Denial of objective sexual morality, acceptance of contraception, and legalization of abortion are as incestuously linked as Milton's Sin, Death, and Satan. Abortion--the legally sanctioned sacrifice of millions of innocent lives unon the altar of expedience--is surely the worst evil which our times are forced to bear, and much of the labor of those who still care about such things has rightly been directed toward ending our national connivance at abortion. This is as it should be: when so many lives are at stake, it is scarcely worth anyone's while to barricade the doors at CVS to keep pimply undergraduates from reaching the prophylactic display. But it is one thing to concentrate our advances along one crucial front, another to abandon flank and rear so that, even if we are victorious in the immediate battle, we shall have lost the war. It is not surprising that "Dr." Joycelyn Elders rhapsodizes about the "public health" benefits of abortion from behind her condom-festooned desk. What is shockingis that so many defenders of the unborn are largely indifferent to the other half of her assault on human dignity.
Too often even pro-life sympathizers are lured onto the rocks by the siren song of the pro-contraceptive movement. After all, isn't preventing "unwanted" pregnancies a good way of decreasing the number of abortions? The claim involves us in an extremely treacherous moral calculus. While an action which would normally be permissible may become a crime because of its consequences, no speculation about consequences can ever justify an action which is in itself wrong. Contraception is simply an unacceptable answer--dare I say it--to virtually any conceivable problem. Advocating contraception is about as morally responsible as suggesting that inner-city males should be supplied with sheep to molest, in order to control the illegitimacy rate. The problem with contraception is not simply that by distributing contraceptives in the public schools we give young people carte blanche for irresponsible and destructive behavior--though we must remind the liberals that sexual behavior can he irresponsible and destructive even when it does not result in an "unwanted" or "undesirable" pregnancy. Rather, the problem is that contraception is inherently wrong, whether used within marriage or outside of that permanent relationship. Contraceptive use is not nearly so serious a wrong as is abortion. It does not involve, in most cases, an assault on an innocent human life. But it can damage and distort the most fundamental of human relationships. And the ideology of contraceptive "choice" leads all too easily into the rhetoric of abortion. Like the proabortion movement, the pro-contraception movement is based upon lies. And like the pro-abortion movement, the pro-contraceptive movement promises "freedom" and '"choice," but in the end provides its dupes with only misery and alienation.
The answer, of course, is that children and rain are not good in the same way. Rain is good or bad as it serves as a means to an end--in this case, the crops which sustain human life. Should parents love their children for a similar reason--because they give us pleasure, because they will carry on our family name, because they will be able to care for us in our old age, because they provide us with a tax deduction? That is, should children be loved only as means to some end, or should they be loved for themselves, simply because they are our children, without regard to any external circumstance or extrinsic end? Surely children are something good in themselves. Now no one tries to avoid something which is intrinsically good. But a couple using contraception evidently regards children as an evil to be avoided, at least for a time. They are thus treating children as amerelyinstrumentalgood, or as a good dependent on circumstance. Such attitudes are a travesty of the unconditional love which ought to exist within a family.
The problem is put in a more acute form by the fact that any method of contraception. will "fail" on occasion. Children will, therefore, be born whose existence their parents regarded as an evil and were actively seeking to prevent. Such is the force of natural affection that most parents will eventually come to love such a child. But the relation will be forever scarred by the fact that the child came into existence against the express will of his parents. Even those children who have been "planned" by their parents--therefore seemingly enjoying an advantage which exactly counterbalances the disadvantage of the child who is an "accident"--are born under the terrible presumption that their desirability and worth depend upon the whim and convenience of their parents. lt is a remarkable triumph of compassion over consistency that such parents do not begrudge the very existence of their already born children when times become difficult.
Joycelyn Elders has made much of her slogan "every child a planned and wanted child." Perhaps she ought to consider that the attitudes which justify child abuse--the horrible presumption that children exist only as the toys of their parents' convenience--are already present by implication in that word "planned." And pro-life supporters should recognize that the ideology which transforms a child into a mere choice begins with the assumption that parents should be able to choose in the first place. From the point of view of choice-addled contraceptive parents, after all, abortion is simply a more effective if less convenient means of accomplishing what a condom is meant to do. If we grant the contraceptive presumption that the worth of a child is dependent upon his parents' choice, we should not be surprised at the terrible consequences.
At first glance the myth offered by the pro-contraceptive movement, that the meaning of human sexuality is subject to our choice, seems liberating and sane: why can't a couple decide to have sex merely for pleasure on one occasion, for procreation on another. If we insist upon the natural character of marriage, as a union devoted to the raising of children and to mutual comfort, contraception may be defended within the overall context of the marriage: a couple who has had children, or intends to have them, might thus use contraception for a period of time without destroying the fundamental character of their union. But this solution, however attractive it may seem, is based upon a lie about human nature, a vicious and untenable falsehood about sex.
Suppose, with the pro-contraceptive movement, that the various aspects of human sexuality are separated or joined only by the anitude of each person subjectively. Under.this presupposition, a woman who feels violated after a rape has no one but herself to blame--since it was only her attitude which determinedthe meaning of what was done to her. The very fact that human societies have always had laws treating rape separately from other forms of violence militates against the modern anempt to redefine human sexuality, here, as so oflen, the modern effort to escape from natural law only produces strange and horrific responsibilities for the human beings who are supposedly left to define themselves. Rape is a crime far worse than mere assault because it involves not only an act of violence against another human being but also a terrible violation of the natural law, the law deep-rooted in every human being which insists that the sexual act cannot rightly be separated from the union of unconditional conjugal love which it is meant to express. This law is not the arbitrary stricture of some vengeful deity thundering from on high; it is at the root of what it means to be human, bound inextricably in that mysterious node which ties our self-awareness together with our physical existence.
There is, accordingly, a meaning which naturally inheres to the sexual act, quite apart from any decision on our part about how to regard it. We may distinguish two aspects of sexual union whose combination defines that meaning: the love between husband and wife whiclh is thus expressed, and the potential of that union to result in the creation of a child, the living expression of the parent's love. Carnal prudence and selfish convenience blinds us to the strange incoherence of our thinking about sex. We still see clearly the perversion involved in the treatment of other natural activities as though they were subject to our whim. Someone, for example, who seeks to divorce the pleasure of eating from digestion and nutrition we recognize as a bulimic and in need of help. The sexual gourmandizing which contraceptive devices enable is to be condemned so much more severely, as sex comes closer to the center of human personality than does mere eating.
The institution of marriage clearly reflects the profound union of the affective and generative aspects of human sexuality: the possibility of generation both symbolizes and necessitates the permanence of love within the marriage bond. The sexual act thus signifies and expresses the character of the conjugal union itself.
This is not to say that an infertile couple cannot enjoy a true and loving marriage, any more than a blind person is less than human or incapable of living a happy life. But in both cases something precious and important is missing. With regard to the artificial forms of sterility which are created by contraception, moreover, there is the greatest moral difference between a condition which is imposed upon us and one which we create for ourselves. A man who is born blind is unfortunate, a man who puts out his own eyes is insane.
Within a marriage, then, each artificially contracepted sexual act is a repudiation of the whole character of the marriage. A marriage may perhaps survive the use of contraception, but it must surely be weakened. For as profound an expression of the mutual love of his parents as is a child, so profound is the mutual rejection expressed by the use of contraceptives. It is a parsimonious, stunted, selfish love which is unwilling to give itself in the mutual creation of a new life. With the use of contraception, the conjugal act looses its responsible and mutual character: selfish lust triumphs over self-giving love; sex becomes, insofar as mere human will can make it possible, a union of bodies without a union of persons.
Just as the significance and worth of the child is determined not by the will of its parents but by natural law, so too the meaning of the sexual act and its contraceptive abuse are deepIy fixed in human nature. And we are deceived if we think that the human cleverness which has enabled men to devise so many methods of interfering with conception will allow us at last to escape our very selves.
The use of contraception transforms the human body into an mere instrument; what is worse, it transforms the body of a husband or wife into a mere instrument of our own selfish pleasure. It is the traditional sexual morality, with its restriction of sexual activity to marriage and its rejection of contraception, which respects human physical existence and the inseparable union of the life of the body with the inner life of the mind. Modern efforts at "liberation" and the glorification of "choice" end in the division of the human being against himself, the denigration of the body and disdain for the integrity of human life.
But over and against the false promises of the culture of "choice," the culture of abortion, contraception, and sexual libertinism, conservatives have something better to offer: the freedom to lead humane and moral lives, the true freedom which comes not from our right to choose but from our ability to love.