Sex, Science, Nature and ‘Choice’

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Four years ago, I wrote a 4,000-word essay called “The Pill at 50: Unhappy Un-Birthday,” which included this observation:

The Pill fostered a prevalence of the belief that sex without pregnancy is normal. This utterly unnatural idea is the foundation of the Contraceptive Culture.
Throughout human history, recognition of the natural connection between sex and procreation was fundamental to society’s laws, customs, attitudes and behaviors in regard to relationships between men and women. These traditions had varied from place to place, and shifted slowly from time to time, but in all times and all places, social norms had been founded on the understanding that sex and pregnancy were intrinsically linked. Indeed, from a strictly biological perspective, reproduction is the sole purpose of sex.
The Contraceptive Culture, by contrast, is based on the negation of what we may rightly call natural sexuality. . . .

You can (and certainly I wish you would) read the whole thing, because so few Americans now have any memory of life before the advent of the Contraceptive Culture, the origin, history and goals of which are generally distorted by academics and the media. For example, it is often claimed or implied that the development and promotion of oral contraceptives in the 1960s was undertaken in order to “liberate” women; in fact, this project was funded by billionaires (especially David Rockefeller) who were fanatically devoted to a eugenics-influenced vision of population control. (See Donald L. Critchlow’s excellent 2001 history, Intended Consequences: Birth Control, Abortion, and the Federal Goverment in Modern America.) The arguments that sold The Pill as a particular blessing to women — and which, by obverse correlation, portrayed pregnancy and motherhood as traumatic burdens to be avoided if at all possible — was promulgated by public-relations specialists hired by Rockefeller and other soi-disant “philanthropists” who shared his population-control agenda.

Because this history is so little known, and because the beliefs of the Contraceptive Culture have become so widely accepted, people are often shocked to be told the truth and sometimes become furiously outraged by those of us who dissent from the now-common way of thinking. Consider liberals’ insane reaction to the Supreme Court’s Hobby Lobby decision, and also how they have reacted to conservatives’ responses. Here is what Rush Limbaugh said Wednesday:

We had a caller yesterday that asked me this question: “When did birth control pills become so important to the human condition the federal government requires every insurance policy to cover them?” Eye exams, dental exams, dental work are not mandated by Obamacare, but contraception is, birth control pills are. Which is worse, to go blind from lack of regular eye exams or to get pregnant? . . .
[I]n the normal, everyday flow of events, pregnancy requires action that has consequences. Yet we treat it as a great imposition that women need to be protected from. It’s a sickness, it’s a disease, it’s whatever, and there’s gotta be a pill for it. Yet they wouldn’t have the problem if they didn’t do a certain thing. It’s that simple.

Limbaugh then went on to talk about Democrats and their dishonest “War on Women” rhetoric, but what he said about pregnancy being the result of an “action that has consequences” was the lead quote in Caitlin MacNeal’s article at the liberal site Talking Points Memo, which cited Limbaugh as an example of “conservative slut-shaming.”

What you see is how something artificial becomes perceived as “normal” simply by being common, and how the New Normal is then taken for granted as, with the passage of time, people simply forget that it was ever any other way. Interstate highways, air conditioning, cable TV, the Internet — my kids can’t imagine life without any of those things, although these are all relatively recent developments.

The Interstate highway system began construction in the 1950s, yet as recently as the late 1970s — when I was a senior in high school — I-20 had not yet been completed between Atlanta and Birmingham. People my age (54) and older are able to remember what long-distance auto travel was like before the Interstate system existed, and we’re also able to remember when you made such trips in a car that didn’t have air-conditioning. Until the 1970s, if the motel or restaurant you stopped at had air-conditioning, this was a feature that the proprietors were certain to advertise on the marquee, along with “Color TV” (a novelty introduced in the 1960s.)

Nobody wants to go back to the days of black-and-white TV, nor is anyone proposing to ban artificial contraception. Yet the influence of the Contraceptive Culture is such that some people seem to have entirely forgotten that the biological teleos of sex — its natural and organic result, its scientific purpose — is reproduction.

After four decades of rhetoric about “choice,” and two decades of lectures about “safe sex,” younger Americans apparently assume that it is normal for sex to be sterile, and that for sex to produce its natural result (pregnancy) is something weird.

As Limbaugh said, people now think of fertility as a “sickness,” a “disease” that requires medical treatment. So deeply ingrained has this view become among some young people that a sex educator in Massachusetts found herself accused of being “unintentionally heteronormative,” which made her realize that her college students had “never thought about sex in terms of biology or reproduction”!

So here we have a court decision, brought about as a consequence of an ObamaCare mandate, which says simply that an employer may refrain from providing insurance coverage for certain types of birth control. That’s it — no one is being forbidden to purchase birth control, nor are any forms of birth control going to be outlawed by this decision. It is strictly a question of whether the federal government has the authority to mandate insurance coverage for birth control. Yet to judge from the reaction of some liberals, the Surpreme Court has unleashed the Sex Police upon us, and we are on the verge of a return to the Dark Ages, when people were expected to pay for their own birth control. It’s as if liberals believe birth control is a right guaranteed by the Constitution.

Now they’re protesting by handing out condoms in front of Hobby Lobby, defending your right to keep and bear no offspring.





 

106 comments

  2. You will note, the Progressives have been successful in separating the family unit, i.e. married mom and dad with kids, into its components and denying any meaningful relationship among any of them. That is, sex is unrelated to marriage and to children and to family, such that idiots on MSNBC can opine that our kids “belong to society, not parents or their family.” The mythical Julia can procreate and live outside the confines of marriage supported solely by Daddy Government. Once birthed, her child never appears again in the narrative. Marriage is not something to be protected by society but disposed of at will or opened to those who cannot on their own produce a new generation. The foundations must be destroyed, because the State brooks no competition.

  3. Why do “progressives” hate babies?

    Why do they talk about pregnancy as if it were a curse, and motherhood as if it meant victimhood?

    Why do they get so angry when someone suggests maybe we shouldn’t allow doctors to dismember an unborn baby in the womb, then suck out his tiny broken body and dump it as medical waste?

    What is it about little children that liberals find so hateful?

  5. Indeed, because in one method of “natural” birth control, the woman must have very regular, predictable cycles and must keep a very accurate, daily record of her body temperature (first thing in the morning before getting out of bed) and condition of her cervical mucus in order to determine when ovulation is occurring. The couple must, then, cooperate in being willing to forego a few minutes of pleasure within several days of ovulation, and instead, show their love for each other in some other way, in the interest of building a strong, long-term, loving relationship. Since many women’s cycles are not that predictable and/or many women do not wish to keep such detailed records and/or many couples would rather not have to consult a calendar, a variety of other methods of preventing ovulation or preventing sperm from reaching the egg are available. Some of the hormone pills prevent ovulation (but many of those also prevent implantation), and many of the barrier methods attempt to prevent sperm from getting up into the uterus, either by introducing a physical barrier between the penis and the uterus (cervical cap, diaphragm, condom) or by killing the sperm (spermicidal chemicals inserted into the vagina). However, none of these methods is a substitute for willpower and personal responsibility, and will not prevent conception if the people involved do not choose to discipline themselves to “make it work.”

    In truth, the only totally effective method of preventing making a baby (short of sterilization) is abstinence, yet in our culture, we’ve brought up whole generations of young people taught that they couldn’t possibly be expected to have the personal willpower and responsibility for their actions to make that work.

  6. What is it about little children that liberals find so hateful?

    Divided loyalties. It is natural for parents to love and care for their children, rearing them to the point where they are ready to go into the world as adults. Further, children are to be a blessing to their parents in their parents’ dotage. As such, the family is the ultimate unit of social cohesion from which all others are derived. It’s not a stretch to think that if children are deemed to be some sort of loathsome imposition, people will either not have them or alternatively will look at them differently. Children cease to become eternal souls given to parents as a blessing and become merely accessories in one’s life, no different than a vacation home in the Hamptons or a new bass boat. From there, it’s an easy hop to the place where the all-loving ( / sarc ) State provides all and is the object of 100% of its subjects’ affections.

  8. it is only my religion that prevents me from agreeing with our liberal friends that the best thing they could do for society is to avoid reproduction.

  9. The Interstate highway system began construction in the 1950s, yet as
    recently as the late 1970s — when I was a senior in high school — I-20
    had not yet been completed between Atlanta and Birmingham. People my age
    (54) and older are able to remember what long-distance auto travel was
    like before the Interstate system existed, and we’re also able to
    remember when you made such trips in a car that didn’t have
    air-conditioning.

    Yeah, made the trip from San Diego, CA to Miami, FL in 1969, the summer after Camille. Me and my brothers made the trip riding in the camper. Pissing out the back door as we were traveling down the highway because Dad wasn’t going to stop for another hour or three. The only ventilation we had was the side windows and the top vent. It was hot, but we were tough and we could stand it. I was eleven then.

    We were taught to respect our elders and whomever we met, was either Mr., Mrs. or Miss so and so. We were also taught to respect women and girls. But we were also taught that respect was a two way street.

    Too bad those values aren’t taught anymore, otherwise, we wouldn’t be in such dire straits.

  12. I recently had the displeasure of eavesdropping on some college kids (from our church youth group!) laughing about how “uptight” people were about sex. “What was wrong with them?” They wondered. And their conclusion? “Religion made them insane.”

    I had to inform them that when people in the 1800s had sex, it resulted in offspring.

    College: as always, filling the world with narcissistic idiots.

    They have managed to create a sexual ethic that requires A LOT of equipment! Abortion clinics, which have to be built with construction machines; pills, which have to be manufactured; rubbers, which have to be produced in factories, which have to be constructed, etc.

    Gone are the “free things”: Judgment, brains, forethought, sobriety. None of these things have a “carbon footprint,” you know!

  13. We must remember that science is not always our friend.

    It used to be that the people practicing abstinence were the smart and responsible people. Now that has flipped. Smart and responsible means having sex with unnatural equipment to prevent nature from following its course. To preach abstinence is now considered the height of irresponsibility.

    What happened was that science decided to favor the lazy and short-sighted, thus marginalizing the responsible and intelligent.

  14. Here’s a liberal conundrum: *apparently* to “suppress” your desires is “unnatural”, yet those late-term abortions where babies are sometimes born alive with bad chemical burns are completely, utterly, and totally natural.

  15. Yeah, I love the fact that “some teens will make a mistake in that area” has morphed into “you might as well not even try.”

    “Nobody gets through their teen years without having sex. Everybody does it.” Well slap my ass and call me a liar if you have to, because I managed just fine to not have sex. As did a majority of the girls I went to high school with (most of whom are now in stable, happy marriages, complete with a few kids). And I’m still waiting. It’s not easy, but then, most worthwhile things aren’t.

    I don’t know if anybody here read it, but Steven Crowder did a great piece on how he and his wife waited and how people kept telling them both they’d never make it to the honeymoon. The comments on that article were illuminating. Several people felt like Steven Crowder was looking down on them and putting himself up as a better person because he waited and they didn’t. They sounded a lot like they felt guilty and just needed somebody to redirect that onto. I liked how one person put it: it’s his victory lap, his way of telling all the people who thought he’d slip up that he was stronger than his biological urges.

    Willpower is a lot like muscle; it has to be exercised constantly or it atrophies. Keep your willpower in good shape and you have far less crap to worry about because of stupid impulsive mistakes. You may still do stupid things occasionally, but you’re far less likely to do those stupid things if you have good willpower. And the stupidites you do manage to get into are few and far between.

  16. In yet another ironic demonstration of the left’s own ignorance and misunderstanding of the issues, if Hobby Lobby weren’t still required to pay for the coverage, they would probably thank protestors for providing free contraception to their employees.

  17. It’s all about them, and having the freedom to do what they want, when they want.
    Children impose responsibility or costs upon their behavior, so they recoil from them.
    Children are very low on their list of priorities, despite what they say.

  18. More liberal magical thinking.
    The inconvenient parts of reality are forgotten or ignored.
    Where were Julia’s family? The father of her child/children? Her boyfriend/husband/”partner?”
    All are messy details that cloud the narrative of the love affair between her and the state.
    Creepy.

  19. This goes beyond the question of contraception. Fundamentally, social liberalism has evolved to the point that the starting point for all decision-making around sexual behavior is that it is a human right to have sex, at any time, under any circumstances, without consequences. And that right to consequence-free sex is what drives the demand for “abortion without apology” as a form of back-up birth control. And that starting point means that they truly can’t understand the pro-life perspective that the right to life of the unborn child (and, as well, the right to be born into a stable family situation) drives sexual ethics rather than the reverse.

    See http://janetheactuary.blogspot.com/2013/11/does-common-ground-still-exist-sorry.html which I wrote in response to a “women share the very good reasons they had abortions” story floating around a while back.

  20. Yeah, I love how people who believe in “free love” supposedly don’t want to stifle nature… and then wind up getting abortions.

    They’re geniuses.

  23. Being pregnant with my kids were the happiest times in my life. I felt honored, and privileged, to participate with my husband and God in creation. Feeling the children growing inside me was an incomparable thing. I pity any woman who looks upon it differently. Frankly, I wish I’d had more kids. I thought I couldn’t afford them, but I now realize that we would’ve found a way. And any sacrifice would’ve been worth it.

  24. Isaiah 5:20

    20 Woe to those who call evil good
    and good evil,
    who put darkness for light
    and light for darkness,
    who put bitter for sweet
    and sweet for bitter.

  26. Haha! I remember those days. I grew up in Florida (where I still live.) No air conditioning in the house, none in the care, none at school. I was an adult before I experienced the wonder of air conditioning for the first time.

  27. Good thing you rebuked them. Maybe it’ll “take”. Not holding my breath, though.

  28. Evidently, sex is the starting point of everything. Which is why there are so many people who praise others for the type of sex they have. I have said this many times: I simply do not care who is having sex with whom, and how. I don’t care how homosexuals are “doing it”, I don’t care how straight people I know are “doing it”, and I don’t care how celebrities or people on TV are “doing it.” Cripes, why does EVERYTHING have to revolve around sex???

  31. As a friend of mine has put it, the sexual revolution is over, and men won.

    We now have the ability to copulate with as many women as we wish, with a very greatly reduced chance of knocking them up. The odds that we will be hit with 18 years of child support for screwing the redhead we met at the bar are pretty low now, and because those odds are now so low, we meet far less resistance from the cute redhead at the bar to the notion of a meeting of the loins.

    This was all supposed to make us happier, but somehow, I have missed the evidence that such was the result. It has succeeded in making us less mature.

  32. Catholic employers must protect their religions beliefs. I urge all good Catholic employers to demand an exemption from immigration laws.The government can not pick and choose who gets what religious beliefs.—-“The more prosperous nations are obliged, to the extent they are able, to welcome the foreigner in search of the security and the means of livelihood which he cannot find in his country of origin. Public authorities should see to it that the natural right is respected that places a guest under the protection of those who receive him.” Catholic Catechism, 2241.

    In January 2003, the U.S. Catholic Bishops released a pastoral letter on migration entitled, “Strangers No Longer: Together on the Journey of Hope.” In their letter, the Bishops stressed that, “[w]hen persons cannot find employment in their country of origin to support themselves and their families, they have a right to find work elsewhere in order to survive. Sovereign nations should provide ways to accommodate this right.” No. 35. The Bishops made clear that the “[m]ore powerful economic nations…ave a stronger obligation to accommodate migration flows.”

  33. The same reason many find poor families with kids gum on the bottom of their shoes, or think the migrant children should be shot at the border.

  34. There is so much wrong (in both senses of that word) with your reasoning in this piece that it’s hard to know where to begin, & a full debunking is not worth my time. But I cannot let your comments about the natural historical link between sex and pregnancy go unchallenged. You write, quoting yourself:

    “Throughout human history, recognition of the natural connection between sex and procreation was fundamental to society’s laws, customs, attitudes and behaviors in regard to relationships between men and women. These traditions had varied from place to place, and shifted slowly from time to time, but in all times and all places, social norms had been founded on the understanding that sex and pregnancy were intrinsically linked. Indeed, from a strictly biological perspective, reproduction is the sole purpose of sex.”

    This is simply untrue — flat-out falae. That “understanding that sex and pregnancy were inextricably linked existed ONLY for women. Yes, when women had sex, before artificial contraception, they did so always in full conscious awareness that they could get pregnant. But the men who had sex with women NEVER had to make that connection. Certainly some men did, but it was entirely optional. For women it was a risk they couldn’t possibly forget. Men, on the other hand, could and did have sex for pleasure, for the fun of it, sex for sex’s sake alone, any time they wished — and I seriously doubt that most men understood sex to be engaged in for the purpose of procreating, at all. This is just reality. The biological, inevitable, overwhelming link between having sex and having a baby has never been mutually and equally understood by both men and women. THAT is what artificial contraception did for women: allowed them to have sex and treat sex the same way that men did. And THAT is the truth behind the current opposition to birth control.

  36. Of course not. They should be safely turned back at the border. Any parent who would use their child as a human shield to try to illegally sneak into another country is a bad parent.

  39. When my father was stationed at Adair in Oregon, we made an annual pilgrimage back to TN to see family. It was 2-lane US and State roads for the overwhelming majority of the trip, and no air conditioning in July and August.

    I well remember my father going to Sears in Nashville in 1965 and having air conditioning installed in the car. It made the trip back bearable, although it still took 4 days to go from Nashville, Tennessee back to Albany, OR.

  43. You said a lot, but you really did not deal with the core of what RSM said.

    “Throughout human history, recognition of the natural connection between
    sex and procreation was fundamental to society’s laws, customs,
    attitudes and behaviors in regard to relationships between men and women.”

    This was true. SOME men were cads, but they were not accepted in polite society. While there have been periods where promiscuous sex became prominent, the overwhelming majority of history is characterized as RSM pointed out in the quote above. In US society, what you claim has been the case only in the last 30-40 years.

    No one can seriously make the claim that women are still able to have sex the same way some man-slut can. In actuality, the man-slut is an empty soul because illicit sex empties a person spiritually. I’ve seen such men fall for a girl, marry her, then utterly fail as a husband because they don’t have the spiritual ability to sustain a lifetime loving relationship with a woman. The same applies to a woman-slut as well.

    Where your ilk make a serious mistake is thinking that sex is just pleasure and PIV (or some perversion of that). It is far beyond that as it is an emotional and spiritual act as well. Illicit sex empties, while licit sex, and that’s within the bounds of a covenant marital relationship, fills. Marital sex aids in the cementing the bond between two people who accept the love of their spouse and return it.

    What you seem to be advocating is simply as damaging as it is damning. God designed things to be a certain way, and the design is exemplified in Genesis chapter 2 when God brought Eve to Adam.

    In the final analysis, the sexual revolution gave nothing, but took much away. The people that led it, however, were determined to rebel against God, and those people that join them are taking the same curse upon themselves. In the end, it leads only to death. Eternal death.

  48. And people laughed at Pope Paul VI:

    Responsible men can become more deeply convinced of the truth of the doctrine laid down by the Church on this issue if they reflect on the consequences of methods and plans for artificial birth control. Let them first consider how easily this course of action could open wide the way for marital infidelity and a general lowering of moral standards. Not much experience is needed to be fully aware of human weakness and to understand that human beings—and especially the young, who are so exposed to temptation—need incentives to keep the moral law, and it is an evil thing to make it easy for them to break that law. Another effect that gives cause for alarm is that a man who grows accustomed to the use of contraceptive methods may forget the reverence due to a woman, and, disregarding her physical and emotional equilibrium, reduce her to being a mere instrument for the satisfaction of his own desires, no longer considering her as his partner whom he should surround with care and affection.

    Finally, careful consideration should be given to the danger of this power passing into the hands of those public authorities who care little for the precepts of the moral law. Who will blame a government which in its attempt to resolve the problems affecting an entire country resorts to the same measures as are regarded as lawful by married people in the solution of a particular family difficulty? Who will prevent public authorities from favoring those contraceptive methods which they consider more effective? Should they regard this as necessary, they may even impose their use on everyone. It could well happen, therefore, that when people, either individually or in family or social life, experience the inherent difficulties of the divine law and are determined to avoid them, they may give into the hands of public authorities the power to intervene in the most personal and intimate responsibility of husband and wife.

    Humanae vitae, Section 17.

    A celibate priest, yet he could foresee exactly what was going to happen

  49. Miss Kattenberg wrote:

    THAT is what artificial contraception did for women: allowed them to have sex and treat sex the same way that men do, and always have. And THAT is the truth behind the current opposition to birth control.

    And there we have it, put as plainly as could be, that contraception has enabled women to become as irresponsible as men . . . . and that is considered to be some sort of good, and some kind of gain for our society.

    Of course, Miss Kattenberg erred when she wrote:

    That understanding that sex and pregnancy were inextricably linked existed ONLY for women.

    No, the understanding was always there, but the consequences are different for men and women. That is why society, why every society of which we have an knowledge at all, instituted marriage, to create a society in which the natural results of copulation, children, could be properly reared and cared for and brought to adulthood. Marriage certainly limits the “freedom” of men, restricts their ability to copulate with any woman he sees, and tries to restrain him to having sex with only one woman, because that is what society needs to progress and survive.

    We were told, of course, that the pill would lead to a better world, a world of sexual happiness and fulfillment, where the worries of unintended pregnancy would be washed away. What we actually got was a society in which more than one out of every three children born is to an unmarried woman, where childhood poverty is increasing because so many are living in families without a father present, and where we are on a slow degeneration as a culture, with more people than ever locked up because they are criminals, where half of marriages end up in divorce, and dropout rates around 50% in our big cities.

    Everything the advocates of contraception predicted for us has turned out to have been wrong!

    And who got it right? Pope Paul VI got it right, when he said that a contraceptive culture would lead to less, not more, respect for women.

  50. Thank you for putting my comment back, Stacy.

    “SOME men were cads, but they were not accepted in polite society.”

    Quartermaster, I don’t know where you get this idea from but you’re mistaken. History is filled with “cads,” as you put it, at all levels of society, very much including “polite society.” Male scions of aristocratic families got maids pregnant ((not always with the maids’ consent), kings and princes and even popes had children out of wedlock and did not always acknowledge them or treat their mothers decently much less lovingly. I don’t think you can have read very widely or deeply if you don’t know this. Barbara Tuchman’s “A Distant Mirror” is only one of numerous histories that mention this. I can assure you that they weren’t publicly shamed with terms like “slut” and “whore,” either, as one reader called Caitlin MacNeal for merely opposing the Hobby Lobby ruling, with no knowledge whatsoever about her personal life. You used the word “man-slut” in your comment, but I have rarely if ever known a sexually active male to be described in such vile and filthy language.

    You don’t have to limit yourself to the realm of nonfiction, either. If you agree that literature broadly reflects the norms and social realities of its time and place, all you have to do is read “Tess of the D’Urbervilles” to know how differently women and men were treated for illicit relationships.

    I have plenty to say about your belief that loving, physically and spiritually satisfying sexual relationships outside marriage are not possible, but I’ll save that in the interest of keeping this relatively short.

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