Painting
the Catholic Church as "out of touch" is like shooting fish in a
barrel, what with the funny hats and gilded churches. And nothing makes it
easier than the Church's stance against contraception.
Many people,
(including our editor)
are wondering why the Catholic Church doesn't just ditch this requirement. They
note that most Catholics ignore it, and that most everyone else finds it
divisive, or "out-dated." C'mon! It's the 21st century, they say!
Don't they SEE that it's STUPID, they scream.
Here's the thing,
though: the Catholic Church is the world's biggest and oldest organization. It
has buried all of the greatest empires known to man, from the Romans to the
Soviets. It has establishments literally all over the world, touching every
area of human endeavor. It's given us some of the world's greatest thinkers,
from Saint Augustine on down to René Girard. When it does things, it usually
has a good reason. Everyone has a right to disagree, but it's not that they're
a bunch of crazy old white dudes who are stuck in the Middle Ages.
So, what's going
on?
The Church teaches
that love, marriage, sex, and procreation are all things that belong together.
That's it. But it's pretty important. And though the Church has been teaching
this for 2,000 years, it's probably never been as
salient as today.
Today's injunctions
against birth control were re-affirmed in a 1968 document by Pope Paul VI
called Humanae Vitae. He warned of four
results if the widespread use of contraceptives was accepted:
1. General lowering of moral standards
2. A rise in infidelity, and illegitimacy
3. The reduction of women to objects used to
satisfy men.
4. Government coercion in reproductive
matters.
Does that sound
familiar?
Because it sure sounds
like what's been happening for the past 40 years.
As George
Akerloff wrote in Slate over
a decade ago,
By making the birth of
the child the physical choice of the mother, the sexual
revolution has made marriage and child support a social choice
of the father.
Instead of two parents
being responsible for the children they conceive, an expectation that was held
up by social norms and by the law, we now take it for granted that neither
parent is necessarily responsible for their children. Men are now considered to
be fulfilling their duties merely by paying court-ordered child-support. That's
a pretty dramatic lowering of standards for "fatherhood."
How
else are we doing since this great sexual revolution? Kim Kardashian's marriage
lasted 72 days. Illegitimacy: way up. In 1960, 5.3% of all births in
America were to unmarried women. By 2010, it was 40.8% [PDF]. In
1960 married families made up almost three-quarters of all households; but by the census
of 2010 they accounted for just 48 percent of them. Cohabitation has increased tenfold since 1960.
And if you don't think
women are being reduced to objects to satisfy men, welcome to the internet, how
long have you been here? Government coercion: just look to China (or America, where a government rule on contraception coverage is the
reason why we're talking about this right now).
Is this all due to the
Pill? Of course not. But the idea that widely-available contraception hasn't
led to dramatic societal change, or that this change
has been exclusively to the good, is a much sillier notion than anything the
Catholic Church teaches.
So is the notion that
it's just OBVIOUSLY SILLY to get your moral cues from a venerable faith (as
opposed to what? Britney Spears?).
But let's turn to
another aspect of this. The reason our editor thinks Catholics shouldn't be
fruitful and multiply doesn't hold up, either. The world's population, he
writes, is on an "unsustainable" growth path.
The Population Bureau
of the Department of Economic and Social Affairs of the United Nations sees (PDF, h/t Pax Dickinson) the rate of population growth
slowing over the next decades and stabilizing around 9 billion in 2050…and
holding there until 2300. (And note that the UN, which promotes birth control
and abortions around the world, isn't exactly in the be-fruitful-and-multiply
camp.)
More broadly, the
Malthusian view of population growth has been resilient despite having been
proven wrong time and time again and causing lots of unnecessary human
suffering. For example, China is headed for a demographic crunch and social dislocation due to its misguided
one-child policy.
Human progress is
people. Everything that makes life better, from democracy to the economy to the
internet to penicillin was either discovered and built by people. More people
means more progress. The inventor of the cure for cancer might be someone's
fourth child that they decided not to have.
So, just to sum
up:
·
It's a good idea for
people to be fruitful and multiply; and
·
Regardless of how you
feel about the Church's stance on birth control, it's proven pretty prophetic.
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