Logic is apparently not a prerequisite for philosophy professors at the London School of Economics. A number of bloggers have noted a recent story in the Journal of Medical Ethics, in which Luc Bovens claims that more babies die from the rhythm method than other forms of “contraception” (sic). (Link goes to the American Papists blog entry.) The article is full of half-truths and misrepresentations and errors of logic. For one thing, he claims that the “rhythm method” is the only method of “birth control” condoned by the Church. Not so. The Church promotes Natural Family Planning, not the rhythm method. Likewise Natural Family Planning relies on abstinence during all of a woman’s fertile period, unlike the old rhythm method.
But the most outrageous claim is that “the “rhythm method” may kill off more embryos than other contraceptive methods, such as coils, morning after pills, and oral contraceptives.” How, you may ask?
“[The rhythm method] may owe much of its success to the fact that embryos conceived on the fringes of the fertile period are less viable than those conceived towards the middle. We don’t know how much lower embryo viability is outside this fertile period, contends Professor Bovens, but we can calculate that two to three embryos will have died every time the rhythm method results in a pregnancy. Is it not just as callous to organise your sex life to make it harder for a fertilised egg to survive, using this method, as it is to use the coil or the morning after pill, he asks?”
Active hostility v. natural causes
Technorati Tags: abortion, bioethics, bioethics, contraception, natural family planning, NFP
Imagine the horrors you could justify using this kind of utilitarian calculus.
I learned in seminary that the disciples of the dissenters (Haring, Curran et. al.) often had little or no grasp of the biology of artificial contraception.
My own “moral” theology prof (a disciple of Curran—we called his intro course “Loopholes 101-102”) once asked us to write a paper on how we would advise a woman in the confessional who was using “the pill.” We knew that he wanted us to give a “nuanced” and “modern” spin on it, so I wrote a bit about the principle of double effect—that is, if the woman were using “the pill” only for its effect on regulating her irregular cycle, any contraceptive results might be considered unintended secondary effects and would therefore be not-immoral. It was my best attempt at getting out of putting down on paper what he was trying to goad us into (and therefore be able to call us “un-nuanced” and therefore unworthy of ordination!)
At any rate, he returned my paper and I found underlined in red the line about regulating her cycle, with a big question mark next to it. When I spoke to him later, it turned out he had no idea that this was one of the uses OB-GYN’s make of “the pill.”
I often wonder if any of the dissenters even know anything about female biology—or even care, for that matter.
Mike’s original posting, above, left me somewhat uneasy in its starkness. Let me elaborate.
While I am offer my wholehearted support to the couple that opts for a large family, there are, in fact, moral reasons for not choosing one. Pope Paul VI recognized this in Humanae Vitae, specifically in Paragraph 10 which I quote here:
That is, Mike is quite right when he says that, for a couple to use their knowledge of NFP to keep from bearing children at all is a mortal sin—but the sin is in the violation of the natural order of marriage, which is ordered toward both the unity of the spouses and toward children.
(to be continued…)
(continuation….)
But for a couple who, having cooperated with God in their marriage and having “accepted children lovingly from God,” also accept responsible parenthood for the children they have and decide to “keep[] a right order of priorities, recognize their own duties toward God, themselves, their families and human society” by choosing not to have any more children—I just don’t think that one can call them guilty of mortal sin.
I know this is controversial, so let me just wrap it up like this: does not one cooperate with God by prudentially using one’s knowledge as well as one’s fecundity to provide not only for future children but also for children already born?
I don’t condone artificial birth control, but prudential regulation of birth, using the faculties and natural provisions at hand, is surely a moral decision by parents.
I bring your attention to Paragraph 21 of the same document:
There are several serious reasons that come to mind immediately: having already a severely disabled child, who will require a disproportionate amount of the parents’ time and attention, might give rise to a prudential judgement to limit the number of children in the family; both parents carrying a specific recessive gene (let’s say for lupus or cystic fibrosis) that is almost certain to result in the birth of a child who is severely disabled; and there are many other specific reasons that present “serious reasons” that call couples to responsible parenthood.
Financial means (or lack thereof) are NOT one of the grave reasons that I usually find morally compelling; most often in the United States, parents who plead this as a reason for not having more children have been deluded into a materialistic approach to life, an approach that I do my best to disabuse them of.
That said, there do exist such dire financial situations, although I rarely am asked to be involved in such situations.