Nineteen sixty-eight was a crisis time for Catholics. It was the year Pope Paul VI published Humanae Vitae, his strong moral critique of birth control. The sexual embrace could not be understood, he insisted, simply as an exchange of personal affection. It is naturally procreative, and interference with its fertility, its “primary purpose,” is sinful. While it would be “natural” and acceptable to regulate conception by abstaining from sex during a woman’s monthly intervals of fertility, he argued, it would be “artificial” and immoral to prevent conception in any other way. Rhythm was in, contraception out.
Critics have tended to fault the pope for two misunderstandings. First, his distinction between “natural” and “artificial” birth control seems forced. Medication and surgery are both artificial, yet we understand them as an assist to nature. And there has been a chorus of testimony from faithful Catholics that they found the rhythm method anything but natural. Second, critics argue, the pope ignored the wise advice of a special preparatory panel, which counseled that the morality of sexual acts in marriage takes its meaning from the full story of a couple’s companionship and parenthood, and it does not depend upon the immediate fecundity of each sexual event.
Additionally, some have argued that hygiene and health care have drastically reduced infant mortality. Thus the ordinary fertility of most couples produces more surviving children than they can provide for, and more population than most nations can accommodate. If science and technology have increased the reproductive power of most households, what is wrong with science and technology helping to moderate that fertility through newly developed contraceptives?
The Prophetic Critique
More recently, though, Catholic critics fault the papal teaching (vigorously continued by John Paul II) for ignoring the prophetic and evangelical roots of Catholic tradition.
There are several aspects to this. The Gospels, for example, report Jesus’ prophetic rejection of the Jewish tradition of divorce. Matthew interprets his account (19:3–15) by putting it alongside the narrative in which Jesus discusses discipleship by rejecting the Law as sufficient for eternal life (vv. 16–29). In both discipleship and marriage, unlimited fidelity is required. Jesus invites his followers to pledge the same steadfast loyalty in marriage that the Father requires of them.
The Epistles (specifically Col. 3 and Eph. 5–6) suggest that the bond between husband and wife is patterned after the steadfast faithfulness between God and Israel, and between Jesus and his disciples. But if Jesus calls men and women to cleave to one another with that same unreserved commitment we know as faith, then it is achievable only by his grace. Christian marriage is a special undertaking in which we work out our baptismal fidelity to Jesus.
How does this relate to procreation? Church tradition has insisted that the Christian commitment between spouses is identical to the commitment to children. Impotence was considered an invalidating impediment to marriage, for marriage was essentially sexual and therefore procreative. A premarital agreement to avoid children altogether was also held to invalidate the marital consent from the outset, since openness to children was an intrinsic part of married life.
In the traditional teaching, then, a couple did not make one decision to marry and then a later decision to welcome children. A single decision committed spouses to set aside their individual preferences in favor of the other’s needs, and to do the same with their children’s needs. You were not ready to marry until you were ready to be a parent.
The first Christians recognized that this moral program was a radical advance on their own past. Jews had recognized four categories of needy people to whom the community of believers was obligated: widows, orphans, resident aliens, and paupers. These were people who could not long survive for want of a network of natural support, so they belonged to every Jew. The first Christian documents show that the earliest believers accepted that fourfold moral responsibility.
Then they pursued each obligation further. Beyond the helpless widow they saw the jeopardy of the wife, who could be discarded at the whim of her husband. Thus they followed Jesus in refusing to recognize divorce. Beyond the helpless orphan they saw the youngest children, unborn and newborn, in danger from unwelcoming parents, and they condemned abortion and infanticide. Behind the helpless foreigner living in their midst they saw the distant foreigner, the enemy, and accepted the Lord’s harsh teaching that they must make him their neighbor, too. Beyond the pauper they noticed the slave, and they honored Paul’s letter to Philemon, who was told that his slave was now his brother.
A life of Christian discipleship, then, meant that one drew near the Lord, not by sweet-talking him in prayer, but by serving him in those most needy. This service allowed no picking and choosing, since the helper promised that the needy person’s needs, not the giver’s preferences, would determine what had to be done.
This led to another uniquely Christian insight: Children do not need their parents as much as parents need their children. We commonly observe children’s growth and development. But the growth of parents is often far more rapid and significant than the growth of their children. Such growth is unlikely to have happened if the needs of children had not provoked them to emerge from selfishness into love. In a sense, children raise their parents more than parents raise their children.
The Most Troubling Family Development
In light of this Christian tradition, the most troubling development in family life in our time is not contraception, nor abortion, nor infanticide. It is the refusal of families, especially in the “developed” part of the world, to find a welcome in their hearts for their children.
Mother Teresa put this powerfully when she accepted the Nobel Peace Prize: “Poor people don’t need our pity and sympathy … they need us to treat them with dignity.… To me, the nations which have legalized abortion are the poorest nations.… They don’t want to feed one more child, to educate one more child. And so the child must die.”
Obviously, what is at stake in contraception is not the elimination of an unborn child. And even if, as I believe, contraception is not in itself morally objectionable, the unreflective ease with which American Christians have begun to fend off children betrays a selfishness that corrupts our sense of Christian marriage.
What happens? A couple may welcome a child, but not if he or she has a handicap. They may welcome a boy, but not another girl. They may welcome a child, but only after 10 or 15 years of developing their careers, by which time there is really no room in their hearts or lives for him. They may welcome a child, but begrudge the time and discipline she requires. They welcome children only on their increasingly self-protective terms.
There is nothing within our tradition of moral wisdom that obliges Christians to maximize their output of children. Yet there is something very sterile and sinister in our growing propensity to associate “choice” with reproductive decisions. What could be a more alien watchword than choice for a people who have promised that their children’s needs (needs, not wants) will govern their choices? In childbearing we forfeit many choices—and find joy.
Stewards Of Children
This leads to a final Christian insight on children. Psychologists and the media have reminded us recently of the inadequacy of the one-parent home. But the church has always been aware that the two-parent home is inadequate. In many traditions, godparents are a part of the baptismal service; the family is thereby augmented by fellow believers who pledge themselves to help the neophyte grow in faith, and who stand as proxies for all those dozens of people that each of us needs, besides our family, to be able to make our journey from selfishness into love.
Not only are we stewards of our own children; we all have to take a hand in raising each other’s children. By that I do not mean simply that we offer professional services to others’ children, but that we are committed to them. A need of theirs becomes an obligation of ours. Just as the bonds of promise (between spouses) are the moral equivalent of the bonds of blood (between parents and children), so the bonds of fellowship in faith entangle us in the fidelity ties that hold other families together.
When a husband and wife consider the prospect of bearing a child, they are really confronting their own partnership. Their readiness to open themselves to a new stranger draws its daring from their readiness to give in to one another just that much more. If marriage is the embodiment of our discipleship, then childbearing is the test of our Christianity.
Children are burdens. They are the heaviest burdens, since you can never calculate or control just what they are going to require from you. But isn’t that just as true of spouses? And isn’t it true of the Lord?
Eugene H. Peterson is pastor of Christ Our King Presbyterian Church, Bel Air, Maryland, and author of A Long Obedience in the Same Direction (InterVarsity) and Answering God (Harper & Row), both of which are about the Psalms.
