This is Life!: Revolutions Around the Cruciform Axis

Must Reading: W. Bradford Wilcox, "The Facts of Life and Marriage"

W. Bradford Wilcox's The Facts of Life & Marriage is absolutely necessary reading. In effect, Wilcox shows how social science research done in the last thirty years has upheld the teaching of HH Pope Paul VI in his encyclical Humanae Vitae:

In Humanae Vitae, Pope Paul VI warned that the widespread use of contraception would lead to "conjugal infidelity and the general lowering of morality"; he also warned that man would lose respect for woman and "no longer [care] for her physical and psychological equilibrium"; rather, man would treat woman as a "mere instrument of selfish enjoyment, and no longer as his respected and beloved companion." Why? By breaking the natural and divinely ordained connection between sex and procreation, women and especially men would focus on the hedonistic possibilities of sex and cease to see sex as something that was intrinsically linked to new life and to the sacrament of marriage.

Wilcox addresses some of the evidence supporting Pope Paul VI's assertions.

What does this data tell us? Well, scholars from Robert Michael at Greeley’s own University of Chicago to George Akerlof at the University of California at Berkeley argue that contraception played a central role in launching the sexual and divorce revolutions of the late twentieth century.

Michael has argued that about half of the increase in divorce from 1965 to 1976 can be attributed to the “unexpected nature of the contraceptive revolution”—especially in the way that it made marriages less child-centered. Akerlof argues that the availability first of contraception and then of abortion in the 1960s and 1970s was one of the crucial factors fueling the sexual revolution and the collapse of marriage among the working class and the poor.

Wilcox summarizes the studies Akerlof has done by giving the bottom line:

The research of Nobel-prize-winning economist George Akerlof suggests that the tragic outworkings of the contraceptive revolution were sexual license, family dissolution, crime, and poisoned relations between the sexes—and that the poor have paid the heaviest price for this revolution. This research suggests that the Catholic Church’s firm commitment to the moral law in the face of dramatic and widespread dissent from within and without is being vindicated in precincts that are not normally seen as sympathetic to Catholic teaching.

This research also suggests that the dissenting agenda advanced by people like Andrew Greeley amounts to a false compassion. Greeley is right to claim that the Holy Spirit speaks through people’s experiences; but a sober look at our experience with contraception reveals that the Catholic Church’s magisterium, and the Christian tradition it conveys, best advances the earthly happiness of men, women, and children, not contraception.

There is more in the article, particularly on the evils of divorce and how children inescapably suffer from divorce, indeed have their lives ruined by it. And you will want to read the social research supporting all these claims.

I have for some time been coming to a different mind regarding contraception and am beginning to come to an understanding of how unChristian a practice it is. This research just underscores that move.

Posted by Clifton at January 7, 2005 11:57 AM | TrackBack