Contraception: Why Not? (part 11)

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

Slide: Pope Paul VI’s Predictions

In Humanae Vitae, published in 1968, Pope Paul IV said that four things would happen if contraception became widely available.

There would be a general lowering of morality.  Has anybody noticed that in the last 40 years?

I grew up in a small town in Pennsylvania in the 1950’s and we never locked our doors.  We knew everybody who lived on our street.  We were the only Catholics, but everybody on the street went to church.  They all had 3, 4, 5, 6 kids.  Most of the mothers were stay-at-home mothers.  Every morning about 9 or 10 in the morning all the mothers with their babies would have a coffee break with each other.  My parents could let us go into any house on the street.  My mother would let us go down to Mulberry Playground every day and expect us back for lunch.  In the afternoon we’d go back to the playground and be back for dinner.  There was no concern about what we were doing in the meantime.

A few years ago when the oldest of her children was old enough to start wanting to play at other kid’s houses, one of my sisters asked me what she needed to know about these households.  I said: “You need to do an FBI background check.”  You need to learn if the mother is married to the man she is living with.  Do they use pornography?  Do they allow unsupervised watching of movies and use of the computer?  Now parents need to be exceedingly careful about where they let their children play and visit.

Pope Paul VI predicted that if contraception became widely used, there would be less respect for women.  Has anybody noticed that in the last 40 years?  We’ll say more about that in a moment.

Pope Paul VI said there would be coercive control by governments over sexuality and that we would start treating our bodies as machines.

Slide: Oppressive Governments and Population Control

As this slide says, in Africa it takes a village to educate a child: in China it takes the government to have them killed.  China has a one child per family policy.  If a woman gets pregnant a second time in China she may be forcibly aborted.  If a couple is going to have only one baby, they nearly always want a boy and they more frequently abort their female babies or even commit infanticide.  Thus, there is now an incredible disproportion of males to females in China.  There are about 117 unmarried males for every 100 unmarried females in China because they are aborting or committing infanticide on their little baby girls.  There are a lot of men who are never going to find a bride.  When there is this disproportion of males to females, it means that you have a potential army of child stealers, bride stealers, or rapists.

Slide: Test Tube Babies

Again, Pope Paul VI predicted we would treat our bodies like machines.  Test tube babies have given a whole new definition to the phrase “designer genes”.  Any woman in the United States can have a baby, heterosexual or homosexual, married or unmarried, of child-bearing age or past child-bearing age.  She can buy a super model’s ova, a Nobel Prize winner’s semen.  She can rent out the womb of a surrogate mother and now she has a baby “of her own”.  We live in a culture where we say, “If I can’t have children, I’m going to make children.”  The Church, in a document entitled Donum Vitae or Gift of Life, teaches that it is not right to make babies in a petri dish or through artificial insemination; it is moral to have babies only through a loving sexual act of spouses.

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