Recently a Catholic correspondent in a London weekly ended his letter to the editor by claiming that it was only a matter of time before the Church modified its teaching on contraception and allowed the use of the new contraceptive pill.

"The Church," he wrote, "has had to modify its attitudes and teaching in the light of scientific discoveries (Galileo, Evolution and Genesis, Freud, etc.) or even as a result of increased social consciousness (slavery, the death penalty, the nuclear bomb), and in good time she will be obliged to reinterpret the divine truths in the light of the population explosion." And, of course, as every schoolboy knows, very much the same view has also been advanced by Dr. John Rock in his recent book, "The Time Has Come".

A few years ago Catholics expressing these sorts of views would have been judged to be crackpots or worse, but it is a fact that they now, for good or bad, represent a fairly substantial body of Catholic opinion, even if it is still very much a minority opinion. I know personally of a number of educated Catholics who seriously think that the Church will in time relax its ban on contraception and allow, for instance, the use of Dr. Rock's pill.

And apart from these Catholics, there is a good number of others who are honestly bewildered and uncertain about the whole business of contraception. If the Dutch bishops do not feel sure about the morality of the pill, how can the lay sheep be confident of where they stand? Catholics, in fact, are almost the only Christians now who oppose contraception on strictly moral grounds, and they find themselves increasingly out on a limb with the great weight of public opinion against them.

More and more the Catholic position seems to the outsider to be an eccentric sectarian fetish rather like the vegetarianism of the Seventh Day Adventists or the refusal of blood transfusions by the Jehovah's Witnesses.

Criminal

Even more damagingly, the Catholic position has been made to appear by the neo-Malthusians as irresponsible and criminal, in that (so they say) it stands it the way of real alleviation of the problems caused by population growth in underdeveloped countries. Just recently the Family Planning Association of Great Britain announced ominously that "civilisation could no longer afford the luxury of large families."

More and more, then, the Catholic feels isolated and eccentric over this whole question of contraception.

At the same time, unfortunately, the old traditional Catholic arguments against contraception seem suddenly to have lost a good deal of their point and plausibility. The old argument was that the natural end of the sexual act was the procreation of new life, and that any deliberate and systematic frustration of this end was "unnatural" and therefore sinful.

But now the Catholic finds his pastors and masters talking about "responsible parenthood" and enthusiastically promoting the "rhythm" method of birth-prevention not as something to be tolerated, but almost as a goes and necessary means for "responsible parenthood."

Of course, the distinction is made that the "rhythm" method is a "natural" means of birth-prevention whereas the use of contraceptive devices is an artificial and "unnatural" means; but all the same it is true that the admission of the 'rhythm" method as licit has made the Catholic position on contraception much less clear-cut than it was.

The admission of the "rhythm" method implies that it is not birth prevention or birth-regulation as such that is wrong (in the sense of deliberately and systematically using the sexual act in such a way that its "natural function" is not fulfilled), but that it is certain means of birth prevention that are wrong.

As a consequence, the difference between the Catholic position and what we might call the contraceptionist position has tended more and more to appear as a ditference over means and techniques, instead of being a difference over the whole purpose of sex and marriage, indeed; i difference over competing views of human life. In this perspeclive the difference between the two positions can be made to look very thin and "casuistical"; so the Catholic position comes to mean that the use of any mechanical device, such as a contraceptive sheath, is deemed to be "unnatural" and so morally wrong, while the deliberate restriction of intercourse to the few sterile days each month when it is known that the woman cannot conceive is deemed to be "natural" and so morally licit and good.

"Rhythm" Method

Thus, a couple using contraceptive devices to space a family of eight children (to cite an actual case I know of) would be morally blameworthy, while a Catholic couple using the "rhythm" method to have a family of two children would be morally praiseworthy.

Within this context, then, the difference between the two points of view does not look to be very large or very crucial, and Dr. Rock's contraceptive pill looks at first sight as though it were just what the doctor ordered to bridge the gap between the two and enable us so to speak, to have our cake and eat it. I mean that from one point of view the pill is an artificial device, but from another point of view it is as "natural" as the "rhythm" method itself.

It is easy to see how the argument goes: If steroids can be licitly used to establish menstrual cycles of uniform length (so as to allow "natural" birth-prevention by the "rhythm" method), why cannot they be used to bring about temporary sterility in the female at will instead of simply having to wait for "nature" to do it? In other words, if temporary sterility in the woman is "natural." and if the artificial induction of temporary sterility is licit in certain cases (as for establishing uniform menstrual cycles), what is it that makes the artificial induction of temporary sterility for the purpose of preventing contraception illicit? Is it simply the intention for which it is used which makes it illicit?

Sexual Plumbing

Some of Dr. Rock's critics have argued that it is obvious that the use of the contraceptive pill is "unnatural" and so just as immoral as the use of any other contraceptive device. Thus, one critic alleges that Rock's argument is that "because the secretion of progesterone after ovulation prevents a further ovum from being released, to give progesterone before ovulation, so as to prevent the release of an ovum is physiological.

"But the precise reason for the secretion of progesterone is to secure the necessary conditions for the development of the ovum. To use it to prevent the release of any ovum is not physiological, and his assertion that it is will be a source of confusion to the non-technical reader. A physiological substance is being used, but in a non-physiological way."

This critic's argument itself, one may think, will also be confusing to the non-technical reader, for it seems to make the whole Catholic morality about contraception depend upon esoteric details of the sexual plumbing.

There is surely something wrong somewhere when, to work out a matter of fundamental morals, one would need to have undergone a course in advanced physiology (pure and applied). And it is surely no wonder that many intelligent non-Catholics should find the Catholic position on contraception interpreted in this crude mechanical way so utterly weird.

I have drawn out these views at some length, not because I hold any brief for them, but rather because leasing out the consequences of this whole way of looking at contraception—shared by both Dr. Rock and his critics—shows up its poverty very vividly. Not only is it a view based upon a simple-minded and arbitrary use of "natural" and "unnatural," but it is also a sub-Christian view; that is, it assumes that any reference to the Christian "world view" or to the Christian view of man is quite irrelevant to the whole question of the morality of contraception.

Instead, the morality of contraception comes to depend on physiological facts about the precise reason for the secretion of progesterone.

As I put it before, it makes the difference between the Catholic and the contraceptionist merely one of techniques, instead of a difference over the whole purpose of human life and sex as part of it. And yet surely it ought to be obvious (at least to a Catholic) that it is only within the context of the Christian view of man taken in its full and complete meaning, that we can get a right and proper view of contraception.

In the last resort, the only sufficient and conclusive argument against contraception is nothing less than the whole Christian "argument." The present crisis over contraception has, I believe, forced Catholics to recognise this unequivocally almost for the first time—it's an ill pill that blows no good.