism of their sexual communion, they act as ‘arbiters’ of the divine plan and they ‘manipulate’ and degrade human sexuality and with it themselves and their married partner by altering its value of ‘total’ self-giving. Thus the innate language that expresses the total reciprocal self-giving of husband and wife is overlaid through contraception, by an objectively contradictory language, namely, that of not giving oneself totally to the other. This leads not only to a positive refusal to be open to life but also to a falsification of the inner truth of conjugal love, which is called upon to give itself in personal totality.” (Familiaris Consortio, no. 32)

To practice natural family planning, the man and woman must communicate with each other. Contraception, by contrast, is a deliberate frustration of communication. The contraceptors withhold something of themselves from each other. Instead of mutual self-donation, the sexual act tends to become a noncommunicative exercise in mutual masturbation, with the other person regarded as an object. Contraception involves a refusal both to take the possible consequences of the act and to accept the other as he or she is without alteration by a chemical, a device, or surgery. In this light, contraception is the antithesis of the relational essence of personhood through which “man can fully discover his true self only in a sincere giving of himself” (Second Vatican Council, Pastoral Constitution on the Church in the Modern World, no. 24)

John Paul, before he became Pope, emphasized that “the person is the kind of good which does not admit of use and cannot be treated as an object of use and as such the means to an end…The person is a good towards which the only proper and adequate attitude is love.” (Love and Responsibility) Note the contrast between this view and the “utilitarian principle” of the Enlightenment, which would allow the human person, whether in contraception or elsewhere, to be treated as a means to another’s end.

Contraception is so rooted in contemporary culture that it is easy to forget that the Anglican Lambeth Conference of 1930 was the first occasion on which a Christian denomination said that contraception could ever be objectively right under any circumstances (see New York Times, 8/15/1930, pg. 1, col. 6). “Lambeth”, said editor James Douglas of the London Sunday Express, “has delivered a fatal blow to marriage, to motherhood, to fatherhood, to the family and to morality.” (see New York Times, 8/17/1930, pg. 5, col. 1). In 1931, when a committee of the Federal Council of Churches followed Lambeth by endorsing “careful and restrained” use of contraceptives, the Washington Post editorially replied:

It is impossible to reconcile the doctrine of the divine institution of marriage with any modernistic plan for the mechanical regulation or suppression of human birth. The church must either reject the plain teaching of the Bible or reject schemes for the “scientific” production of human souls. Carried to its logical conclusion, the committee’s report if carried into effect would sound the death-knell of marriage as a holy institution, by establishing degrading practices which would encourage indiscriminate immorality. The suggestion that the use of legalized contraceptives would be “careful and restrained” is preposterous. (see the Washington Post, 3/22/1931).

Abortion
Contraception is the prevention of life, while abortion is the taking of life. But both involve the willful separation of the unitive and procreative aspects of sex. The contraceptive mentality tends to require abortion as a backup. And many so-called contraceptives are abortifacient in that they cause the destruction of the developing human being.

Euthanasia
Once the contraceptive ethic and abortion accustomed people to the idea that burdensome lives are not worth living, the way was clear for euthanasia for the aged and the “useless”. If man is the arbiter of when life begins, he will predictably make himself the arbiter of when life ends. Euthanasia is postnatal abortion, as abortion is prenatal euthanasia.

Pornography
Like contraception, which reduces sexual relation to an exercise in mutual masturbation, pornography is the separation of sex from life and the reduction of sex to an exercise in self-gratification. Pope Paul VI, in Humanae Vitae, warned that contraception would cause women to be viewed as sex objects, that “man, growing used to the employment of anti-conceptive practices, may finally lose respect for the woman and, no longer caring for her physical and psychological equilibrium, may come to the point of considering her as a mere instrument of selfish enjoyment, and no longer as his respected and beloved companion.”

In Vitro Fertilization
Contraception is the taking of the unitive without the procreative. In vitro fertilization is the reverse. Various refinements of this technique include the freezing of spare embryos and their later use for experimentation or as spare parts for persons in need of new organs. The treatment of human beings as objects is obvious here.

Promiscuity
According to the natural moral law and the Commandments, sex is reserved for marriage because sex is inherently connected with procreation and the natural way to raise children is in marriage. But if, through contraception, we claim the power to decide whether sex will have anything to do with procreation, why should we have to reserve sex for marriage?

Divorce
In the natural order, marriage should be permanent because sex is inherently related to procreation and children should be raised in a home with parents permanently married to each other. But if it is wholly our decision whether sex will have any relation to children, why should marriage be permanent? If sex and marriage are not intrinsically related to new life, marriage loses its reason for permanence. It tends to become a temporary alliance for individual gratification—what Pope Paul VI called “the juxtaposition of two solitudes.”

Homosexual Activity
If sex has no inherent relation to procreation, and if man, rather than God, is the arbiter of whether and when it will have that relation, why not let Freddy marry George and Erica marry Susan? The contraceptive society cannot say that homosexual activity is objectively wrong without condemning itself. Objections to the legitimization of the homosexual “life-style” are reduced to pragmatic and the esthetic. Homosexual activity, like contraception, also frustrates the interpersonal communication that is intrinsic to the conjugal act. And where that act should be open to life, homosexual activity is a dead end. It rejects life and focuses instead on excrement, which is dead.

It is increasingly obvious not only that contraception is contrary to the nature and dignity of the person but also that it is hostile to the common good. The Church’s teaching here is a providential and prophetic call to reason and sanity.