Contraception and Abortion
Fruits of What Tree?
Hi to my readers. It’s been nearly a couple of years.
Among my most recent posts were a series of three for National NFP Awareness Week 2024:
National Natural Family Planning Awareness Week! When is it OK to avoid having another baby?
What’s the Difference between Natural Family Planning and Contraception? And is there such a thing as a “contraceptive mentality”?
Methods of Natural Family Planning: A (brief) critical overview
Later that year, due to some health problems (the same ones that had led me to retire from teaching), I had to let Moral Theology (this Substack) go dormant … until now. Now, it’s time to start breathing some new life into this thing. I am inspired to do so especially by the fact that it is once again NFP Awareness Week!
July 25 (this year, the end of the week) is the anniversary of St. Paul VI’s encyclical On the Regulation of Birth Humanae Vitae, and July 26 is the feast (not liturgically observed this year, since it falls on a Sunday) of Sts. Joachim and Anne, the parents of the Blessed Virgin Mary, grandparents of Jesus.
In this first new article after some time, I’m going to “cheat” just a little. At the 2022 University Faculty for Life conference, I did a panel with old and dear friend Dr. Richard Fehring, founding director of Marquette University’s Boland Institute for NFP.
Richard, being more high-tech than me.
Photo credit: My wife, Kim.
Yrs. truly, holding forth.
Photo credit: Kim.
The title of my fairly short paper was the title of this article: “Contraception and Abortion: Fruits of What Tree?” Richard had asked me for some reflections on the relationship between contraception and abortion to accompany his more data-driven presentations, and as the reader will discover, I drew heavily from the thought of Karol Wojtyła/St. John Paul II in making my argument.
I never got around to polishing my paper enough for publication in the conference Proceedings, so I am publishing it here instead. Enjoy. I will note that article 2 in my 2024 series here covers some of the same ground.
And I will be with you again in much less than two years. I promise.
Also, I think that Putin and Kirill must be deposed.
Introduction
St. John Paul II writes in Evangelium Vitae §13: “But despite their differences of nature and moral gravity, contraception and abortion are often closely connected, as fruits of the same tree. ... [I]n very many ... instances such practices are rooted in a hedonistic mentality unwilling to accept responsibility in matters of sexuality, and they imply a self-centered concept of freedom, which regards procreation as an obstacle to personal fulfilment. The life which could result from a sexual encounter thus becomes an enemy to be avoided at all costs, and abortion becomes the only possible decisive response to failed contraception.”
I propose in this paper to offer a philosophical account of what contraception and abortion have in common, such that failed contraception leads logically to abortion. I shall begin by showing the problems with one such account, that proposed by Germain Grisez, according to which contraception is itself contralife. This view is not shared by John Paul II, and is not otherwise tenable. I shall then turn to John Paul’s own pre-papal thought. As Karol Wojtyła, in Love and Responsibility, he offers an explanation of the relationship between sexual intercourse, procreation, and authentic love that has implications for one’s understanding of how the choice of contraception will shape one’s attitudes toward potential new life. I shall outline this explanation and develop these implications.
Is contraception contralife?
According to Germain Grisez, contraception is always contralife and nothing but. It is not a sexual sin, since the choice to use contraception is distinct from the choice to engage in sexual intercourse. He admits that contraception is not opposed to justice, as murder is, but points out that some acts of wrongful killing, notably suicide, are not unjust either (since justice by definition concerns the other). So an act need not be unjust to be contralife. He also admits that contraception prevents a potential life from coming into existence, rather than ending an existing life, but argues that killing likewise, in its own way, is at odds with potential life, namely the potential future life of the one who is killed. If Grisez is right, then the “tree” of which both contraception and abortion are fruits would simply and obviously be a contralife will.
But is it John Paul II’s view, and is it true, that contraception is contralife rather than unchaste as Grisez thinks? To begin with, this is clearly not John Paul’s view. He writes that “contraception and abortion are specifically different evils: the former contradicts the full truth of the sexual act as the proper expression of conjugal love, while the latter destroys the life of a human being; the former is opposed to the virtue of chastity in marriage, the latter is opposed to the virtue of justice and directly violates the divine commandment ‘You shall not kill.’”
More importantly, there are several substantive problems with G’s position. First, one cannot neatly separate the choice to use contraception from the choice to engage in sexual intercourse since the former does not make sense apart from the latter; contraception is precisely the choice to deprive sexual intercourse of its procreative potential. Second, Grisez’s way of thinking about the evil of contraception makes it impossible meaningfully to distinguish contraception from periodic abstinence (natural family planning) as he wants. His claim that latter doesn’t choose a baby’s not coming to be as the means to reasonable avoidance of a broader state of affairs simply doesn’t make sense. Third and above all, Grisez’s claim that contraception is analogous to killing since the latter in its own way also only prevents potential future life is less than convincing, since it is the potential future life of someone already living, someone (whether another or oneself) to whom it is possible to have duties like respect for that continuing (unless it is interrupted) life. Grisez’s argument, then, cannot serve as an interpretive key to John Paul II, nor, more broadly, as an explanation of the reality of the relationship between contraception and abortion.
Contraception as anti-procreative selfishness
I shall therefore adopt an alternative approach that would seem especially promising and that will turn out to be more successful: using John Paul to interpret John Paul. Specifically, I shall draw from one of his most notable pre-papal writings (written, therefore, as Karol Wojtyła), the 1960 Love and Responsibility. Here he offers his most detailed philosophical treatment of human sexuality. We may outline the most relevant steps in his analysis as follows.
First, the human person is a “subject” with an interior life of intellect and will. Second, accordingly, the human person deserves to be treated as a subject rather than as an object. Third, this means in turn that the person deserves to be treated as a partner in pursuit of a common good, not as an instrument for the attainment of one’s private goals. Put differently, the person deserves always to be loved, never to be used. Wojtyła calls this the “personalistic norm,” and refers to it elsewhere as the primordial moral requirement in our dealings with human persons (not only in the sexual field).
What enables marital intercourse to be the sort of “matter” that can be “formed” into love is that it is objectively oriented toward a common good, namely, procreation. Note that this is a statement about the type of act that intercourse is, not simply about particular acts of intercourse. That is, it is true whether or not a particular act of intercourse is going to be capable of bringing about procreation. Now, the act also, of course, foreseeably gives pleasure, both physical and psychological. This is obviously, on a subjective level, a key reason couples choose to engage in it. There is nothing at all wrong with this. Pleasure is, however, not a common good. It is neither common nor a good. It is essentially internal; his remains his and hers remains hers, even if they experience it at the same time and as a result of the same thing. Furthermore, it is not itself a thing that one can pursue. It does not have its own being—nor, therefore, its own goodness (or evil). It is always only an accompaniment to some act or experience. It only shares in the good (or evil) of the act or experience it accompanies. So the fact that an act gives pleasure to its participants does not enable the act to be one of love. Rather, if an act is oriented toward something that is authentically a common good, it can then be one of love, and therefore good, and then the pleasure it brings will be good.
What does all of this have to do with contraception? Objectively, I would say, contraception attacks intercourse’s orientation toward procreation. Indeed it subordinates respect for this orientation to maximization of opportunities for sexual pleasure. Again, this brief philosophical description of contraception would seem to be objectively valid, whatever conclusions one might draw regarding its moral implications. And note that natural family planning can easily be distinguished from contraception thus understood. NFP does not seek to deprive any act of intercourse of its procreative potential. Thus it does not attack intercourse’s orientation toward procreation. When used to avoid pregnancy, NFP subordinates the pursuit of sexual pleasure to respect for this orientation.
We can therefore conclude that contraception is at odds with the personalistic norm, and therefore with chastity (since this virtue puts sexuality at the service of authentic love), whereas NFP is consistent with love and with chastity. I would like to point out that it is on the basis of this explanation of the moral evil of contraception that one can understand the view, offered by John Paul II in the 1980s, that contraception contradicts the total self-giving that is expressed in the language of marital intercourse. How might one defend the claim that intercourse expressed the language of total self-giving? One first needs to know that it has a procreative orientation that, morally speaking, demands respect (in order for intercourse to be capable of being an act of love). One can then conclude that intercourse expresses the language of total self-giving, that is, one whose procreative orientation is in fact respected. In short, the “language” formulation presupposes and simply restates the philosophical formulation found in Love and Responsibility.
With Wojtyła/John Paul II’s moral analysis of contraception in place, we can understand what he means in Evangelium Vitae when he says that it, like abortion, is “rooted in a hedonistic mentality unwilling to accept responsibility in matters of sexuality,” and “impl[ies] a self-centered concept of freedom.” First and foremost, contraception is hedonistic and self-centered in its attitude toward one’s spouse or other sexual partner. If one’s sexual partner is not one’s spouse, then sexual intercourse is already hedonistic and self-centered, but, I suggest, contraception compounds this. An act that is already selfish in one respect can still also become selfish in another.
Why does John Paul go on to say that this mentality—the “contraceptive mentality” properly understood, as I have argued elsewhere—“regards procreation as an obstacle to personal fulfilment. The life which could result from a sexual encounter thus becomes an enemy to be avoided at all costs”? What is the connection between one’s attitude toward the one with whom one has a sexual encounter, and one’s attitude toward the life that could result?
In general, it is, of course, hard to compartmentalize one’s dispositions. It is perhaps especially hard to do so within the same area of life, that is, the sexual and procreative field. But there is a further point that requires explanation. To repeat what I have already said, contraception is selfish and hedonistic because it subordinates respect for intercourse’s orientation toward procreation to maximization of opportunities for sexual pleasure. In this precise sense, it, unlike NFP, is anti-procreative. It embodies selfishness toward one’s partner by being in this way anti-procreative. Even though wishing to avoid procreation is not itself selfish—NFP use is not of itself selfish—seeking to do so by using contraception might be called anti-procreative selfishness toward one’s partner. It seems especially likely that this kind of selfishness could spill over into hostility toward a child who might be conceived despite contraceptive use. Whereas since NFP does not involve anti-procreative selfishness, when procreation happens despite attempts to avoid it using NFP, it seems far less likely that an attitude of hostility toward the child conceived will develop. If such an attitude does develop, it will not develop from an attitude already necessarily present in the choice to use NFP.
Conclusion
Over the twenty-seven years since Evangelium Vitae was published, I have suggested more than once that it is most fruitfully approached as a treatment of the differences between what John Paul II terms a culture of death and a culture of life—of what has gone wrong in a culture of death and of what must be done to build a culture of life. I think that his rejection of the widespread view that contraceptive use will reduce the abortion rate should be understood in this context. One of the several ways of looking at the underlying philosophical outlook of a culture of death is that the personalistic norm—the primordial moral norm that says that persons are always to be loved and never to be used—is ignored. In a culture of life, by contrast, this norm is acknowledged and obeyed. If contraception is at odds with this norm, then it follows that contraception is at odds with the requirements of a culture of life. Indeed, for the specific reasons I have given, it—unlike NFP—is very sharply at odds with an attitude of welcome to new life. It follows that the effort to bring about rejection of contraception and embrace of NFP is at the front line of the effort to build a culture of life.