The Washington Post Had It Right - in 1931

The Catholic Thing, March 7, 2010

New Challenges on “Birth Control”

By Howard Kainz

The Catholic Church claims to be the “rock of Peter,” and the Obama administration seems to come up against this “rock” recently when it moved toward universal availability of free contraceptives, even in Catholic institutions.

In order to understand how Catholics could be caught in an ostensibly counter-cultural position (“against birth control!”), we have to be aware of the extraordinary sea change that has taken place since the Anglican Lambeth Conference in 1930, the first Christian group to allow limited uses of contraception. A person in our day reading the March 23, 1931 editorial of theWashington Post in the aftermath of that conference would no doubt consider it a forgery.

Yet the following excerpt reflects prevailing opinion among Christians at that time, as well as among the editors of that newspaper:

It is impossible to reconcile the doctrine of the divine institution of marriage with any modernistic plan for the mechanical regulation or suppression of human birth. The church must either reject the plain teachings of the Bible or reject schemes for the “scientific” production of human souls. Carried to its logical conclusion, the committee’s report if carried into effect would sound the death-knell of marriage as a holy institution, by establishing degrading practices which would encourage indiscriminate immorality. The suggestion that the use of legalized contraceptives would be “careful and restrained” is preposterous.

What was the basis for this widespread belief in the 1930s? In part, there was the Bible, but the belief was due in large part to a long tradition of Christian ethics, not just in Catholicism, but also in Protestantism. Little by little, however, after the Episcopalians, Protestant denominations accepted contraception. Methodists, Presbyterians, some Lutheran synods, Mennonites, and others followed suit in the following decades.

Why is Catholicism a “holdout?” Here again, the source is not just the Bible, but a long tradition from Patristic times. Yes, in the early Christian era, contraceptive methods were available – many of them even riskier than modern pharmaceuticals, and contraceptive by causing abortion. They were the subject of frequent condemnations by Fathers of the Church and theologians – St. Clement of Alexandria and Tertullian in the second century, Minucius Felix and St. Hippolytus in the third, St. Augustine, St. Basil the Great and St. Jerome, as well as the Council of Ancyra in the fourth. In the Reformation era, Luther and Calvin both vehemently condemned contraception.

Some Christian resistance has historically been based on the Bible, especially the narrative about Onan (Genesis 38:8-10) who practiced coitus interruptus and was punished by God for the act. But Catholicism, which published the canonical Bible 1700 years ago, is not “based” solely on the Bible, and the arguments of the Fathers are not just derived from the Bible but from natural law – the unwritten law prevailing, sometimes in bare outlines, among all religions and cultures – laws against murder, theft, adultery, etc.

The Catholic Church does not prohibit “birth control,” based on Natural Family Planning, such as Dr. Fehring’s Marquette method, or Dr. Hilgers’ Creighton method, or Dr. Billings’ method, which identify a woman’s fertile periods, and have also proven effective in helping infertile couples to become pregnant. But it can also be used to “space” pregnancies by abstinence during fertile periods.

         The Lambeth Conference, 1930

Although NFP, has been proven in various studies, and in particular by documented research by the Paul VI Institute, to be as effective as the “pill,” it is not popular because of the periodical abstinence required, or in individual cases where treatment for irregular periods, etc. requires consultation with specialists.

So the Catholic objection is not against “birth control,” but against artificial contraception, i.e., blocking procreation by artificial means. However, in common parlance, “birth control” has become synonymous with contraception, which goes beyond “control” to blocking births.

The objection that Catholics use contraceptives as much as the general public is just a new form of the “everybody does it” moral principle. But the objection is also not factual, a recent “fact-check” column in the Washington Postdiscovered. The widespread statement, “98 percent of American Catholic women have used contraception in their lifetimes” is actually based on 2006-2008 interviews by the Guttmacher Institute of 7,356 females aged 15-44, in which 68 percent of the Catholic women had used some form of contraception. The 98 percent figure was based on tables in the study that were misinterpreted. The Guttmacher Institute came out afterwards with statistics to correct the misinterpretations.

Pope Paul VI’s 1968 Encyclical Humanae Vitae warned against four inevitable results of the widespread use of contraception: 1) an increase in conjugal infidelity; 2) a “general lowering of morality”; 3) loss of respect for women by men, and a tendency to treat women as “mere instruments of selfish enjoyment” rather than cherished partners; and finally, 4) the massive imposition of contraception by governments.

Hardly anyone would deny that the first three predictions have come to pass. In regard to the fourth prediction, for most of us the example of Communist China, with its forced “one-child” policy used to come to mind. But now we are confronted with the unthinkable: that the United States government may impose contraception, directly or indirectly, through insurance or taxation, or out-of-pocket funding by self-insurers, upon Catholic universities, hospitals, and other institutions.

Sandra Fluke, a Georgetown University law student, recently complained to Congresswoman Nancy Pelosi that she has to pay about $1000 a year for contraception. President Obama, in a telephone call to Fluke, offered her his personal support. And he has framed a mandate that will, if successful, grant individuals like Sandra Fluke the funding they are seeking.

The handwriting is on the wall. The American people, whether they support contraception or not, are now being asked to come to the aid of those who do not feel they should have to pay for contraceptives. We’re seeing the logical working out of what even the Washington Post could see in 1930 and, it seems, only a few religious people can see today.

Howard Kainz is emeritus professor of philosophy at Marquette University. He is the author of many books, including the recently published The Existence of God and the Faith-Instinct.

© 2011 The Catholic Thing. All rights reserved. For reprint rights, write to:info@frinstitute.org



Retrieved March 8, 2010 from http://www.thecatholicthing.org/columns/2012/new-challenges-on-birth-control.html#comments

PA: The Catholic Church held firm when others folded, but not in practice very firm.  For decades bishops allowed priest-confessors to ignore or oppose Church teaching while cashing the Church's paycheck.  The Church fell into moral laxity of its own as the morality of the sexual revolution pervaded seminaries and theology departments and catechesis fell into neglect.  Obama depends on this weakness within the Church   to launch his attack on religious liberty and turn it into an election issue.  Sandra Fluke is no fluke (sorry).  Apart from being a Democratic dirty trick to undermine the House hearings on the administration's attack on religious liberty, it is unimaginable that in another era, even with anti-Catholic bigotry nearly as rampant as it is today, that someone would have the gall to tell the world that she chose to attend a Catholic law school--i.e., one that is at least in the tradition of a Christian faith that always condemned pre- and extra-marital sex and artificial birth control--but she expects the school (and faithful students through their fees) to subsidize her contraception.  I am not sure what is more astounding--her sense of entitlement or the Administration's promoting her and her story to attack the Church.

Incidentally, Fluke's figures seem to be wildly inflated and she could get a much better price at Walmart, Target, or even the more expensive Planned Parenthood.

Heads in the sand over AIDS

Excellent article!  What opponents of a behavior change strategy fail to see is that their own failed approach of promoting condom use (while dismissing abstinence and fidelity as unrealistic) is itself a behavior change strategy--in the African context, it leads to more sex with multiple partners at the same time and so to more HIV/AIDS.

Ideological blinders have led to millions of preventable AIDS deaths in Africa. In his new book, Dr. Edward C. Green, former director of the Harvard AIDS Prevention Project, describes how Western AIDS “experts” stubbornly pursued ineffective remedies and sabotaged the most successful AIDS prevention program on that ravaged continent. Drawing on 30 years of conducting research in Africa, Southeast Asia, and other parts of the world in international health, Green offers a set of evidence-based and experience-rich solutions to the AIDS crisis. He calls for new emphasis on promoting sexual fidelity, the only strategy shown by research to work.  Controversial but important findings for health researchers, international development specialists, and policy makers. 

Carolyn Moynihan | Friday, 2 December 2011

Heads in the sand over AIDS

How many more lives, how many billions of dollars, will be sacrificed to western sexual ideology?

Every year since 1988 the joyful tidings of Christmas have been preceded by the increasingly upbeat message of World AIDS Day, December 1. This year’s theme of “Getting to zero” was launched last month by Hillary Clinton announcing that an “AIDS-free generation” was within grasp if the United States and countries around the world would team up on scientific advancements. President Obama threw an extra $50 million in that direction and he was joined by former presidents George W Bush and Bill Clinton in promising greater commitment to eradicating the disease. The catch-line, “beginning of the end”, was scripted in the White House. Bono, Elton John and Carla Bruni-Sarkozy leant their faces to the cause.

Unfortunately, the promotion seems to have fallen flat. Pleading financial crisis, the governments that are the mainstay of the Global Fund to Fight AIDS, TB and Malaria (US$21.7 billion pledged last year) have decided to cancel the next funding round and no new applications will be accepted until 2014. This certainly is tragic, since the Global Fund keeps alive nearly half (3.2 million) of the 6.6 million people living on life-saving antiretroviral (ARV) drugs, and efforts to prevent mother-to-child transmission are said to have some success. Progress has also been made against the other big epidemics. However, there are still 7.6 million people who need ARV treatment, and many of those are now unlikely to get it.

But even without the defection of the cash-strapped rich countries there was always going to be bad news to report. AIDS might be on the decline, thanks to treatment, but HIV infections are on the rise again after falling for several years. About 2.7 million people were infected last year, which is double the number brought into treatment, according to The Independent, and people are now becoming infected faster than they can be tested and treated. In Malawi, a small African country with a population of under 15 million, 70,000 new infections are expected next year.

The truth is that there can never be enough billions to “end” an epidemic driven by the sexual ideology of the same parties -- or their partners -- that are supposed to be curing it. This was rather sharply illustrated a couple of months ago with the publication of evidence linking the widespread use of progestin injections as birth control with HIV transmission in sub-Saharan Africa. But even without such a direct channel, the “sex positive” approach of the family planning networks in developing countries guarantees that the behaviour basically responsible for disease -- having multiple sex partners -- does not change.

It is no accident, then, that this week thousands of experts and acolytes are gathered in Senegal for the second International Conference on Family Planning to push forward the global family planning agenda. They too will be demanding billions from the first world’s governments and foundations. The director of the Gates Institute for Population and Reproductive Health, Dr Amy Tsui, who is also a professor at the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health, is a lead conference organizer.

One of the things they are talking about at the ICFP conference is, according to one report, “the prevention of HIV through multi-prevention technologies (MPTs) that protect against HIV and act as contraceptives”. They don’t have these MPTs yet, you understand, but they are working on them -- for instance, a vaginal ring that releases both an ARV drug and a contraceptive hormone. What it would cost to provide such technology to African women is anybody’s guess. In the meantime what they have, mainly, is the contraceptive injection, and the condom. One seems to be contributing to the HIV epidemic and the other has never stopped it.

What has shown the potential to stop the epidemic is well known: behaviour change strategies used in Uganda and (less famously) in Zimbabwe. Uganda turned its epidemic around in the early 1990s with its ABC programme focusing on abstinence for the unmarried and “zero grazing” for the rest. This has since been undermined by aid organizations pushing condoms. Zimbabwe in the ten years to 2007 brought its HIV prevalence down from 27 per cent to 16 per cent -- mainly, according to researchers, through reductions in extramarital, commercial, and casual sexual relations”.

Edward Green, the Harvard researcher, who stumbled upon Uganda’s secret in 1993 has been trying ever since to get recognition for behavior change as the most effective means of dealing with the AIDS epidemic. In his recent book, Broken Promises: How the AIDS Establishment has Betrayed the Developing World(2011), he recounts how, at an AIDS conference in Washington in 2004 his presentation received muted applause. But, when a female college student came to the microphone and exclaimed, “I think people should be able to have as much sex as they want, with as many people as they want,” she received a thunderous, standing ovation.

That is what the people of Africa and elsewhere are up against: not only a deadly disease but an international community that has such an investment in its own doctrines about sex and population that it will use all its political and economic power to impose them where they are most destructive. Already in Africa alone more than 46 million people have been infected with HIV and 18 million have died.

The developed nations should be ashamed to stage another World AIDS Day, let alone project its end, until our responsibility for this avoidable epidemic is admitted.

Carolyn Moynihan is deputy editor of MercatorNet.

Want to read more articles by Carolyn Moynihan Click on the links below

·                        Contraceptives mandate would make cowards of us all | 11 November 2011

·                        Bad shot: when will WHO warn women about the contraceptive jab? | 28 October 2011

·                        “I’m sorry I did not wait” | 19 October 2011

·                        Margaret Ogola: an African heroine | 30 September 2011

·                        Twilight on the moors | 27 September 2011

Retrieved December 2, 2011 from http://www.mercatornet.com/articles/view/heads_in_the_sand_over_aids

Exporting HIV: Sacrificing Maternal Health to Prevent Pregnancy

The Quandary You Will Always Have With You

By Matthew Hanley

THURSDAY, 10 NOVEMBER 2011

So a major new study comes out in the journal Lancet Infectious Diseases declaring that a common hormonal contraceptive doubles the risk of HIV transmission. Researchers at the University of Washington determined, by following 3,800 couples in seven AIDS impacted African countries, that the contraceptive (Depo-Provera, which is taken by injection every few months) increases the likelihood that women will become infected with HIV, and the likelihood that women already infected will transmit it to their male partners. Those who have relentlessly promoted such contraception might now be considering how to concede, sotto voce: oops, my bad!

Or will they? This study was not the gold standard – that is, it was not a randomized controlled trial explicitly designed to examine that specific linkage. But it is sturdy and bolsters in important respects previous studies that also indicated a connection between hormonal contraceptives and HIV transmission. Still other studies have conclusively demonstrated a link between contraception and otherSTDs. The strength and gravity of these findings, if not strictly conclusive at this stage, nonetheless dictate that the safest operating assumption should be that the contraceptive doubles the likelihood that the uninfected partner will contract HIV.

President Obama should therefore cease exporting these contraceptives – long a mainstay of foreign aid programs – though we can expect politicized dithering from health authorities about whether or not to even inform women, and men for that matter, of this risk. It’d be hard to call such a move reactionary, despite what some would no doubt say, considering that Obama personally apologized to the president of Guatemala recently because American medical researchers deliberately infected 1,300 Guatemalans with STDs such as syphilis in the 1940s.

Granted, this is not precisely the same thing. But we can now say with much, if not quite total, confidence that western funded contraception programs lead to more HIV transmission than would otherwise occur in their absence. Among those exposed to the virus and the contraceptive – not a small cohort (12 million African women use it) – we can expect roughly twice as many infections to accrue as we would without the contraceptive. This is now foreseeable. 

The inhumane Guatemalan scheme of the 1940s took eighty-three lives; what was then justified under the pretext of “science” is now rightly seen as an outrage. But there are always justifications. In this case, justifications are being called quandaries. Public Health authorities today will fend off outrage – over complicity with fueling a fearsome epidemic – as long as possible under the pretext of “family planning,” whether they resort to the overpopulation canard or to tragically high rates of maternal mortality. Even if it means knowingly causing eighty-three extra HIV infections a day – assuming that only a small proportion of Africa’s 2.7 million annual HIV infections is attributable to injectable contraception – you can always do some harm as long as you claim that contraceptives somehow do more net good. Malleable indeed is the utilitarian calculus, constant its compliance with the will of the powerful.

The New York Times stressed that these findings present a “quandary,” citing officials who depict preventing pregnancy in that part of the world as roughly on par with preventing HIV infection.  But this is a false dilemma. As I pointed out recently, we’ve made little progress against maternal mortality in Africa because maternal health programs have not focused on survival but devolved into “Family Planning” programs – which authorities seem not to want to relinquish at any price. 

Imagine if the vast sums of money now being spent on the carcinogenic steroids that also increase HIV transmission – injectable contraceptives – were spent on relatively basic measures to manage the conditions that cause the vast majority of maternal deaths; only a minuscule proportion of resources are presently directed towards those proper ends. Why, you’d kill two birds with one stone – reduce current levels of HIV transmission and save the lives of mothers and their babies when (real) complications do strike.

If that sounds reasonable, you need no nudging to appreciate why Pope Benedict XVI observes with repeated urgency that reason itself is under assault today – not just faith. (You can expect the usual attacks on him when he visits Benin next week.) The Public Health and Foreign Aid establishments are not just rejecting the Judeo-Christian tradition – but “dissing” Hippocrates himself, the esteemed pre-Christian father of Western medicine who gave us one of its most foundational principles:  Primum non nocere – First, do no harm.

Hippocrates, it must be stressed, also equated love for the art of Medicine with love of Humanity. You don’t have to be a physician and an artist, as St. Luke was, to recognize that pregnancy is not a disease – even if our own government, now attempting to require private employers to cover contraception and sterilization under the rubric of “preventive services,” would have us believe otherwise. Could it be that, in pursuing demonstrably harmful, neo-Malthusian contraceptive schemes, some measure of misanthropy lurks not far beneath the surface in our great halls of supposed philanthropy? 

The distressing capitulation of the healing professions to aggressive secularism’s assault on man is but one manifestation of the gravity of our present predicament. John Paul II felt that humanity is in the midst of its greatest historical confrontation – between “the Gospel and the anti-Gospel” – and that most Americans do not realize it. It is a trial not only for the Church, he stated in Philadelphia two years prior to becoming pope, but a veritable “test of 2,000 years of culture and Christian civilization.”  This too is not a quandary – it’s all hands on deck, to safeguard everything from individual human dignity to medical integrity to the rights of nations.


Matthew Hanley is, with Jokin de Irala, M.D., the author of Affirming Love, Avoiding AIDS: What Africa Can Teach the West, which recently won a best-book award from the Catholic Press Association. His latest report, The Catholic Church & The Global AIDS Crisis is now available from the Catholic Truth Society, publisher to the Holy See in the U.K.

© 2011 The Catholic Thing. All rights reserved. For reprint rights, write to: info@frinstitute.org

The Catholic Thing is a forum for intelligent Catholic commentary. Opinions expressed by writers are solely their own.

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