A couple of days after I wrote a post on the HHS ruling concerning birth control, health insurance, and religious-affiliated institutions, and the outrage by the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops and others that followed, President Obama offered a compromise. The Catholic Health Association of the United States approved the President’s new plan, saying, “the framework developed has responded to the issues we identified that needed to be fixed.” Not so the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops, which remains opposed to any compromise.
I will not rehearse the many reasons why many like me think Catholic-affiliated institutions, such as hospitals and universities accepting federal tax dollars, should not be exempt from federal rulings regarding birth control for employees. Instead, I’d like to turn to a consideration of the concept of natural law. This, after all, is the basis for the bishops’ opposition to birth control.
“Natural law,” generally speaking, is the idea that there exists a universal, unchanging moral realm underlying all societies, no matter their particular expression or manifestation in history. In Catholic theology, natural law has a long, venerable tradition, much of it derived from the philosophy of Thomas Aquinas.
Yet the idea of natural law itself was hardly invented by Catholics. In Western thought, it first appears with the ancient Greeks. We see it in the political philosophy of Plato and Aristotle, who ascribed to an idea of natural law radically different from that in Catholic theology. For the ancient Greeks, natural law is an all encompassing and universal principle that was so integral to their idea of an ordered universe that even their gods (who oftentimes behaved recklessly or even wantonly) were subject to its force. With Catholic natural law, on the other hand, natural law and the divine merge into one.
Modern political philosophers such as Thomas Hobbes and John Locke rejected ancient theories of natural law in favor of modern ideas of natural rights. Instead of finding moral ground in natural law, they found it in the principle of the rights of individuals against institutions such as the monarchy, the state, or even the Church. Hobbes and Locke based their entire contract theories not on natural law, but on the new, modern idea of natural rights. To take just one example of the idea of natural rights these modern political philosophers introduced to us, consider the value we place on the “right to private property.” This comes straight out of Locke.
Modern political philosophy, based on rights, not natural law, flowered during the Enlightenment. The Catholic Church did not admire the Enlightenment’s elevation of reason, and its accompanying concentration on rights, sticking instead with “natural law”— a divine law reason alone could never fully grasp.
Today we live with an unresolved tension between modern natural rights and older ideas about natural law. This explains at least in part our quarrels over birth control and abortion. While “pro-choice” advocates defend the “rights” of women, and “pro-life” advocates defend the “rights of the unborn,” Catholic Bishops defend the idea of natural law. To a large extent, we’re talking past one another because many times we’re talking about different things.
Now let me apply all this abstract talk about natural law versus natural rights to the current fracas over HHS requirements regarding employers, insurance and birth control.
When the Pill hit the streets in the late 1960s, Pope Paul VI reacted by issuing his “Humanae Vitae” (1968). The document reaffirms the Catholic teaching that using contraception of any sort (including coitus interruptus) in order to prevent new human beings from coming into existence is a violation of natural law. When it comes to sex, Catholic theology asserts that God has a design, and that design—the “natural law” regarding sex—is that sex is for procreation.
Sexual pleasure, by the Catholic account, is not in and of itself a good. Instead, it’s a “blessing from God” only if experienced within the bounds of marriage, and even then only if it’s accompanied by the possibility that conception will occur. Even within marriage, then, sexual pleasure is “harmful” (to the love between a husband and wife) if it goes against the “natural” purpose of sex, which again, is procreation. Hence, Catholic doctrine, although permitting the rhythm method, forbids every other method of birth control.
That over 90 percent of American Catholic women use birth control at some point in their lives may not please the bishops. Understandably, however, it does not affect their principled stand, which is to adhere to Catholic natural law that teaches sexual pleasure accompanied by contraception is an evil. I quote directly from an official Catholic Web site:
The Church has always taught the intrinsic evil of contraception, that is, of every marital act intentionally rendered unfruitful. This teaching is to be held as definitive and irreformable. Contraception is gravely opposed to marital chastity, it is contrary to the good of the transmission of life (the procreative aspect of matrimony), and to the reciprocal self-giving of the spouses (the unitive aspect of matrimony); it harms true love and denies the sovereign role of God in the transmission of human life (Vademecum for Confessors 2:4, Feb. 12, 1997).
Most people today who follow even watered-down Enlightenment ideas of “natural rights” find Catholic teleological talk about the purpose of sex unpersuasive. In our Enlightenment-fueled conviction that everyone has the right to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness, having sex while using contraception is a part of freedom. It’s a choice. It’s a right.
For those who do not ascribe to Christian ideas of original sin, the whole idea of a ban on contraception may make no sense. Even for many Christians, enjoying a vigorous sex life with a partner while using birth control ranks among the more pleasurable, direct and fulfilling ways to express mutual love.
Here, then, lies the deep and irresolvable problem: Whether considered as metaphor or real history, the long ago situation of God expelling Adam and Eve from the Garden of Eden that explains “original sin” no longer holds sway. I don’t mean to suggest that people think they never do bad things; they simply no longer tend to think they are inherently bad. If anything, we moderns are more apt to consider ourselves inherently good—or at the very least, born as blank slates—than born with original sin. Which means that when we do bad things, we are as apt to blame them on corrupt institutions (or society itself) as on ourselves.
Because many now understand the moral realm as a mishmash of both natural law and natural rights, it’s unlikely we’ll see a resolution to the arguments over birth control and abortion any time soon.
