By DONALD DeMARCO
The site is a Chicago abortion clinic. A young woman approaches the door of the clinic pulling a cart of boxes containing contraceptives. Aware of the presence of pro-life people, she raises her voice and exclaims, “I’m here to help women by providing them with birth control, women need this, couples need this, it will help reduce the number of abortions. I’m here to help!”
The situation does not permit dialogue. The woman is not open to the possibility that she might be more of a hindrance than a help. Her faith is in contraception, not conversation. Yet she, herself, despite her personal convictions, is in need of help. Helping the helpers can be a formidable task when one has to deal with self-righteousness.
What can one say to her? Are you really trying to help people or is your goal to mechanize sex? If that is the case, you are not helping people, but encouraging them to de-spiritualize their lives. The only way to help people is to have faith in them, not contraceptives, but this is immensely difficult because people do not always have faith in themselves. No doubt these words would have fallen upon deaf ears, avenues to the mind that have also, perhaps, been contracepted.
The modern world wants to simplify things. Therefore, it places its hope in mechanisms that work directly and immediately. Contraception belongs to the category of the TV remote, something that, presumably, can switch things on and off with little human involvement. “Mechanization has taken command,” to borrow a phrase from the historian Siegfried Giedion. It is a cultural phenomenon that Ralph Waldo Emerson noted some time ago when he declared: “Things are in the saddle and ride mankind.”
It is not easy to help people regain control of their lives. God’s grace is far more instrumental than a packet of pills. Real help is difficult; bogus help is counterproductive. No human being’s moral life was ever turned around for the good because of a product that was synthesized in a laboratory. We have become the victims of a limitless faith in technology. C.S. Lewis warned, in his mini-masterpiece, The Abolition of Man, that “if man chooses to treat himself as raw material, raw material he will be.”
That contraception will reduce the incidence of abortion is a plausible hypothesis. Yet, what seems plausible may not be real. Fishermen realized this long ago when they chopped in half clam-eating starfish. They were perplexed, however, when their clam harvest diminished at the same rate that their predators were being bisected. Finally, they lost faith in their plausible hypothesis when learned that starfish have the capacity to regenerate. Their strategy, seemingly so simple and realistic, was counterproductive. They were doubling their enemies.
The truth is, and it is amply documented, that contraception increases the incidence of abortion. This truth, most disturbing to contraception promoters, has been acknowledged by the U.S. Supreme Court. According to the 1992 Planned Parenthood v. Casey decision, “Abortion is customarily chosen as an unplanned response…to the failure of conventional birth control…people have organized intimate relationships and made choices that define their views of themselves and their place in society in reliance on the availability of abortion in the event that contraception should fail.” And “fail” is something that contraceptives often do.
There is product failure and user failure. Then there are the risks to the woman’s physical as well as psychological health. The life force is very strong. We see evidence of this when we notice blades of grass and various weeds breaking through the asphalt road and cracks in the cement sidewalk. It is not easy to prevent life from emerging even when the contraceptives are made of asphalt and cement.
Contraception is not restricted to biology. It also has a psychological implication. Intellectual contraception can close the mind to ideas just as conventional contraception can thwart the biological process of conception. Yet, just as contraception often fails to suppress the life force, intellectual contraception also has breakdowns when a merger between mind and reality takes place. There is much hope in this notion and it fully justifies the continuing discussion of the folly of placing personal faith in impersonal technologies.
The young woman with her arsenal of contraceptives was pouring fuel onto the fire, while pro-life witnesses were fenced off and prevented from offering any kind of argumentation. Nonetheless, reality cannot be fenced off indefinitely and will continue to make its enlightening appearances at the most unexpected moments.
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(Donald DeMarco is a senior fellow of Human Life International. He is professor emeritus at St. Jerome’s University in Waterloo, Ontario, and an adjunct professor at Holy Apostles College and Seminary in Cromwell, Conn., and a regular columnist for St. Austin Review. Some of his recent writings may be found at Human Life International’s Truth & Charity Forum.)
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