“Men and women are equal in dignity, complementary in mission.”—Pope Saint John XXIII Contraception as a Harmful Ideology One of the unintended side-effects of the widespread acceptance of contraception is the rejection of complementarity. Contraception furthers inequality, in that it symbolizes the attempt to make the woman function as a [...]
"Contraception cannot be an expression of total self‑giving, because in contraception, something is done to oneself to destroy the power to conceive a child. That same selfishness that wants to prevent the child by contraception will grow until it wants to kill the child already conceived. We must fight selfishness [...]
Surveys in many countries consistently show that most Catholics believe that decisions of conscience about contraception rightfully belong with those who must bear and rear children. The legitimacy of teaching requires that it be embraced by the faithful. Your teaching has no such legitimacy. It is a marginalized minority view [...]
Years ago, I had the privilege of accompanying Human Life International’s founder, Father Paul Marx, on several of his parish weekends. His homilies usually covered the complete range of Church teaching on sexuality, from contraception to abortion to homosexuality. Several times after these Masses, I witnessed irate parishioners publicly berate [...]
The moral doctrine of the Church judges human behavior, but is silent on chemical compounds. Most people do not know that it is permissible for Catholic women to use the birth control pill under carefully defined conditions when the intent is not to impair their fertility. Sometimes a young woman [...]
One of the most prominent features of the Culture of Death is its short-sightedness. It puts grand plans into action and makes sweeping promises about how many lives will be saved or improved by its initiatives. And then its architects are invariably shocked and surprised when a galaxy of negative [...]
There are times when priests, ministers and pro-life activists encounter what might be called the “ultimate hard case” involving condoms. This is the situation where a husband and wife are serodiscordant; one is HIV positive and the other is not. The question inevitably arises as to whether or not they [...]
Even with all of the different contraceptives and abortifacients on the market today, women forget to use their birth control, think their birth control method might have failed, or were coerced into sex. Many of these women resort to “emergency contraception,” a term that covers several drugs or devices that [...]
Some people refer to sexual sterilization as "Catholic birth control." This erroneous term, and the misguided assertions of a number of well‑known dissenters, has led to significant confusion regarding the Catholic Church's teaching on sterilization. Because it separates the marital act from the transmission of human life, sterilization is condemned [...]
If pressed, many “family planners” admit that in an ideal world, all young people would refrain from sexual activity before marriage and remain faithful to their spouses after. Such a society would have no HIV-AIDS or other sexually transmitted diseases, very little unwanted pregnancy (and few pregnancies among unmarried teens!), [...]
