Contraception and the Church

Christopher West

If you think the Church needs to "get with the times" on the issue of contraception, believe me, I can relate. I almost left the Catholic Church because of what I once considered this "blasted teaching." And all this natural family planning stuff, I thought, was just a way for crusty old bishops to keep the fun out of sex. What do they know about sex anyway?

Live and learn, if we dare. My wife won't mind my saying that I have come to learn more about sex from Pope John Paul II than from anyone on the planet. I came to learn from him that the sexual embrace is meant to be a foreshadowing of the eternal union of heaven. And I came to learn that there's an enemy hell-bent on keeping us from understanding and living sex in this way. Why? Because if he can disorient sex, it will no longer point us to heaven. And that's his precise goal - to keep us from heaven.

Our sexuality, as John Paul II insisted, "is by no means something purely biological, but concerns the inner-most being of the human person" (Familiaris Consortio, n. 11). It is here, in our inner-most being, that we learn to love as God loves or fail to do so. The problem in the modern world is that we have confused lust for love. When lust (self-gratification) is a person's paradigm for sex, he or she will view everything the Church teaches as a hindrance. But when loving as God loves is a person's paradigm for sex, everything the Church teaches not only makes sense, it becomes the sure path for discovering true love.

This might sound strange at first, but let it sink in. Contraception was not invented to prevent pregnancy. We already had a 100% safe, 100% reliable way of doing that. It's called abstinence. Contraception, in the final analysis, was invented so men and women wouldn't have to abstain. Why do we spay and neuter our dogs and cats? Why don't we just ask them to abstain? They can't. This is precisely the point: the Church is trying to help us see that when we choose to render sexual union sterile, we are reducing ourselves, in a sense, to the level of animals in heat. Sexual union in such a situation is not an act of love, but an act of indulging instinct; it's an act of lust. After all, if you can't say "no" to sex, what does your "yes" really mean?

When couples abstain from a potentially fertile act of intercourse, they are demonstrating their freedom and, hence, their love. "Oh, give me a break," people respond. "What is the big difference between sterilizing the act yourself and just waiting till it's naturally infertile. The end result is the same thing: both couples avoid children." To which I respond, "What's the big difference between killing Grandma, and just waiting till she dies naturally? The end result is the same thing: dead Grandma."

If you can tell the difference between euthanasia and natural death, you can tell the difference between contraception and NFP. On the one hand, natural death and natural infertility are both acts of God. On the other hand, in killing Grandma and in rendering the sexual act sterile, we are taking the powers of life into our own hands, making ourselves "like God." Wasn't this the original temptation in the garden?

Blessings,
Christopher West