Opposition to the Pill among conservative Catholics was consistent from the beginning, but it was only after it had been in widespread use for years that some conservative Protestants began rethinking their views on contraception in general and the Pill in particular. “I think the contraceptive revolution caught Evangelicals by surprise,” observes Albert Mohler, the president of the Southern Baptist Theological Seminary. “We bought into a mentality of human control. We welcomed the polio vaccine and penicillin and just received the Pill as one more great medical advance.”
But beginning in the 1990s, many conservative Christians revisited the question of what God intends in marriage and pondered the true nature of the gift of sexuality. The heart of the concern, in this view, is that using contraception can weaken the marital bond by separating sex from procreation. The ideal of marriage as a “one-flesh union” places the act of intercourse, with the possibility of creating new life, at the center of the relationship. “Go back a hundred years,” Mohler says. “The biblical idea you’d have adults who’d intend to have very active sex lives without any respect to the likelihood of children didn’t exist. And it’s now unexceptional.” This is not to say that everyone has an obligation to have as many children as possible; Mohler has two, not 12, he notes, and as long as a couple is “not seeking to alienate their sexual relationship from the gift of children, they can seek to space or limit the total number of children they have.” But the ability to control human reproduction, he says, has done more to reorder human life than any event since Adam and Eve ate the apple.
Steinem disputes this whole framework, noting that sex and procreation have never been as tightly connected as Mohler suggests. “Most animals seem to have periods of heat, in which sexual activity is most concentrated and they are most likely to conceive,” she says. “Human beings uniquely don’t. So for us, sexuality is a mark of our humanity, like our ability to reason or remember or think about thinking. Sexuality is not only a way we procreate but also a way we communicate and express love and caring and community.”
Women’s-rights leaders see multiple agendas at work in the counterrevolution: an attempt not just to roll back access to contraception but also to return women to more traditional roles. “The cynic in me says, Hmm, they are winning the abortion fight, so they need to raise money some other way, which means go somewhere else. They go to contraception,” says NOW president O’Neill of social conservatives. “If the project is to re-establish patriarchal structures, where women are subordinate to male family members, they have to end women’s access to contraception.”
Hmmm. [i]”They are winning the abortion fight, so now they need to raise money some other way,”[/i] asserts the cynical NOW president. I wish!! Well, polls show we pro-lifers are gaining ground, but we haven’t won yet. But being opposed to contraception is by no means an anti-feminist position.
As usual, Al Mohler is right. The Pill has had an incredible, huge impact on modern life, for better or worse. And I suspect it’s a mixed bag, with lots of both.
David Handy+
Interesting how the president of NOW assumes that if people reconsider contraception, women will lose freedom. Does she think freedom consists of the absence of ideas tending toward God’s teachings about life?
David+, in the May edition of “First Things” there is an article,”Bitter Pill” which does a cost-benefit analysis of contraception. Assuming the social science holds up, the article makes a very persausive case that men have greatly benefited from the pill at the expense of women and children. Of course, this is just what Pope Paul VI said would happen in “Humanae Vitae”.