Birth control: The Catholic ban, 40 years later

Forty years ago this summer, said Kathryn Jean Lopez in National Review Online, Pope Paul VI took stock of the sexual revolution sweeping the West and declared: “Enough.” The birth control pill was new on the market, and young people were professing their belief in “free love.” Living together out of wedlock was losing its stigma. Into this cauldron, the pope released his encyclical Humanae Vitae, forcefully affirming the church’s ban on artificial contraception. Many critics still mock Paul as a medieval ignoramus. But one can’t help but wonder what would have happened if more Catholics (and non-Catholics) had taken to heart his declaration that the twin functions of marriage—to foster love between partners and produce children—are so closely related as to be inseparable. Might today’s shocking levels of out-of-wedlock births and sexually transmitted diseases be lower? Might the coarsening of our culture, including the treatment of women as sex objects, have been at least somewhat tempered?

It may be true that the “lowering of moral standards” Pope Paul warned about has come to pass, said Robert McClory in the Chicago Tribune. But by any measure, his Humanae Vitae has been a “disaster” for the church. The notion that birth control is always wrong, even for married couples, has driven millions of the faithful from their pews. “One in every 10 Americans is now a former Catholic,” and among those remaining, up to 80 percent ignore the encyclical. That’s because 40 years ago, the pope took a valid moral position to an absurd extreme. “He could have said that selfish, non-generative lifestyles are not acceptable. He could even have praised the values of natural family planning.” Instead, by depicting the pill and other contraceptives as “intrinsically evil,” he wrote the church out of any meaningful discussion of the subject. Humanae Vitae is a cure that was “as bad or worse than the disease.”

“The ban has been particularly disastrous in the developing world,” said Jon O’Brien in the Dublin Irish Times. In places such as Latin America and Africa, where conservative church doctrine holds more sway, it has kept poverty-stricken families from obtaining contraceptives— resulting in countless unwanted children born into desperate circumstances. In Africa, hundreds of thousands of Catholic men refuse to use condoms, thereby infecting innocent women with HIV. “It is one thing to talk the talk on promoting a culture of life. It is quite another to respect the reality of people’s lives.”

Subscribe to The Week

Escape your echo chamber. Get the facts behind the news, plus analysis from multiple perspectives.

SUBSCRIBE & SAVE

Sign up for The Week's Free Newsletters

From our morning news briefing to a weekly Good News Newsletter, get the best of The Week delivered directly to your inbox.

From our morning news briefing to a weekly Good News Newsletter, get the best of The Week delivered directly to your inbox.

Sign up