Salient: Victoria University Students' Paper. Vol. 27, No. 4. 1964.

Criminal

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."

This article was published in the January, 1964, issue of the Melbourne " Catholic Worker" under the title " The Pills and Responsible Parenthood".

We reprint it here because many readers have asked for some moral comment on contraception. We feel that the article makes a number of worthwhile comments on the subject, and would welcome any letter or articles from students or staff on this or related matters.

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.