Contraception debate rises again

Birth control stirred decline in morality

photo-credit Janet Smith

By DEBORAH GYAPONG
Canadian Catholic News
Ottawa

As much as North Americans - including a majority of Catholics - may hope modernity has driven a stake through the debate on artificial contraception, it's back.

"With a vengeance," said Ottawa Catholic John Pacheco, who organized Humanae Vitae 2006 conference held May 12-14 in Ottawa. "It's the elephant in the room."

For Catholics, the teachings against contraception have been "one of the most well-kept and embarrassing secrets of the Church," said Janet Smith, a keynote speaker at the conference.

Smith, an expert on Church teaching on life ethics, said a 1995 study showed 80 per cent of Catholics used some form of artificial contraception. In 1960, before the advent of the birth control pill, about 60 per cent of Catholics practised natural family planning.

Chances are most Catholics have never heard a homily on the issue, nor have new converts received any instruction, she said.

The modern world no longer sees babies as blessings but burdens, she said.

Interest in the issue is changing, Pacheco said in an interview. Not only Catholics but also an increasing number of evangelicals are re-examining whether artificial contraception is a good thing.

For Smith, the devastating consequences of artificial contraception are numerous: the facilitation of sex outside of marriage; a huge increase in the number of sexually transmitted diseases and infection rates; increased levels of abortion as a back-up; and higher divorce rates.

These effects create negative social change leading to more poverty, crime and drug abuse, she said.

Pope Paul VI, who wrote Humanae Vitae, the encyclical laying out the Church's teachings on birth control, said sexual acts had two functions - the expression of the lifelong exclusive love between a husband and wife and an openness to new life.

"This particular doctrine . . . is based on the inseparable connection, established by God, which man on his own initiative may not break, between the unitive significance and the procreative significance which are both inherent to the marriage act," the pope wrote in 1968.

Smith said Paul VI predicted that artificial contraception would result in a general lowering of morality, a decline in respect for women, more coercive control by governments over sexuality and rise in the perceptions that human bodies are merely machines.

Demographic decline is another factor spurring renewed interest in the debate.

Fears of a population explosion propped up arguments in favour of contraception but Smith said demographers now predict rapid population declines not only in the developed world but in the developing world as well.

In fact demographic decline led to the theme of this year's National March of Life: Abortion is Killing Canada's Future.

Pacheco looked like Don Quixote when he booked a venue with 1,800 seats, the best audiovisual equipment, including two big screens, and invited top notch speakers, including Smith, who teaches at Detroit's Sacred Heart Major Seminary.

New York Times story

His attempt to bring the issue back to the fore didn't look so "out of touch" though when the New York Times magazine did a take-out entitled "Contra-Contraception" May 7, the Sunday preceding the conference.

"As with other efforts - against gay marriage, stem cell research, cloning, assisted suicide - the anti-birth control campaign isn't centralized," wrote Russell Shorto for the magazine. "It seems rather to be part of the evolution of the conservative movement."

The article quotes Southern Baptist Theological Seminary president Albert Mohler, Jr. who wrote in a December 2005 column: "The effective separation of sex from procreation may be one of the most important defining marks of our age - and one of the most ominous."

Teachings on contraception also lurk behind the ongoing debate about whether condoms should be used to prevent the spread of HIV/AIDs or whether the Church should permit condom use when one married partner is infected.

Detailed teaching

That led CBC's Sunday Edition host Michael Enright to interview Moira McQueen, the director of the Canadian Catholic Bioethics Institute May 14. In that interview, McQueen laid out in detail the Church's teaching on contraception.

The New York Times Magazine and the CBC Radio interview bookending the conference made Pacheco's conference on this highly controversial subject look almost prophetic.

Only about 300 people attended, far fewer than Pacheco had hoped for, but he had the conference professionally videoed. DVDs and CDs of the conference will be available through the website www.therosarium.ca.

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