Humanae Vitae: 40 Years Later

The Anniversary of Humanae Vitae
By Joseph Bottum

You know the story. Forty years ago—on July 25, 1968—a tired, grumpy, and celibate old man in Rome issued an encyclical called Humanae Vitae, solemnly declaring that birth control is bad, and half the world responded with a shrug. The other half responded with a sneer.

It’s hard to imagine a worse moment for Pope Paul VI to denounce contraception. The Second Vatican Council had finished its great shake-up of Catholicism only three years before, and even the most serious Catholics were still picking themselves up off the ground and trying to figure out what had happened. As for non-Catholics, well, in the summer of 1968, across the civilized world, aroused young people were declaring their freedom from all the senseless old restrictions and chastities. Even if Paul VI was right, there was no one ready to listen to him.

But, of course, the pope wasn’t right. We all know that. Humanae Vitae was treated as a joke because it was a joke, wasn’t it? Vatican roulette, rhythm-method babies: The official Catholic view of sex was a gift to stand-up comedians around the world. A gift to politicians and public figures, for that matter. Want an easy stick with which to whack around, say, the Catholic Church’s opposition to abortion? Point out that those nutty Catholics are against birth control, too. Whenever public Catholics need a quick way to ingratiate themselves with non-Catholics, they announce their dissent on the Church’s teaching about birth control. And why not? It costs nothing, and it lets them pose themselves as rebels and independent thinkers, under no one’s ecclesial thumb.

It’s hard to remember all the joys we were told that contraception would bring, back in the day. For generations, from Victoria Woodhull all the way down to Margaret Sanger, birth-control activists had insisted that abortion would cease if we allowed access to contraception. In the 1965 decision Griswold v. Connecticut, the U.S. Supreme Court placed decisions about birth control at the center of the marriage bond. The smutty theaters, the back-room racks of pornography, the venereal diseases, the crushing down of young women into a life of timidity, the out-of-wedlock births, the masturbatory shame—all the sicknesses of a repressed culture would be swept away in the free love that contraception allows.

Free love—forty years on, the phrase has a marvelously musty sound to it, like the fragile violets of a Victorian spinster’s girlhood, pressed in the fading pages of her remembrance book. Things didn’t work out quite the way we were promised. In fact, the results were pretty much what the pope had said they would be. A funny thing happened on the way to the orgy, and—as Mary Eberstadt notes in her superb essay in the current issue of First Things—if there’s a joke buried in Humanae Vitae, the joke is on us.

Simply as a piece of argumentative prose, the 1968 encyclical was badly constructed. It lacked the romantic elements that Pope John Paul II would later put in his far more persuasive Theology of the Body, and it appealed to the authority of Christian tradition at a moment in which hardly anyone was willing to listen to authority. Still, along the way, Paul VI issued four general prophecies in Humanae Vitae, and on about all four of them, he seems to have been right.

He said, for instance, that universal acceptance of contraception would have the social consequence of creating men who had lost all respect for women. No longer caring for “her physical and psychological equilibrium,” men will come to “the point of considering her as a mere instrument of selfish enjoyment and no longer as his respected and beloved companion.” In any great social movement, what’s cause and what’s effect is always hard to figure out, but, at the very least, all you have to do is sign on to the Internet to see that this much is true: Widespread access to birth control certainly didn’t bring us the end of pornography and the objectification of women’s bodies.

Paul VI predicted, as well, that the institution of marriage would have trouble surviving “the conjugal infidelity” that contraception makes easy. Far from strengthening marriage as the Supreme Court seems to have imagined, the advent of birth control left marriage in tatters, as the sexual revolution roared through town. If many more people use contraception today than they used to—and do so certainly with less shame—then why have divorce, abortion, out-of-wedlock pregnancies, and venereal disease done nothing but increase since 1968?

Humanae Vitae added that the general acceptance of contraception would put a “dangerous weapon” in the hands of “those public authorities who take no heed of moral exigencies.” And, from forced abortions in China to involuntary sterilizations in Peru, non-democratic governments have seen that there aren’t many steps between allowing people to limit birth and forcing them to.

Finally, the pope warned that contraception would lead people to picture their bodies as somehow possessions, rather than as their actual being. If a woman can paint her house, then why shouldn’t she get her nose bobbed and her breasts blown up with silicon to the size of beachballs? It’s what men seem to like, after all, and the body is just a thing, isn’t it?

Well, no, the body isn’t just a thing. The universal acceptance of contraception changed not just our behavior but the way that we think. It created a chasm between sex and procreation, and into that chasm fell social good after social good. You can’t say Paul VI didn’t warn us.

Joseph Bottum is editor of First Things.

Pro-Choice vs. Pro-Abortion

It’s often said that “nobody is pro-abortion.” In fact, this was uttered by Senator Barack Obama at the last presidential debate. Perhaps no one is, though admittedly people’s political actions make a hard case for this proposition. Nevertheless, I think a careful distinction needs to be made between ‘pro-choice’ and ‘pro-abortion.’ It isn’t bogus to think so, either.

These are two distinct positions, both of which are contrary to Catholic teaching on the matter of abortion. The ‘pro-choice’ position is rooted in moral relativism and thus, posits no judgment on the moral good or evil of the act of abortion. At best, a ‘pro-choice’ position will concede that grappling with the decision to have an abortion, or worse, having one is a position no woman desires to find herself in, thus we should reduce the number of abortions. This is the point where their argument breaks down. The lack of objectivity hinders a ‘pro-choice’ individual from framing in any meaningful way their personal opposition that cannot be imposed or any reason why we should really commit ourselves to limiting the number of abortions. Either way, this position holds abortion should be left legal so that those who choose it may do so.

The ‘pro-abortion’ position views abortion not only as a legal right, but as morally good either as a means or an end in and of itself. Margaret Sanger is arguably pro-abortion because it was the mechanism by which she wished to eliminate black people. Someone who is ‘pro-abortion’ may see it as a means of population control, which is allegedly a problem, and so forth.

Both positions are absurd, but there is a subtle difference between the two and perhaps the fundamental difference is one’s intention, though the end often remains the same.

I think any good Catholic should be aware of this, particularly in dialogue with someone who is pro-choice. Christ preached charity and compassion. If we cannot dialogue with our brothers and sisters who are profoundly mistaken without labeling them as ‘baby killers’ or ‘pro-abortion’ explicitly (though it may otherwise be true), we are in some ways alienating those who may be receptive to the pro-life message if it is presented in a kind, understanding way, e.g. understanding a ‘pro-choice’ person’s concern for the woman involved, but calmly (I can’t emphasize this enough) explaining why being pro-woman is truly to be pro-life and that society should be pro-motherhood so that no woman feels she is incapable of welcoming her child into this world.

This is a fundamental element missing from the abortion debate. There is profound temptation to attack the other side or worse, respond to their attacks with even more disdain. A house divided against itself will not stand nor will it save unborn children. Are we in this for our pride or to save unborn human life?

Christians: Why Are We Absent In Hollywood?

Typically if one discusses the reflection of American culture in mainstream entertainment, there are very little positive things to be said—especially in Christian circles. But there is rarely a clear solution to the problem. Some discussions of the issues, in my experience, fail to reflect the gravity of the matter. I think it matters, more so than just casual condemnation in conversation. The entertainment center in America—Hollywood—matters because it is the global center of art and entertainment. Art is the way we humans respond to the cosmos. Every generation delivers something beautiful for future generations to brood over and take delight in. Storytelling is the way human beings learn. It is the way we define our values. It gives us heroes and noble dreams. Entertainment is the way we stretch beyond the limits of our day to day work to experience the depth of our human nature. Entertainment should lead us to laugh hard, to cry with empathy, and to feel exhilaration and wonder.

It is frightening to think that Christians are missing from this unbelievably influential and urgent landscape. Christians have something to offer that is direly missing from Hollywood. We bring hope, the mandate of concern for the world, and most importantly, the glory and creative energy of the Holy Spirit.

This is needed terribly in movies, television shows, videogames, and the Internet. We need not only to be donating to and praying for organizations such as ActOne, which has a Christian vision for entertainment, we need to encourage faith-filled artists and professionals to be writers, directors, actors, and so forth, in order to change the landscape and give our youth better idols to look up to. This is a moral imperative for all Christians.

We also need to realize that American culture has deeply shaded Christian religious practice for the worse. It is a current trend to “switch” between denominations to find what “feels good” and not what is the truth. There is an emphasis on finding a church that gathers everyone together in a false sense of unity—a church without dogma, without a clear moral framework of life, no political declarations, etc—that makes us all feel good. We want to be comfortable in our sins.

It seems to me that an authentic Christianity is going to make us uncomfortable, it is going to make us cringe as we follow our moral conscience to the point of receiving ridicule from others. That’s why I’m Catholic and why I chose it over every other religious tradition I looked at, even over Protestantism and Eastern Orthodoxy.

I find that even amongst Catholics, many wish we lived back in the 1830s when everyone was supposedly devout and attended a Tridentine Mass jovially. Not quite. The Church has faced challenges to life, to the family, and not so surprisingly for those of us who are catechized, there has always been dissent. The Gnostics, the Arians, the Nestorians, the Quietists, and the list goes on. There has always been those people unlearned in their faith, hypocrites, and people who use religion for personal gain. Forget living in this past. This is our time. This moment with its post-modern confusion, with its 24 hour chattering news cycle, its post-sexual revolution cynicism, vulgarity, morally-unbounded liberalism.

The Lord proclaimed, “Do not weep for Me, but weep for yourselves and for your children. For indeed the days are coming in which they will say, ‘Blessed are the barren, the wombs that never bore, and the breasts that have never nursed.’” I think we’ll be better off when we face the fact that we live in a dark world which is locked in a struggle with very high stakes. We should not be surprised by the ravages of sin. Only fools are scandalized. And those who have not been enlightened by the Gospel are susceptible to relativism, to so-called sexual freedom, to contraception, to legal and recreational drugs, to senseless wanton violence and if we fight it, we have to do so through their mechanisms—the entertainment media.