Artificial birth control is an especially rampant and controversial practice in our culture. The issue is particularly relevant to campus life, since some Boston College students last year pushed for “prescription of birth control at Health Services [and the] availability of condoms on campus” under the euphemism of “sexual health.”
The problem with artificial contraception, according to the Catholic Church, is that it closes the sexual act to the possibility of new life. It says to one’s beloved, “Yes, I want you, but not all of you,” while saying to God, “I can take Your plan for creation, and make it a little better myself.”
In Mere Christianity, C.S. Lewis used an analogy to convey the perversity of strip shows, in which he described a situation where people gathered in a hall for the singular purpose of watching a chef who slowly revealed a dinner that had been covered. This fascination with food is clearly absurd. Likewise, strip shows manifest an unnatural obsession with sex.
To extend C.S. Lewis’s analogical reflection, I would like you to imagine a person who went to a very fine dinner. He samples everything, but only chews it. The taste is all that matters, so he spits the food out, and does not eat it. It is clear to see that such a man is a fool for just tasting food, and is demeaning his own dignity as a human by ultimately starving himself.
Contraception and sex outside marriage, similarly, take the pleasure of sex but throw out the beauty that this pleasure points to: the loving hand of God’s creative power touching down upon this earth to create a family. In marriage, contraception weakens the vows that a couple pledges to each other and to God. Outside of marriage, contraception furthers a society that is, quite literally, deadly by being against life.
What is the perspective that motivates proponents of artificial contraception? In Lewis’s The Problem of Pain, he described the “golden apple of selfhood, thrown among the false gods.” Proper stewardship mandated “that every player must by all means touch the ball and then immediately pass it on. To be found with it in your hands is a fault: to cling to it, death.”
The use of contraception fails to receive fully another’s love and reciprocate it. Rather, it grasps “the golden apple of selfhood.” There will always be those, who dissatisfied with the way of life mandated by the Truth, seek to create their own perverted conceptions of it. Boston College remains faithful to its Catholic identity, not the ever-shifting whim of popular opinion, and rightly rejects the adolescent idea of providing contraception to students.
It seems that the contraceptive mentality regards life as a given, not a gift—as something to control and not to value. This contraceptive attitude extends beyond the issue of birth control. We cleave to our resumes, our accomplishments and GPAs, our egos and curricula vitarum. We forget that we do not choose to wake up each morning, but that each day is a grace given by God. Will our culture continue to seize each day as if life is only experienced on our terms and not surrendered to its ultimate Author? Quite oppositely, we should be ready each morning to make our lives ones of self-gift, mirroring the very existence of Him in Whose image we are made.
