The Church on contraception

The furor surrounding the Health and Human Services (HHS) mandate affords us an opportunity to reexamine the Church’s teaching on contraception. 

The HHS mandate effectively forces nearly all private health plans to provide coverage for any FDA-approved prescription contraceptive drugs and devices, including surgical sterilization. These are euphemistically listed among “preventive services for women” that all health plans will have to cover without co-pays or cost sharing. 

There is a general misunderstanding regarding the mandate and the Church’s opposition to it, which has led many to erroneously claim that the disagreement is about contraception. This simply is not the case. The exemption provided for “religious employers” fails to cover most faith-based organizations, including Catholic hospitals, universities and service organizations like Catholic Charities that serve millions every year. This rule infringes upon our First Amendment right to freedom of religion, which guarantees “Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof.” 

While the Church’s opposition arises because the mandate violates religious freedom guaranteed by the first amendment of the Constitution, the administration and the secular media have tried to make this about contraception. Even as the national conference of bishops are leading the fight to preserve our religious liberty with clarity and conviction, the attempts at misdirection by the administration and their supporters of contraception impel us to explain the Church’s teaching on this important issue.

Unfortunately, many people of faith, including some Catholics, lack an understanding on the inherent evil of contraception. Contraception is defined as “against the beginning.” We must ask ourselves against the beginning of what? 

Honest seekers of truth will reach the conclusion that it is against the beginning of life because its only purpose is to prevent life from springing forth from the very act by which life is given, an act ordered by God “in the beginning.” This act is, of course, the conjugal act of marital intercourse, ordained by God when He created “them male and female, in His image.” 

“That is why a man leaves his father and mother and clings to his wife, and the two of them become one body.” (Gn 2:24)

Being created male and female in God’s image offers us the first description of human identity as it represents the original inheritance of every person. God himself as the Trinity is a communion of persons. From the very beginning man and woman were created for a unity that joins them together as one. This oneness is a unity of sharing human nature and at the same time a unity of persons. It forms a communion of persons in God’s image.

God’s image is known by its unitive and creative love that brings about life. Man expresses this image through his body most perfectly in the marital embrace. It is in this manner that man and woman exercise the gift of unitive and procreative love. 

The Church teaches that there is an unbreakable connection between the unitive and procreative meanings of the conjugal act. The unitive meaning is that man and woman are to image God by making of themselves a total self-gift to one another. Any barrier to the total gift of self renders the gift a lie. Any disruption of the unitive and procreative love is a denial of God’s image.

The procreative meaning of the act demands that every such act must be open to the possible transmission of life. This connection was established by God “in the beginning” and cannot be broken by man of his own volition without dire consequences. Contraception disrupts and distorts both meanings.

In a contracepting society stigmatized with a divorce rate greater than 50 percent, out-of-wedlock births at a rate near equal to that of married couples, the phenomenal spread of AIDS and other sexually transmitted diseases and the 53 million plus abortions in the United States alone since 1973, it can hardly be argued that artificial contraception has fulfilled the promises of sexual equality and freedom touted by its early supporters. Given all of the various woes that have resulted as a direct response to the widespread use of contraceptives, it should be readily acknowledged that contraceptive practices serve only to separate men and women and place them in opposition to their very nature as fecund beings. 

It has further served only to allow men to treat women as objects for their own satisfaction. This objectification has led to new forms of sexual slavery in direct opposition to the freedom originally sought through contraception.

For these reasons the Church teaches that contraception is an act against the very dignity of the human person created in God’s image and likeness.

(Deacon Stephen Nolte is the director of the Office Life, Justice and Human Dignity for the Diocese of Corpus Christi.)