The Pill: from "freedom" to fiasco.

Catholic insight regularly returns to the issue of contraception. Why? Because in society as well as in the Church it is and remains a central issue of the day.

Eve thought that eating the forbidden fruit would bring her happiness. Her descendant, Modern Woman, thought that contraception would do the same for her but, as with Eve, sorrow has come instead. Donald De Marco clearly explains why it was inevitable. Msgr. Vincent Foy shows why dissent among theologians leads to grave harm. Editor

In July 1961, G. D. Searle & Company introduced the Pill to their prospective customers through an ingenious advertisement that appeared in Obstetrics & Gynecology. The ad showed the mythic female figure of Andromeda breaking free from the rock to which she had been chained. Thanks to the Pill, according to the ad's symbolism, Andromeda and all women would be "unfettered," freed from enslavement to the rock of unwanted pregnancy.

In the original story, Andromeda was chained to a rock in order to placate an enraged Neptune, god of the sea. There, she awaited the fatal assault of a sea monster. Perseus, observing what was about to take place from his aerial view, came to her rescue, slew the monster, freed Andromeda, and took her for his wife. In the 1961 version, the Pill replaces Perseus, while fertility is the rock, and the Catholic Church a stand-in for the sea monster. According to the old myth, virtue, in the form of Perseus' courage, triumphed over vice, symbolized by Neptune's wrath. In the new myth, technology (the Pill) triumphs over the tyranny of an unwanted pregnancy and the chains of male oppression.

Freedom

G. D. Searle, and other Pill manufacturers that followed, were selling "freedom," and women in large numbers were buying it. It was an illusion that was almost irresistible and one that continues to weave its charm, in certain influential circles, even to the present day.

Reflecting on who may have done the most good for mankind over the last century, David Nyhan, writing for the Boston Globe (Dec. 1999), ruminated over such candidates as Gandhi, Churchill, Mother Teresa, and others, but finally decided that the honour belongs to Dr. John Rock who developed the birth control pill. In his article, entitled "John Rock made it possible for women to have a life," Nyhan states that "Nothing has done as much to reduce the dependence of women upon men as the pill that freed them from unwanted pregnancy."

Yet the freedom that the Pill, or any other form of contraception promised, was a freedom that could never be delivered, because it presupposed that the source of a woman's slavery was her own fertility. How can freedom and self-division be compatible with each other? Must a woman be free from herself in order to be free? Certain influential activists, such as Lester Kirkendall, welcomed the arrival of this New Era which allowed women to enter "a sexual economy of abundance" where contraception would allow unrestrained sexual pleasure without the burden of children. The question he and other like-minded gurus neglected, however, was whether the new liberty was really a new set of chains, one forged by licentiousness.

In order to justify contraception as a prescription or a medication, fertility must be redefined as disease. But this "disease" is inseparable from the woman's identity as a woman. To compound matters, women who have difficulty getting pregnant once they go off the Pill are told that infertility is also a disease. Barbara Seaman complained in her book The Doctors' Case Against the Pill (1980) that there is something fundamentally wrong with a medical model that judges both fertility and infertility as being diseases. The unavoidable conclusion she derives is that "being a woman is a disease" (emphasis hers). Can a woman be free from herself and still be a woman? Does not freedom presuppose a certain wholeness or integrity that allows a woman to be who she is? "A pill is what you take when you have an illness," writes George Sim Johnstone. "Couples who use contraceptives are treating their fertility, whose depth and mystery they ought to revere, as a defect in need of a technological fix" (Crisis, Oct. 1996). Ii would seem that women need to he freed from the illusion that being a woman is a disease.

There is a second problem with the notion that contraception can bring about freedom. This problem involves another division, one between love and life, or sex and children. Teresa R. Wagner, who is a domestic policy analyst with the Family Research Council in the United States, has warned that those "who chose to ignore that ontological reality [the natural order that links sex with children] did so at great risk."

Contraception is a wedge that attempts to separate life from love. The contraception partners, therefore, approach each other with a certain mental sterility or intention that life should not follow love. In cases where life does follow, despite contraceptive precautions, the disposition has already been set to reject it. Thus, the contraceptive mentality prepares the way for abortion. This point has been brought home with dramatic force and incontrovertible logic in the 1992 Planned Parenthood v. Casey decision:

"Abortion is customarily chosen as an unplanned response...to the failure of conventional birth control...People have organized intimate relationships and made choices that define their views of themselves and their place in society in reliance on the availability of abortion in the event that contraception should fail."

Fiasco

Margaret Sanger, who declared that "It is apparent that nothing short of contraceptives can be an end to the horrors of abortion and infanticide," has been proven wrong. Contraception opens the gateway to an increased incidence of abortion (and also infanticide). It does not free love from life or sex from children; more to the point, it disposes partners to reject life when it is conceived.

There is a passage of extraordinary moral insight in James Joyce's Ulysses, which is one of the most complex books ever written. In the "Oxen of the Sun" episode, a group of students are declaring their support for contraception: "Copulation without population," they chant. But Stephen Dedalus opposes them because he is wary of separating fecundity from sex. He states, in typical Joycean fashion: "But, gramercy, what of those Godpossibled souls that we nightly impossibilise, which is a sin against the Holy Ghost, Very God, Lord and Giver of life. In her lay a Godframed Godgiven preformed possibility which thou hast fructified with thy modicum of man's work. Cleave to her! Serve!"

Dedalus (which stands for "Dead-all-of-us") does not want to free women from their fertility; he wants to honor them in their life-giving, love-receiving wholeness. Therefore, the freedom that contraceptivists promote is a false freedom and is bound to be a true failure. In an article under the poignant title "Forever Babyless," the author recalls that "As a young woman contraceptives were my ticket to freedom.... Years later, longing for a child, I could hear my diaphragm mocking me in the night."

The failure of contraception to deliver what it promised is combined with the fiasco that it precipitated. In 1999 two social commentators, neither of whom has any particular sympathies with Catholicism, published books that are a positive embarrassment to contraceptive ideology. Lionel Tiger reports in The Decline of Males that the Pill has created "an unprecedented and not-so-hidden nihilism about reproduction" that has made the relationships between men and women far more difficult. He argues that since the Pill alienates men and women from their own fertility, it inevitably alienates them from each other.

Francis Fukuyama states in The Great Disruption that the use of contraception has "been accompanied by an explosion of illegitimacy and a rise in the rate of abortions." He finds that if contraception has freed anyone it is men who "felt liberated from norms requiring them to look after the women they had gotten pregnant."

Alienation within the self and between the sexes is not a good formula for marriage and the care of children, but for a societal fiasco. According to the United States Center for Health Statistics, between 1957 and 1994, the same period during which contraceptives became commonplace in America, the number of out-of-wedlock births rose from 202,000 to 1,300,000. A 1999 Family Planning Perspectives article ("Contraceptive Failure Rates: New Estimates From the 1995 National Survey of Family Growth") reports that half of all pregnancies in the United States are "unintended" and that 18 per cent of couples using condoms and 12 per cent taking the Pill get pregnant within two years.

Failure

The illusion that contraception has brought about "duty-free" sex has encouraged many people to engage in sexual activities with no regard whatsoever to either children or marriage. Promiscuity, for many, seems to be a "right". Danielle Crittendon remarks in her highly acclaimed book What Our Mothers Didn't Tell Us: Why Happiness Eludes Women (1999),

"The most politically conservative young women I know-women who say they oppose abortion and yearn to marry and have families--would never disavow their right to sleep with whomsoever they please."

Another unhappy result, stemming from this wave of sexual promiscuity, therefore, is an epidemic of sexually transmitted diseases. In the 15 to 24-year-old bracket, sexually transmitted diseases are so common that a minimum of one-third will acquire an STD by their twenty-fourth birthday, regardless of contraceptive use ("The Medical Downside of Unfettered Sexuality," Family Policy, Sept.! Oct. 1999). In the same article, Joe McIlhaney, Jr., M.D. states that "increased medical and health risks represent just another broken promise of a revolution that attempted to divorce sexuality from monogamous, heterosexual marriage and children".

Contraception has been a significant factor in increasing the rate of adultery, spouse abuse, child abuse and abandonment, and divorce. It has led to greater tolerance of homosexual practices and homosexual "marriages". It has changed the focus of sex, as Patrick Fagan has stated in The Catholic World Report (Nov. 1998), from "other-focused"o "self-focused," from "hetero-focused" to "auto-focused". It has contributed to a dangerous inversion of sex in which lust and selfishness are more likely to be expressed than love and generosity. As a result, the present contraceptive society has done much to install the isolated individual, rather than the family, as the basic unit of society.

From a historical viewpoint over the last four decades, it can accurately be said that contraception's freedom was an illusion, its failure was a tragedy, and the fiasco it engendered was a catastrophe.

Looking back on the revised version of the Andromeda myth, we might say that it was more realistic to envision Andromeda as being chained to the rock of her own lust and victimized by unscrupulous Pill promoters (the sea monster) as a way of placating intemperate males (Neptune), while the Catholic Church (Perseus) was courageously trying to come to her rescue.

Truth

Freedom is surely to be prized. But it must be a freedom based on truth, the truth of men and women as body-soul integrities and the truth of the ontological unity of love and life. G. K. Chesterton was being both insightful and prophetic when he said that contraception "is a name given to a succession of different expedients by which it is possible to filch the pleasure belonging to a natural process while violently and unnaturally thwarting the process itself." We have burned our cathedral to fry an egg, or drowned ourselves for a sip of water. Our search for freedom through contraception has bound us more securely to the rock (John Rock, not the Rock of Peter). We should be searching for freedom through truth, one that honors our human wholeness and is willing to return the family to its rightful place as the basic unit of society.

Dr. Donald DeMarco is Professor of Philosophy at St. Jerome's University in Waterloo, ON. t