Humanae vitae's legacy
Hagen, John D. Jr.
`i continuing the conversation H V MANAE VITAE'S LEGACY Two views ohn D. Hagen few years ago in Commonweal, a young Catholic scholar referred to older colleagues "whose intellectual clocks...
...It can be written now, based on the lived experience and the increased biological understanding of recent years...
...For the past two decades, I've been engaged in young-adult ministries with the parish that serves the University of Minnesota...
...t+i VALERRY Commonweal 9 June 4, 2004...
...To meet the enormous cultural challenges of the present day, we need to lay to rest the ecclesiastical grievances of the 1960s...
...The foregoing points would go a long way in helping to frame the "easily understandable booklet" that our bishops hope to issue on birth control...
...But the clock didn't stop in the late 1960s...
...It is far more difficult to make a compelling moral argument with regard to a highly effective contraceptive— to wit, the pill—that was not designed to work as an abortifacient and when functioning normally does not do so...
...the logic of NFP does not...
...The last specific item of evidence she cites is a survey that was taken in 1969...
...Many breast-cancer risk factors correlate with estrogen exposure, and hormonal birth control may have helped cause the burgeoning breast-cancer rates of the past few decades...
...The rhythm method was superseded twenty-five years ago...
...A 2003 study sponsored by the National Cancer Institute showed a significant increase in breast cancer risk for young women using oral contraceptives (see www.nci.nih.gov...
...On the other hand, many of them find great credibility in the vision articulated by John Paul II...
...Birth-conVALERRY trol pills primarily work by suppressing ovulation...
...A contraceptive that is clearly abortifacient should be regarded by Catholics as morally unacceptable...
...Absent such proof, I could not in conscience advise a young Catholic woman to rely on the method—not if she wished to plan her family in concert with paid employment...
...However, occasionally "breakthrough ovulation" occurs...
...But those hurts have little to do with conditions on the ground for young people today...
...I have been in a good position to observe the latter point...
...Young Catholics increasingly recognize this...
...In Humanae vitae, Paul warned that a contraceptive culture would lead to a general breakdown of sexual morality and exploitation of women by men...
...Humanae vitae was obscure, but it contained a deep wisdom which has been vindicated with passing decades...
...the so-called majority report of the papal commission on birth control said as much, in 1966...
...Leslie Woodcock Tender's recent essay on contraception ("A Bitter Pill," April 23) unfortunately fits this paradigm...
...Almost every priest I know below the age of forty confidently espouses NFP...
...That would indeed be good news, but not necessarily a reason for the church to exclude all other modes of family planning...
...Artificial contraception has abortifacient properties...
...In this chastened spirit, let me respond to each of his "important points...
...Hagen's claim in this regard is eerily parallel to past pronouncements, which typically asserted that rhythm was as effective as the best contraceptive then on the market...
...Legions of Catholic women then were engaged in "daily anatomical observations," although sometimes without the desired outcome...
...The pressing issue now, as Tentler correctly states, is steering our youth through "the churning seas of adolescence" roiled by the hypersexualized entertainment and advertising media...
...Modern NFP, based on daily anatomical observations, is easy to learn and is nearly 100percent effective (see The Journal of Reproductive Medicine, June 1998...
...practices law in Minneapolis...
...The essential components of Natural Family Planning—the basal temperature method and analysis of cervical mucus—were known by the later 1950s...
...As Francis Fukuyama, a thoroughly secular scholar, shows in The Great Disruption, contraception paradoxically led to an increase in out-of-wedlock births and abortions all across the developed world...
...Hagen's argument here seems perilously close to this theologically dubious logic...
...The pill and the IUD have been linked to numerous other health complications...
...Natural family planning works...
...i continuing the conversation H V MANAE VITAE'S LEGACY Two views ohn D. Hagen few years ago in Commonweal, a young Catholic scholar referred to older colleagues "whose intellectual clocks stopped in 1968 with the ecclesiastical politics of Humanae vitae...
...Pope Paul VI was an accurate prophet...
...As a historian, however, I know that the same was said of the rhythm method from the 1930s forward—not just by priests, but by Catholic physicians and medical researchers too...
...Hagen does much the same...
...Here are a few important points that we've learned in the intervening years: Natural family planning works...
...Perhaps it does—I haven't the expertise to judge, particularly in light of the paucity of rigorous research on the subject...
...NFP, by contrast, involves no risks to women's health at all...
...Some women might decide that "daily anatomical observations" were not consonant with their understanding of personal dignity...
...The enormous success of the World Youth Day assemblies demonstrates this...
...On the one hand, they live in a hypersexualized culture (a direct result of the birth-control pill...
...Intrauterine devices (IUDs) may also interfere with implantation (see the National Catholic Bioethics Quarterly, Spring 2004...
...The church seemed fecklessly resistant to population-control imperatives and to the spirit of the times...
...Older Catholics preoccupied with the battles of the late 1960s run the risk of becoming a sort of Jacobite league or Confederate veterans' association, aging and dwindling and increasingly marginalized in the life of the church...
...Leslie Woodcock Tentler plead guilty to aging, but not to being intellectually mired in 1968...
...Tentler marshals data that start in 1875 and end with the "rhythm method" and other twice-told tales of the 1960s...
...Many people dissented in good faith from the encyclical, but the data we have are decisively different now...
...He states, "The main impact of the pill and the sexual revolution that followed was...to change male behavior....[M]en felt liberated from norms requiring them to look after the women whom they had gotten pregnant...
...I understand the lingering hurts expressed by Tentler and A Commonweal 8 June 4, 2004 her priest-interviewees from the 1960s...
...Certain Catholic spokesmen in the 1960s asserted, presumably in good conscience, that rhythm was just as effective as the pill...
...Artificial contraception has abortifacient properties...
...He challenged this older cohort of Catholic academics to desist from endlessly "fighting the old battles" and reciting the old grievances (see Christopher Ruddy, "Young Theologians," April 21, 2000...
...Unlike John Hagen, I no longer have much appetite for indiscriminate broadsides against moral corruption, and even less for one-size-fits-all solutions to complex problems...
...He asserts that two contraceptives—one of which, the IUD, is not much used in the United States—may on occasion have abortifacient properties...
...In cases like these, why should couples not be free to elect an alternative mode of family limitation, even if its effectiveness did not match that of NFP...
...Natural Family Planning today may well be more effective than the rhythm method practiced by many older Catholics...
...We all scoffed at this in 1968, but it proved to be sadly accurate...
...Catholic spokesmen in the past—a few as late as the 1950s— sometimes equated contraception with murder...
...bishops' project to publish "an easily understandable booklet" explaining official church teaching on contraception...
...Hormones contained in them thin the endometrium (the lining of the uterus), making it difficult for embryos to implant...
...As a member of Tender's generation, I can vividly recall the angst surrounding Humanae vitae...
...We need all hands on deck for that task...
...Such a booklet couldn't have been written in 1968...
...In such cases, birth-control pills can cause early abortions...
...A recent theology of the body seminar in the Twin Cities attracted more than a thousand people...
...The church's teaching on birth control is unlikely to change, not because of obstinacy but because the course of events has shown the teaching to be sound...
...The encyclical was obscurely reasoned and the "rhythm method" didn't work...
...The intervening years have made me a sadder but wiser girl...
...I know dozens of young couples who use NFP and attest to the fact that it not only works but strengthens their marriages...
...Feminism, which Hagen does not mention, has shaped the expectations of even my most devout students, nearly all of whom anticipate careers as well as families...
...But what if medical research were to provide incontrovertible evidence that NFP was "nearly 100percent effective...
...John D. Hagen Jr...
...The logic of contraception promotes a breakdown of sexual inhibitions...
...And that's to say nothing of the "theology of the body," lucidly articulated by Pope John Paul II and embraced by many young Catholics...
...Others might have cause to worry that regular bouts of abstinence would have a deleterious effect on their marriages...
...Following his logic, we would have to say that Catholics who insist on using contraceptives should opt for condoms or diaphragms...
...Hagen makes a startlingly blanket claim here, but does not establish it...
...Artificial contraception poses serious risks to women's health...
...Tentler attacks the U.S...
...We don't yet have the kind of proof we need, however, given rhythm's troubled history...
...Rhythm's proponents were also quick to tout the most recent improvements to the method, only then admitting that earlier approaches were not in fact as effective as once claimed...
Vol. 131 • June 2004 • No. 11
