Catholic on Contraception

The Time Has Come, by John Rock; Longmans, Green, 19/-.

We are running out of world to live in.

In the middle of the most productive century the world has ever known, half of its population is hungry. The comparatively recent burgeoning of the human birth rate has made it clear that a world practising death control must also practice birth control, and it may be that the greatest danger faced by man today is energy—not atomic, but sexual.

All this is very much the concern of Dr. john Rock, Clinical Professor Emeritus of Gynecology at Harvard University, and a Roman Catholic whose work was instrumental in the development of the first oral contraceptive.

Taking a look at the world's vital statistics for the immediate past, Dr. Rock observes an alarming overall acceleration in population, unevenly distributed geographically and compounded of extensions in life expectancy, reductions of infant mortality, and a bad habit of prolific procreation.

Such a world as Rock paints is clearly in need, and urgently, of widespread population control, which alone cannot resolve the crisis, but without which no combination of other measures can succeed. Rock attempts to deline the obstacles to the propagation of birth control, and is led rather tediously to a marvellously thorough and protracted evaluation of the attitudes of the Catholic Church to what is illicit and what is not.

Rock's look at the Catholic doctrines uncovers a growing tendency within the Church toward a more responsible attitude to parenthood. Mis examination is more important than its treatment in the book may imply, for the Church is influential in the appropriation of funds for much-needed research.

Presently available methods of birth control have little chance of endorsement by all religions. Neither are they of much use on the large scale of their need—they have proven so unreliable or so complicated that several Indian states have resorted to male sterilisation and Japan now practices widespread abortion.

In an absorbing chapter on the development and modus operandi of the oral contraceptive (steroid) pill which he helped to develop, Rock fairly demolishes the Church's objection to it, though it he far from him to say so. He shows that the principle of the only Church-sanctioned method of birth control, the, the so-called "rhythm method," is just as much "sterilisation" (by the voluntary unfulfillment of the ovum's repro-ductory function) as is that of the pill, which works by modifying the time sequences of the body's functions. "It is difficult not to believe," he' says, "that God gave man his intellect to safeguard him when his inner biology was inadequate."

Dr Rock is sure that an answer will be found in what he calls the first world problem in history. He seems to say that we'd best face our shrinking world with a little more perception.

—J.C.B.