Ecology of the Body, NFP, and "Adam and Eve After the Pill"

Judy Barrett, Respect Life coordinator for the Santa Rosa Diocese, reflects on the physical and moral evils of contraception:

It strikes me as a curious disconnect that in this health-conscious environment, millions of women daily pop birth control pills made of artificial hormones, taking the Pill for decades from their teens through menopausal middle age, with hardly a second thought about potential physical, psychological, and societal downsides. Think about it: healthy women take a daily dose of man-made hormones to control a perfectly natural bodily function—fertility—that occurs only a few days each month.

The Pill is deemed to be safe, and modern contraceptives are undoubtedly safer from a medical viewpoint that the early higher dose formulations. But every package of birth control pills comes with a fine-print insert warning of side effects that may include blood clots, strokes, breast cancer, cervical cancer, depression, weight gain and bleeding and advising that certain people should not take the drugs. If you watch television, you’ve undoubtedly seen commercials urging women who have suffered serious harm from several kinds of contraceptives to join in class action lawsuits against the makers of the drugs. So—how “safe” is safe? Yet, most people take it as a given that the physical side effects and health risks are outweighed by the benefits of the Pill.

Whether or not the Pill is safe begs some larger questions: Is it morally right?

She then makes the excellent point that the focus on religious liberty should not obsure the truth about contraceptives and the gift of NFP:

But while emphasizing the very real religious liberty threats, I wonder if we Catholics are letting a teaching moment slip by. One of the responsibilities of the Church and the faithful is to bear witness to the truth, to get the message of the Church out into the world. Sometimes we don’t do that as well as we could, either as the institutional Church or as the laity.

Here’s my point: Church teaching on contraception is morally correct, good for individuals, families and society at large, and it needs a fair hearing. One of the best kept secrets of the Church is natural family planning (“NFP”). NFP, properly understood, is the moral, holistic, drug free, natural, healthy, modern and scientific means of cooperating with God’s plan to achieve or postpone pregnancy. Every year the USCCB sets aside the week around the anniversary date of Humanae Vitae as Natural Family Planning Awareness Week. The website is a gold mine of information for individuals and parishes.

During NFP Awareness Week beginning July 22 we would do well to ponder and talk about serious questions that deserve to be examined in light of our faith. What are the consequences to individuals and society from the widespread use of birth control? What is the negative fallout of severing procreation from sexual activity? I suggest as a starting point a careful reading of Humanae Vitae. The writings of Professor Janet Smith are noteworthy. For an eye-opening look at the broader societal impact, I recommend Adam and Eve after the Pill: Paradoxes of the Sexual Revolution, the recently published book by Hoover Institution research fellow Mary Eberstadt.

Eberstadt's book has been receiving a large number of positive reveiws. The Weekly Standard recently reviewed Adam and Eve After the Pill: Paradoxes of the Sexual Revolution at length. Jonathan V. Last writes:

The scope of her work is depressingly grand, yet Eberstadt retains a winsome equanimity. She believes that the tide might yet recede, so long as we’re willing to face facts. And she believes—in another parallel she draws with the Cold War—that the right side need not be the losing side. As evidence, Eberstadt offers the amazing case of America’s double-reverse on pedophilia. It’s difficult to remember, but from the 1970s until the 1990s there was a sustained effort to legitimize pedophilia as merely another lifestyle choice. (Eberstadt coined the term “Pedophilia Chic” in these pages.) It nearly succeeded. But during the last 10 years something remarkable happened: As the near-universal condemnation of Roman Polanski showed in 2009, pedophilia was restigmatized.

Eberstadt suggests that this reversal was largely the byproduct of another scandal—the Roman Catholic church’s legacy of priestly abuse. The crimes committed within the church were irresistible to the church’s critics, many of whom were part of the sexual avant-garde and disliked the church specifically because of its teachings on sex. Empowering these critics, Eberstadt wryly notes, “logically created a whole new class of antipederasts.”

Read the entire review. Nancy Piccion, in her recent review on the Reading Catholic site, says:

This book is not enjoyable –in fact, reading it can be downright discouraging.  But it is a must-read in understanding, “the moral core of the sexual revolution (is) the abundant evidence that its fruits have been rottenest for women and children.”

Every single essay-chapter is important and stands alone.  It’s hard to pick out a best chapter, but “The Will to Disbelieve” is crucial in setting up the notion that society at large is largely ignoring the clear results of the sexual revolution, much the same way the “the moral facts about the Cord War remained disputed at the highest intellectual levels, especially on American campuses, until about two seconds before the Berlin Wall came down.”
Perhaps the only hopeful chapter of Adam and Eve After the Pill is “‘Pedophia Chic’ Then and Now” which outlines how just a few short decades ago, pedophilia was more in vogue and even defended in the public square such as mainstream magazine articles.  Ebertstadt writes that it is “a small case of small but real moral progress that bodes a little better for the youngest and most innocent among us, even as it confirms that the sexual revolution has made the world a more dangerous place for them.”

One of the most interesting reviews appeared in Christianity Today, the flagship magazine of American Evangelicalism. The reviewer, Sharon Hodde Miller, is a doctoral student at Trinity Evangelical Divinity School; she states:

Eberstadt's final chapter sheds a different kind of light on current evangelical conversations about sex. As often as these discussions are taking place, and as important as it is to affirm sex in marriage, there is a distinctly individualistic flavor to these teachings. While church leaders should encourage marital intimacy in the bedroom, married sex (and the teachings behind it) can still have negative social ramifications. Using contraception is not a private act, nor is it a neutral one. Eberstadt's book is Exhibit A of this reality.

Knowing this, pastors cannot address the widespread sexual brokenness in our culture simply by encouraging married sex. They must also address the ideology and theology behind the brokenness, and contraception is Ground Zero for those discussions.

Although Eberstadt's primary aim is to present the empirical evidence of the sexual revolution's fallout, her research serves an additional purpose. It also presents the empirical evidence for thinking carefully and soberly about embracing contraception. In this day and age, such a suggestion will seem ridiculous to Christians and non-Christians alike, but the data is undeniable. If we want to think seriously and Christianly about sex, then we need to think seriously about contraception.

For more information:

• Visit the website for Adam and Eve after the Pill
• Read the Introduction to Adam and Eve after the Pill
• "The Party's Over": A Catholic World Report interview with Mary Eberstadt