Address to the Clergy: On Contraception and Natural Family Planning*

There was a question addressed to Mr Madden when he was on the panel the other day: ‘What’s the difference between Natural family Planning and Family Planning, inasmuch as both are Family Planning?’ Mr Madden replied by analogy of Natural Weight Loss, which he contrasted with Artificial Weight Loss. A good answer as far as it went, especially in what it implied. For the thought in the questioner’s mind seems to be: ‘Given that it’s Family Planning, why should you mind what sort of Family Planning it is? Why should it be a question of anything but convenience?’ That is, he is assuming that ‘Family Planning’ is an action description rather like ‘Abortion’. So he is saying: I’ll understand you if you are going to object to just any activity of this sort, but if that is not your stance, I don’t understand. It’s like saying that abortion is a course of action you’ll entertain, but never on Tuesdays and Thursdays, or never with instruments as opposed to drugs, or vice versa.

Let us first clear away one source of confusion. Someone may have the thought: ‘If it’s all right to procure a certain significant effect at all, it can’t matter how you do it’. Now, this idea doesn’t stand up for a moment. It might be all right to execute a criminal who has been caught, had a fair trial, and been found guilty. It would not follow that it was all right to starve or torture him to death, or to leave a suggestive noose hanging on a nail in his cell. Or it may be all right to try and arrange that some bore and nuisance won’t come to a meeting that he has a right to attend: this objective itself may be fine. That’s not to say you can do it by lying to him or by locking him up, effective as these means would be. But it could be quite acceptable to fix the time of the meeting cunningly, so that he can’t conveniently get to it. So that is the first point: means obviously can matter.

But the objector has a point to his question which I think was not met. He was told what the difference was - but he wants to know why it matters. He might say: ‘I see the difference, but I don’t see what difference that difference makes to the morality of your Family Planning activity.’ And if that is his point, he is in a position which is very common indeed. I’ve noticed that all speakers at this conference who’ve referred to the matter at all, have obviously found the difference clear; natural and artificial methods are to them as different as chalk from cheese, and it has been obvious to them that contraceptive acts are illicit, even when the purpose of adopting contraceptive methods is good and justified. This was also the message of Humanae Vitae: you must not do evil that good may come. But what was the evil in question? I believe that people who live rightly perceive the difference: they have what the scholastics call ‘connatural knowledge’ - the instinct of a thoroughly honest person for what is honest is an example. Such a person may not be able to give much explanation why such-and-such an act is dishonest, may not be armed with a theoretical account; he merely has a good sense of what is honest and what is not. But reason demands that there be an account; and those who don’t live rightly, and so have not got this ‘knowledge of connaturality’, badly need an explanation.

I myself formerly attempted a back-handed sort of explanation. What was involved, I said, was in principle and intention that special form of unchastity known as ‘unnatural vice’.

Before elaborating this answer, I will say a word about this characterisation ‘unnatural vice’ for homosexual intercourse, mutual masturbation, bestiality and so on. It is a label for a recognisable range of sins. But it’s not that other sins are ‘according to nature’ in the sense that as far as nature goes, they’re all right. All sins are contrary to the Law of Nature. But that particular label attaches to some forms of sin because the order of nature that is violated in them is a pattern of use of bodily parts and functions not specific to man but generally animal. The ‘unnaturalness’ is positively biological, not a violation of some specifically human order as are lying, stealing, or adultery. Adultery is also a sin against nature, but against nature as specifically human, not as generically animal, so it doesn’t get called that.

This is not a total explanation because the sins so labelled all have to do with generation or the use of the human generative apparatus. A doctor who was a friend of mine once said to me ‘Isn’t deliberately making meals of totally un-nutritive food a form of unnatural vice?’ I could see his point, but such acts are not called that, nor even necessarily condemned. This is a point of great interest, but I can’t take it further at present.

To return to my theme: I argued that if it is all right to change the character of your intended sexual act from being an act of the generative type to something else, by rendering it infertile (if it would otherwise be fertile), precisely for the sake of the intercourse, then it is very difficult to see anything wrong with those other acts, acts of mutual masturbation, say, or of homosexual intercourse. They would only be somewhat more deviant. I thought that Catholics at least - to whom the argument was addressed - would be pretty clear that those acts were acts of gross unchastity, and so that they could infer that these acts of contraceptive intercourse were, in intention, marked by the same sort of unchastity.

Many have accepted this; it is a more or less familiar argument. But to my astonishment I have also met the following reaction: ‘Yes, the argument is sound enough; it shows that the whole picture of ‘unnatural sin’ hangs together. But why should we accept any of it?’ Someone who says this is likely to maintain that homosexual activities, and indeed any mutually acceptable form of sexual satisfaction between two people (I’m not sure why it should be just two actually) are all right so long as they are ‘expressions of love’ between the parties. This is what Dr Billings would call regarding men as ‘superbeasts’; but his description would itself be rejected.

What we have here of course is a thorough rejection of the whole Catholic Christian doctrine of chastity. A sympathetic pagan friend of mine questioned me about what sort of embraces between the unmarried, say, (not involving intercourse) a Catholic regarded as permissible. I said that embracing on purpose in a manner to produce genital excitement, and dwelling on that, staying with it deliberately if it occurred, were excluded: that, indeed, one should only engage in such embraces with complete acts of licit sexual intercourse in view. To my surprise, she showed surprise, remarking that a vast amount of the embracing that goes on would be condemned by that rule, and that embracing so as to produce orgasm and ejaculation, without proper intercourse, was a very usual thing. Now I think we know for sure that this is contrary to the virtue of chastity. But, the critics say, what’s wrong with it? Why isn’t it good? If it’s contrary to chastity, why should we have any regard for chastity?

Now I think that Humanae Vitae offered an answer to the general question about chastity, even though its considerations were restricted to the context of marriage and contraceptive intercourse within marriage. The considerations have in them the seeds of an answer along the whole front. In that answer will be delineated the badge of chastity which in ancient pagan times was one of the distinctions of a good Christian life: not a rare, all but impossible virtue, but something practicable by ordinary people.

The Pope said that the conjugal act has two meanings, the unitive and the procreative, and that there was an inseparable connexion between them. We must look at this teaching closely.

The ‘inseparable connexion’ is not said to be between being unitive and being procreative, but between having unitive meaning and having procreative meaning. Now if these ‘meanings’ are inseparable, it follows that if you have an act which manages to be procreative (i.e. to procreate) without being an act of union, it will not have ‘the procreative significance of the conjugal act’. Such might be an act of ejaculation into a tube leading to the right spot for causing conception.

And equally it means that if you have an act which manages to be unitive, i.e. to join the partners up, while its character as a generative type of act is destroyed, that act has not ‘the unitive meaning of the conjugal act’.

This teaching has been criticised on the ground that an act can be unitive though procreation is excluded. But the symmetry I have indicated shows that that is irrelevant. Obviously an act can equally be procreative though union is excluded. If it would nevertheless lack ‘the procreative meaning’ its being unitive though procreation was excluded would not show that it didn’t still lack ‘the unitive meaning’.

We would very well understand someone who said: ‘I didn’t do any act of begetting, I didn’t beget, I merely discharged my semen into that tube they offered me’ - even though the sperm had got home and a conception resulted.

(We know that the Church says that children are to be begotten, not produced in any other way.)

So we can understand the ‘lack of procreative meaning’ in an act which does procreate without union; can we understand the lack of unitive meaning in an act of union which is intentionally rendered incapable of procreative meaning?

We say that it has unitive meaning only if it is a marriage act, that is: such an act as demands marriage as its appropriate setting. A complete sex-act - an ejaculation - accomplished in the course of mutual masturbation, for example, has nothing about it to suggest that its proper home is a marriage. Only acts of the generative type have that character of belonging properly in a marriage. And that is why such acts, done within a marriage, are no derogation of human dignity - whereas all others, including these ones outside a marriage, violate the dignity of human nature.

It is, I believe, universal to regard marriage as having a sort of honourableness and dignity about it. This is obviously connected with its role in reproducing and rearing children.

Dr Billings has already made out the connexion between his programme** and the value of chastity, the virtue of the conduct of one’s sexuality according to right reason. For a multitude of reasons the pride and glory of that virtue have not been prominent in present day Western culture. People think of chastity as nothing but abstinence; even if they admire it, they think of it only in connexion with priests, nuns and monks. Christian celibacy is indeed a glorious thing - but it is specially appropriate to our day (because of its special temptations) to charge into battle with the banner of the chastity of married people. It is the greatest thing, to my mind, about this programme that it develops this virtue. We have witnessed it, heard perhaps unconscious but very clear testimony of it. The more teaching of the ovulation method there is the more chance people are going to get to learn this virtue and to shine out before the world. There is a legend of a young woman called Thecla, who was so ravished by St. Paul’s preaching of chastity, which she overheard by the accident of the position of her house, that she forthwith took baptism and embraced virginity. This sort of enthusiasm is rare - now. We reverence real voluntary poverty when we see it far more than the other vows. But the flame should be kindled again, and the place, the opportunity, for kindling it is among the married. Among the contraceptive Catholic populations there is an awful spiritual deadness, which will last until they are weaned from their vices. The virtues of married chastity can be joyfully preached as never before.

I don’t know if it is necessary to add a warning. For the populations which are really suffering from the pressure of large families in hunger, natural family planning must be a boon in the possibility of regulating births without doing violence to human nature. Among the contraceptive populations of the West, I believe that the message ought to be ‘Get having babies! - you are going to ruin your country and often your personal future, by regarding, say, two as quite enough, when you have no great excuse. Remember that it had to be for grave reasons that you adopted a policy of extreme limitation not just for ease in your lives’. There is already a ghastly dearth of children in the West because of the present fashion.

I have been impressed by the claim that natural family planning does not go with a restriction for insufficient reason on having children. I can see that it operates in favour of acceptance of a child if it comes, and I can also see a particular reason why people say it ‘doesn’t work’ - namely that with people abstaining because on the whole they’d rather not have a baby again just yet, this resolution is quite likely to break down. I think therefore that it is worth asking people what they mean by ‘it’s not working’ - it may turn out that they mean just that. Now that is a rather good form of ‘not working’, and people show their chastity by their willing acceptance of a child when it comes.

But for pretty self-controlled people it would be possible to abstain from having children, for insufficient reason, by this method. Back in the nineteen-fifties, I think, there was a controversy in the correspondence columns of the London Times, about contraception. The Catholic parties to the debate declared the ancientness and constancy of the Church’s teaching, citing St. Augustine to prove their point. At that juncture, someone wrote saying: ‘But St. Augustine condemned the use of the safe period to avoid conception!’ There was a dead silence from the Catholic side. This made me read St. Augustine. What I found was that he condemned the Manicheans’ attempts in various ways never to have any children at all. Their methods included the use of what they took to be infertile times, as well as abortifacient drugs.

Doctrine has not changed; St. Augustine’s view still prevails. A determination never to have any children nullifies a marriage. This will of course be the reason for the new marriage services, in which the couple profess their willingness to accept children. If one determined never to have children, one could not flatter oneself that one was obeying Divine Law and following the teaching of the Church, just because one was successfully seeking to avoid children by rhythm or the ovulation method, and never never using contraceptives. The whole spirit in which one had sexual relations would be contrary to that law and that teaching. However, relatively speaking, rather few people will have that attitude, and it matters where you are coming from and what you are moving towards. At present it would be a tremendous push in the direction of virtue and Christian living to wean contraceptive populations from their vices by leading them into the practice of natural family planning.

Here the clergy are important. The clergy I’d like to speak to are, I believe, not here: the other ones, who do the big cop-out, I mean the great evasion, who despise the teaching of the Church and tell anyone who asks them ‘It’s just a matter of private conscience’. This is cowardly, and careless of people’s souls. Such clergy do not reflect how much damage they may be doing. There are things that are a ‘matter of private conscience’: for me it means one thing (for example) to treat such-and-such a person with conventional respect, for you it would mean another. But such matters are necessarily subject to reassessment according to circumstances, and a husband, say, who will not accept contraception when his wife is very keen on it might well be made to look an arrogant stubborn beast by his insistence on following his own ‘private’ conscience. I have known such cases.

How such clergy can be stirred up I don’t know. Clearly the bishops are in the strongest position to urge them to stop saying that, to become more serious and shoulder their pastoral task.

* Evidently a supplementary contribution to the Melbourne conference at which the previous paper was delivered. Unpublished typescript.

** i.e. of natural family planning: the Billings ovulation method.