It's billed as a protest against Obamacare-mandated contraception coverage in health insurance plans offered to employees by Catholic-run institutions and Catholic-owned businesses. The Catholic Church teaches that the use of artificial means of birth control — pills, condoms, IUDs, sterilization, and the like — is against God's will and is therefore a sin.
I happen to think otherwise. So, apparently, do huge numbers of Catholic women. According to tables published by the Guttmacher Institute, using (among other sources) unpublished data from the 2006-2008 National Survey of Family Growth ...
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... 98 percent of Catholic women who have had sex have at some point in their lives used a contraceptive method other than natural family planning, aka the "rhythm method." (See also the Guttmacher Institute report "Countering Conventional Wisdom: New Evidence on Religion and Contraceptive Use," by Rachel K. Jones and Joerg Dreweke.) Among non-pregnant, non-post partum Catholic women who are sexually active and who do not wish to get pregnant:
- 32 percent rely on sterilization to avoid pregnancy
- 31 percent use a pill or other hormonal treatment
- 5 percent use an IUD
- 15 percent use condoms
- 4 percent use some other artificial method
- 2 percent rely on natural family planning to avoid getting pregnant
- 11 percent rely on no method whatever
Only the last two categories, comprising just 13 percent of the Catholic-and-sexually-active group, meet with Church approval — assuming, that is, that the women in those two categories are having sex only with their husbands.
Sterilization, pills, hormonal treatments to avoid pregnancy, IUDs, condoms, and all other approaches besides the rhythm method are forbidden to Catholic women by the Church. So 87 percent of the sexually active Catholic women who are in the "I don't want to get pregnant" group are voluntarily placing themselves in a state of sexual sin.
The statistics show that there's not a big difference between Catholic women and women of other faiths in this regard. True, women whose religion is "Other" (Buddhists, Muslims, Jews, etc.) are more likely to use condoms than women whose religion is Catholic, Mainline Protestant, Evangelical Protestant, or "None." Evangelical Protestant women are more likely to depend on sterilization. Other than that, there's not a dime's worth of difference in the numbers.
The Guttmacher Institute report I cited above says:
Sexual experience among never-married women of all religious affiliations is common: It is reported by four in 10 adolescents aged 15–19 and eight in 10 young adults aged 20–24. Among those aged 20–24, Evangelicals are slightly less likely to have had sex than are Catholics or Mainline Protestants.
And also:
Never-married women of reproductive age who attend religious services every week are less likely to have ever had sex than are those who attend less frequently (48% vs. 74–80%), and this association applies to both adolescents and young adult women. Similarly, never-married women with a religious affiliation who indicate that religion is very important in their daily lives are less likely to be sexually experienced than are those who indicate religion is less important (59% vs. 74–80%), and this association applies to both adolescents and young adult women.
To me, this last result indicates that the Church needs to work harder to get more fannies into pews, if it wants less illicit sex ... which means not railing against the sexual practices of potential Mass attendees. But instead, Archbishop Lori and the USCCB are conducting the Fortnight for Freedom, railing against government mandates that don't force anyone, Catholic or otherwise, to have illicit sex or to use artificial birth control when she has licit sex.
Huh? Go figure ...
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