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James K. Baxter Complete Prose Volume 2

Contraception and the Pope [2]

Contraception and the Pope [2]

Sir: Again I must be ‘wordy’ – the term applied by your correspondent J. Whitley Stokes to my last letter concerning the encyclical Humanae Vitae. If the rightness of Catholic morality on this issue were universally self-evident, I would not even write about it; but surely most men must acknowledge that here we deal with difficult moral, religious and social problems, not to be bulldozed out of the way by a few succinct phrases.

Your correspondent J.S. Drummond has astonished me by the claim that page 657 artificial birth control ‘rests with every woman’s individual choice’. Here we can see the danger of snap judgments. If all women conceived pathogenetically, I might be swayed to agree with this view. But surely each ordinary marital act involves the conscious consent of both partners; and husband and wife must reach an unforced agreement as to what means of family planning, if any, they wanted to use. A husband whose wife used the Pill, and who regarded that use as immoral, would have an obligation to abstain from cooperation in a deliberately infertile act. Such painful disagreements are by no means uncommon. The view of J.S. Drummond seems to me to imply a feminism carried to the point of moral absurdity.

Two of your correspondents confess themselves unable to distinguish between the morality of artificial contraception and that of the rhythm method. I grant that the distinction is delicate. In the first case a given marital act is made deliberately infertile, by chemical or mechanical intervention in the process of the male or female body. In the second case a couple may choose to perform the marital act at a time when it is naturally infertile, and to refrain from similar acts at a time when such acts would be naturally fertile. One could legitimately call this natural contraception. The fact that the Catholic Church permits natural contraception shows plainly that she has no objection to family planning. It is only chemical or mechanical intervention in the body processes, undertaken to induce an artificial infertility, which she has always forbidden and now forbids.

The Catholic argument claims that the generative system in man or woman is a sacred and total pattern given to the human species by the Creator; and that the introduction of artificial factors (a chemical or a rubber sheath or plug, to name ordinary examples) and the removal of natural factors (ovulation or the transmission of spermatozoa) is morally impermissible, though it is within the power of man to do it. If one’s approach is wholly clinical, or if one acknowledges the existence of a Creator only vaguely or not at all, the argument will probably be incomprehensible. Personally, however, I am often gratified and surprised to find that many people who are not Catholics do grasp it and accept its moral consequences. This generally occurs in the degree to which they are consciously or subconsciously aware of the meaning of Christ’s injunction to His followers to remember that their bodies were the temples of the Holy Spirit, a statement far removed from clinical or agnostic modes of thought.

1968 (547)