Humanae vitae's legacy
Tentler, Leslie Woodcock
her priest-interviewees from the 1960s. But those hurts have little to do with conditions on the ground for young people today. On the one hand, they live in a hypersexualized culture (a...
...The rate of abortion in the mid-nineteenth-century United States, when contraception was unmentionable in polite public discourse, was probably almost as high as it is today...
...Dire symptoms, however, mandate careful diagnosis...
...As a historian, however, I find this leap of faith eludes me...
...Catholic spokesmen have been making this particular claim since the early years of the twentieth century...
...But alarmist claims about pill use and breast cancer have not been borne out...
...To meet the enormous cultural challenges of the present day, we need to lay to rest the ecclesiastical grievances of the 1960s...
...And yet the same century saw an unprecedented increase in women's life expectancy, particularly in the developed nations, where contraceptive use is most widespread...
...Leslie Woodcock Tentler is professor of history at The Catholic University of America...
...We need all hands on deck for that task...
...The intervening years have made me a sadder but wiser girl...
...My parents also supported McGovern because they thought he best represented their ideals about social justice and opportunity for all...
...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 idea that politics must serve the common good and help care for the weakest segments of society seeped into my own political consciousness at an early age...
...Young Catholics increasingly recognize this...
...Hagen's argument here seems perilously close to this theologically dubious logic...
...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...
...After we raised our hands it became clear that my parents were the only ones for McGovern...
...Certain contraceptives have in fact been physically harmful: the Dalkon Shield, a nolonger-marketed version of the IUD, did dreadful damage to some of its users, while the earliest version of the pill contained what many researchers now regard as dangerously high levels of estrogen...
...I was grateful for the support when one girl said she wasn't sure...
...We don't yet have the kind of proof we need, however, given rhythm's troubled history...
...This occurred in Muncie, Indiana—christened "Middletown" USA in a groundbreaking sociological study of the early twentieth century...
...Pope Paul VI was an accurate prophet...
...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...
...More important, American women today live longer, healthier lives than ever before...
...On the other hand, many of them find great credibility in the vision articulated by John Paul II...
...He asserts that two contraceptives—one of which, the IUD, is not much used in the United States—may on occasion have abortifacient properties...
...the so-called majority report of the papal commission on birth control said as much, in 1966...
...Our present woes have multiple causes...
...My father, who served in the Army in Vietnam (1967-68), returned opposed to the war...
...Timothy P. Schilling CATHOLIC & POLITICAL Between a rock & a hard place he first presidential election I gave any thought to was Nixon-McGovern, 1972...
...Natural Family Planning today may well be more effective than the rhythm method practiced by many older Catholics...
...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...
...My first-grade teacher asked if we knew whom our parents would be voting for...
...The pope, in fact, didn't know the half of it...
...That was my spontaneous reaction upon first reading the "doomsday" paragraphs of Humanae vitae, where the pope predicts widespread moral collapse should the church permit contraception in marriage...
...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...
...That would indeed be good news, but not necessarily a reason for the church to exclude all other modes of family planning...
...In this chastened spirit, let me respond to each of his "important points...
...Legions of Catholic women then were engaged in "daily anatomical observations," although sometimes without the desired outcome...
...Far better, in my view, for Catholic leaders to begin to speak about living the vocation of Christian marriage in the real world—about marriages that are communities of life and love, where fidelity to spouse and family is what makes every act of marital intercourse simultaneously unitive and procreative...
...Humanae vitae was obscure, but it contained a deep wisdom which has been vindicated with passing decades...
...As the feeble support for McGovern showed, Muncie was still a reliable barometer of the nation's sentiments...
...A contraceptive that is clearly abortifacient should be regarded by Catholics as morally unacceptable...
...On the one hand, they live in a hypersexualized culture (a direct result of the birth-control pill...
...If one accepts as an article of faith that contraception is the cause of all our sexual woes, then Hagen is surely right...
...The enormous success of the World Youth Day assemblies demonstrates this...
...Some women might decide that "daily anatomical observations" were not consonant with their understanding of personal dignity...
...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...
...How do we know that contraception is the root cause of these disorders...
...Following his logic, we would have to say that Catholics who insist on using contraceptives should opt for condoms or diaphragms...
...John D. Hagen Jr...
...If this says anything at all about contraception, it would seem to suggest that birth control is good for women, at least in a physiological sense...
...Viewed from 2004, his litany of moral disasters seems rather tame— a contemporary reader is immediately tempted to embellish it...
...I was fascinated by politics...
...Hagen does much the same...
...Others might have cause to worry that regular bouts of abstinence would have a deleterious effect on their marriages...
...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...
...Americans had the world's highest divorce rates when it was still illegal to send contraceptive information through the mail...
...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...
...I couldn't read enough books recounting FDR's grappling with the Great Depression and, as a boy, I was a convinced Democrat who wanted to be "1Vh01 !h) 1/011 uirnii, 1/1111 ~u~~irl to Vi .istrr,/ i7 I~r~tu~cr~iN" T SCHWADRON Commonweal I 0 June 4, 2004...
...Hagen makes a startlingly blanket claim here, but does not establish it...
...But what if medical research were to provide incontrovertible evidence that NFP was "nearly 100percent effective...
...McGovern lost in a landslide election...
...the most recent epidemiological studies dispute a once-suspected correlation between the two...
...My parents voted for McGovern because of the war in Vietnam...
...Who can doubt that we live in a hypersexualized culture...
...Catholic spokesmen in the past—a few as late as the 1950s— sometimes equated contraception with murder...
...The bishops should indeed press ahead with their "easily understandable booklet...
...But those hurts have little to do with conditions on the ground for young people today...
...The essential components of Natural Family Planning—the basal temperature method and analysis of cervical mucus—were known by the later 1950s...
...Once we can speak honestly about marriage, we will be in a much better position to guide our young people through the sexual jungle that is their unhappy inheritance...
...Artificial contraception has abortifacient properties...
...Contraception, moreover, is here to stay—no matter what the bishops say...
...Perhaps it does—I haven't the expertise to judge, particularly in light of the paucity of rigorous research on the subject...
...Many people dissented in good faith from the encyclical, but the data we have are decisively different now...
...Natural family planning works...
...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...
...That courtship among the young has been increasingly displaced by a crude exchange of sexual favors...
...practices law in Minneapolis...
...That marriage is a vanishing institution among certain vulnerable segments of our population, and in trouble among the rest of us...
...Certain Catholic spokesmen in the 1960s asserted, presumably in good conscience, that rhythm was just as effective as the pill...
...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...
...t+i VALERRY Commonweal 9 June 4, 2004 Artificial contraception poses serious risks to women's health...
...Leslie Woodcock Tentler plead guilty to aging, but not to being intellectually mired in 1968...
...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...
...High rates of teenaged pregnancy in the United States predate the pill...
Vol. 131 • June 2004 • No. 11
