Q. Why is it not moral to use contraception as a way to prevent abortions?
A. It is best to begin this by addressing the Church’s position on contraception. The argument for contraception as a means to reduce abortions has become constant. Let us first take a look at what the Church teaches about contraception.
We see in the Catechism of the Catholic Church the Church’s teaching on the marital act: “The spouses’ union achieves the twofold end of marriage: the good of the spouses themselves and the transmission of life. These two meanings or values of marriage cannot be separated without altering the couple’s spiritual life and compromising the goods of marriage and the future of the family.” (2363)
The sexual act is good and holy. So much so that the Church teaches the only place where its power can be safely participated is the sacrament of marriage. The sexual urge is natural and good. It is certain that temptation occurs outside of the context of marriage. It is the lifelong sacramental commitment that gives freedom to both participants. As opposed to the likelihood of sexuality causing a rupture in relationships, within marriage it bonds couples together. While the Church teaches that there are times that a married couple can avoid the transmission of life through periods of abstinence, she affirms the reality that procreation is one of the two purposes of the marital act.
This was the teaching of all Christian Churches until 1930. The Anglican Churches held their annual “Lambeth Conference.” At that conference the Anglican Church was the first to remove the prohibition against artificial contraception. It was allowed only within marriage and only under certain circumstances. This caused an avalanche of relaxations in the Christian world on the moral teachings of sexuality in marriage. The Catholic Church would answer in 1968 when Pope Paul VI released the encyclical Humanae Vitae.
In the encyclical, the holy Father affirmed that “The reason is that the fundamental nature of the marriage act, while uniting husband and wife in the closest intimacy, also renders them capable of generating new life—and this as a result of laws written into the actual nature of man and of woman. And if each of these essential qualities, the unitive and the procreative, is preserved, the use of marriage fully retains its sense of true mutual love and its ordination to the supreme responsibility of parenthood to which man is called. We believe that our contemporaries are particularly capable of seeing that this teaching is in harmony with human reason.”
Pope Paul VI gets to the heart of the Church’s teaching on marriage and human sexuality: every sexual act must be a loving action within the context of marriage and open to life. However, the pope went on to prophesy the consequences to a world where artificial birth control was the norm. These consequences include widespread marital infidelity and a lowering of moral standards, reducing the dignity of a woman to an instrument of satisfaction and governments forcing it upon their people. All of these prophesied consequences have come true.
We must also ask whether it is true that contraception does lower abortions. Many people make the claim that accessibility to artificial birth control reduces the need for abortion. The claim is supported by what appears to be statistical proof of the reduction in the number of abortions over the last decade. But what is abortion? Abortion is the intentional killing of an innocent unborn human being. Most contraceptives use several methods to prevent pregnancy. Among them is thinning of the uterus for the purpose of preventing an achieved conception from implanting. In this case there is already a fertilized egg and conception has taken place. That unique human person is prevented from growth and is therefore aborted. This is the reason many contraceptives are also called “abortifacients.”
Finally, after seeing why the Church doesn’t allow artificial birth control and its many effects, perhaps the best answer to the question comes again from Pope St. Paul VI and the encyclical Humanae Vitae: “Though it is true that sometimes it is lawful to tolerate a lesser moral evil in order to avoid a greater evil or in order to promote a greater good, it is never lawful, even for the gravest reasons, to do evil that good may come of it —in other words, to intend directly something which of its very nature contradicts the moral order, and which must therefore be judged unworthy of man, even though the intention is to protect or promote the welfare of an individual, of a family or of society in general. Consequently, it is a serious error to think that a whole married life of otherwise normal relations can justify sexual intercourse which is deliberately contraceptive and so intrinsically wrong.”
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