What’s Blocking Access to Contraception?: Religion

By Timothy Herrmann | July 5, 2012

UK news paper the Guardian, has decided to poll its readers with the question “What’s blocking access to contraception?” in preparation for the upcoming London Family Planning Summit. Each day they take the responses and map them “dynamically” in a word cloud. The most recent results can be found below:

As you can see, most of the Guardian’s readership, or at least those that took the time to fill out the survey, believe that religion is the biggest obstacle to women using contraception.

Actually, they might be right. Religion does generally ask people to think seriously about sex and the use of contraception and, at least the Catholic Church, tells them that using it during or after sex is a sin. However, the Catholic Church’s teaching isn’t a matter of telling people what they can’t do, it’s a matter of education.

Simply put, sex always carries with it the possibility of conception.

Anyone can choose to interrupt that process, but the Church teaches us that we shouldn’t. Doing so interrupts a process that could lead to pregnancy. The Church not only recognizes that sex includes the possibility of pregnancy but recognizes that using contraception separates sex from conception. This is wrong, according to the Church, because it not only closes off sex to the possibility of bringing new human beings into existence, but also keeps the people having sex from living out all of the drama that this possibility demands from them.

It’s not that giving birth is somehow more important than sex itself, it’s that the two can’t and shouldn’t be separated. Giving birth implies sex, and sex implies giving birth. Separating the two not only means purposefully robbing new humans of their existence but also robbing those involved of an important part of their life, or existence, as well.

It’s not that the Church is prudish, or moralistic, or just plain behind the times, it is that the Church refuses to ignore that sex is meant to be sex, and life is meant to be life, nothing less (and no matter what the sacrifice it demands). The moment we pretend to separate the conception of human life from sex is the moment sex, and the human, cease to be themselves and loose their ultimate value for whatever value we decide to give to them (which is often very little).

We see this problem today, especially in the new movement to increase global access to family planning or, in many cases, population control.

For example, take this quote from an important planning document behind the London Family Planning Summit to be held on July 12, “If the 215 million women and girls in developing countries with an unmet need for contraception used modern methods of family planning, unintended pregnancies would fall by more than 70 percent, and each year there would be nearly 100,000 fewer maternal deaths and nearly 600,000 fewer newborn deaths each year.”

This is to say, there will be 100,000 fewer maternal deaths because women that would have had children without contraception, will not have those children once they have access to contraception. It also assumes that 600,000 new born deaths will be avoided simply because those children will never be born at all, given that the woman won’t have those children once she has access to contraception.

Again, 600,000 new born deaths will be avoided because those babies won’t be born at all. Try and figure that one out.

So, instead of thinking about what it would take to get those 100,000 women the kind of maternal care they would need to take their children to term without dying, or the kind of neonatal care that would be needed to save the 600, 000 children from death, we would rather rob mothers of the possibility of giving birth, with all of the drama that it includes, and to rob children of existence all together. It’s easier and its cheaper. It also means less education and less responsibility.

Instead of teaching people about the responsibility and beauty that sex implies, organizations like the Gates Foundation would rather hand out contraception. And that is why when Melinda Gates calls herself Catholic, she really doesn’t even know what she means. Being Catholic is far more interesting and important for the good of the human person than she knows. It’s not about contraception and sex. It’s about discovering what it means to be human and helping others down the same path through example and relationship.

It is not a problem of being “moralistic” but of desiring people to take their own life more seriously. The Church would never deny that it is important for families to be able to feed and support their children, it would only argue that using contraception  keeps people from having to figure out how to do it.

Share on Facebook
Share on Twitter
Tagged with: • •