Contraception: Why Not? (part 7)

This post is part of a series by Professor Janet E. Smith.

Slide: Contraception Leads to Abortion

Even the Supreme Court says that contraception leads to abortion in Planned Parenthood vs. Casey.  Casey was the democratic pro-life governor of Pennsylvania; he and the people of Pennsylvania put certain restrictions on abortion.  Most of those actually were upheld by the courts: for instance, a teenager had to get her parents’ permission; a married woman had to at least inform her husband that she was getting an abortion.  But Planned Parenthood, which is the biggest abortion provider in the United States, challenges all restrictions on abortion and challenged Casey.  Pro-lifers were thrilled. We thought this is going to be an opportunity for the Supreme Court to look again at the question of when human life begins.  Apparently all members of the Supreme Court had lost their library cards at the time of Roe vs. Wade, because they couldn’t get to the library to discover when human life began.  They didn’t know. For some reason, they couldn’t get access to the textbooks that have been saying for decades and decades that human life begins at conception.  Embryology textbooks, gynecological textbooks, obstetrical textbooks, genetic textbooks all say human life begins at conception.  We were hoping that maybe this time around, 20 years later, they were going to be able to go to the library, open a textbook, and find out.  But instead the Supreme Court said that, in some critical respects, abortion is of the same character as the decision to use contraception.  These are the words of the court: “For two decades of economic and social developments, people have organized intimate relationships and made choices that define their views of themselves and their places in society in reliance on the availability of abortion in the event that contraception should fail.”  So the Supreme Court was saying that they’re not going to look at the question of when human life begins because our culture has become absolutely dependent upon abortion: people need abortion should their contraceptives fail.

But is that true?  Contraceptive failure doesn’t mean a woman needs an abortion. If a contraceptive fails, then it is only just to give the baby life.  The problem is not that the contraceptive has failed but that the women are having sexual intercourse with someone with whom they have no intention of having a baby.

Slide on Pregnancy

That is not God’s plan.  God meant the day that a woman first found out that she was pregnant to be one of the very happiest days of her life.  When she gets that first positive pregnancy test, she would call up her husband and say, “Darling we’re starting our family.  I’m pregnant.”  The two of them go berserk.  They paint the nursery.  They spend a couple hundred dollars on phone calls.  They buy a book with babies’ names. They are deliriously happy.  Their life has moved to a new level.

A couple years ago was the first year in the United States that the number of positive pregnancy tests to single women was higher than those to married women.  The day a single woman finds out that she’s pregnant is not the happiest day of her life.  A lot of you have been there.  Maybe your girlfriends have been there, your sisters, your friends.  An unmarried woman gets a positive pregnancy test and thinks, “What do I do now?  Do I marry him?  Why would I marry him?  I barely know him.  He is a jerk.  Why would I marry him?”  Or maybe, she thinks, “Yes, I do want to marry him.  I’m crazy about him.”  But you can’t imagine how many women don’t marry even the men who want to marry them, because they don’t want to feel like they trapped him into marriage.  A number of women will get abortions even though the man by whom they got pregnant wanted to get married.

Some women decide to become a single mother.  Certainly, many women do an incredibly good job of it.  Some men are also very good providers in those situations.  But generally it is difficult.  All sorts of problems arise with being a single mother.  Virtually every single mother would say she would like to have a husband to help her raise her children.

Some women have an abortion, the worst of all decisions and one from which it is very hard to recover.

Some few women put their babies up for adoption. Among my brothers and sisters there are three adopted children.  We love these children like crazy.  We love the mothers of those children who were generous enough to give up those children so that we could have the families that we wanted to have.  But to give a baby up for adoption, although an incredibly generous and marvelous thing to do, is very painful.

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