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.