UNITED STATES
Bilgrimage
Jerry Slevin
Argument of Some U.S. Catholics That Church Position on Contraception Doesn’t Affect Poor Women in Developing Nations: What’s at Stake Here?
Perhaps I have not been clear in what I have written this week (here and here) about some of the fault lines that are apparent among American lay Catholics now that the pope’s comments about contraception and family planning in the Philippines have opened discussion of those issues all over again. I’m going to try again.
In her National Catholic Reporter article about the Catholic church’s complicity in the suffering of Glyzelle Palomar, Jamie Manson provides a clear, compelling case for why the issue of contraception (and the denial of contraceptives to women in developing nations) should concern all Catholics everywhere — as an ethical challenge: she writes,
For more than a decade, the Roman Catholic hierarchy obstructed the passage of the Reproductive Health Bill, a proposed Philippine law intended to bring free or subsidized birth control options (condoms, birth control pills and intrauterine devices) to government health centers, including remote areas where some of the poorest live. It would provide family-planning training for community health officers and require sex education in public schools. It also would vastly improve maternity care for poor women. Abortion and abortifacients would remain illegal. …
What I have been trying to draw attention to is not the response to issue of contraception of the Catholic hard right as represented by groups like Human Life International, which has long argued that contraceptives should be actively opposed for women in developing nations. I’m trying to focus on what is a quite typical and predictable response of a solid core of American Catholics who are pro-contraceptive-use, who use contraceptives themselves, but who want flatly to deny that the Catholic magisterial teaching about contraceptives has much effect at all on women and children in poor nations. I want to focus on the response of many American Catholic “liberals” to this discussion, in other words.
In comments made by some lay Catholics in the U.S. at NCR this week, you can see this position clearly developed, with claims, for instance, that a majority of Filipino women must be using contraception, since the birth rate in the Philippines is moderate. This claim flatly denies what both Jamie Manson and NCR’s editors are saying. In fact, it calls into question the integrity of these fellow lay Catholic witnesses to Catholic ethical truths in an important intraecclesial Catholic ethical discussion. It also flatly denies that the official teaching of the Catholic church vis-a-vis contraception has much effect at all on the lives of poor women and children in places like the Philippines.
Another tactic of this same set of lay American Catholics who themselves use contraceptives and who themselves approve of contraceptive use for others is the claim that the debate about contraception is a tired debate that reflects concerns of over-the-hill Vatican II lefties, while younger, with-it lay Catholics have transcended that post-Vatican II debate. Since lay Catholics in general, in the Western nations, no longer care what the magisterium says about these issues, and no longer listen when the magisterium talks about sex . . . .
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