Op-ed: Catholic Church’s Wrong Direction on Contraception

It is somewhat of a paradox that America’s secular government has helped enable religious pluralism, expression, and toleration to thrive. Religious communities run schools, homeless shelters, after-school programs, drug treatment centers, soup kitchens, and countless other programs that make life better for people. Children are socialized in school to respect religions different from their own, and it is a rare individual who does not have friends or co-workers who practice different religions.

Sometimes, however, a religious body can advocate a practice that is harmful, not only to members of that religion, but to countless others as well. When the Catholic Church – or any other religious body – attempts to curtail the use of contraception, they are on the wrong side of history, and people of good will should speak out to change that policy. It is not enough that over 90% of American Catholics disregard the Pope and practice birth control as they see fit. American Catholics comprise only about 6% of the world’s Catholics. Everyone in the world is affected by the Catholic Church’s position on this issue. If the Catholic Church had approved of condoms, for example, the AIDS epidemic would have claimed fewer lives.

Before modern medicine, when under-population was a problem, the Catholic Church’s position against contraception made sense. As recently as 1750, there were fewer than 800 million people in the world. No matter how many children women bore, so many died young that the population stayed relatively stable. The United Nations projects that by 2100 there will be 10.1 billion people on Planet Earth. Most experts agree that this number of people is unsustainable.

Every big problem in the 21^st Century is already being aggravated by overpopulation. Climate change, scarce resources, illegal immigration, air and water pollution, loss of animal habitats, crime, lack of opportunities for women, international conflicts, and growing inequality between rich and poor countries, are just a few problems that could be ameliorated by worldwide acceptance of family planning.

Reliable contraception practiced by women was one of the greatest achievements of the 20^th Century and the quality of life everywhere on the planet will depend on widespread use of contraception in this century. (Men have used condoms made of various animal parts since before recorded history, with about as much success as the Church-approved rhythm method.)

Contraception became available for women after World War One when a nurse named Margaret Sanger smuggled diaphragms from Europe into New York Harbor in brandy bottles, and she published a newsletter explaining how to prevent conception (for this she was jailed). For the first time in history, millions of ordinary women could decide if and when they wanted to have children. Later, in the 1950s, Margaret Sanger persuaded Katharine McCormick, heir to a fortune made in reapers, to fund research by Gregory Pincus and John Rock that led to the birth control pill in 1960.

Call it family planning, birth control, or contraception, the use of medical devices to prevent unwanted pregnancy, as well as the 1965 decision of the Supreme Court in Griswold v. Connecticut, asserting that the private use of contraceptives was a Constitutional right, led directly to a revolution in the position of women. Before contraceptives became widely available, some exceptional women (usually single) had managed to become scientists, doctors, lawyers, politicians, and business executives, but within a decade of the first sale of “The Pill,” millions of women were choosing careers that were unthinkable if they had been bearing babies every two years. There has been more change in the position of women since 1960 than in the previous history of the world. And once women have experienced reproductive freedom, they will never go back to constant child-bearing, which is inevitable without contraception.

The Catholic Church and other religious organizations present religious arguments against contraception. When the Bible said, “be fruitful and multiply,” the earth was sparsely populated. It should be the policy of our seculargovernment not only to reject such arguments, but to make contraception as widely available as possible, both here and in countries to which we give aid. Family planning will lead to fewer abortions; more prosperous families; a more sustainable environment; and improvement in the overall quality of life.