The Procreative Norm

In Are We Just Wrong about Sex Today?, I said there used to be a core principle of our sexual ethics called the 'procreative norm'. That was before the Sexual Revolution of the 1960s. 'Procreative norm' is a fancy way of saying that sexual activity, in order to be moral, had to have a due reverence for the begetting and rearing of children.

So just sex — sex that was morally right — was in those days always to be between married spouses. It had to be 'open to procreation', meaning that no artificial means of avoiding pregnancy were to be used. The recently introduced (1960) birth control pill was forbidden to Catholics by church teaching. Pope Paul VI's encyclical letter Humanae Vitae in 1968 affirmed this teaching ... and many modern Catholics erupted in protest.

In 1973, the Roe v. Wade decision of the U.S. Supreme Court legalized abortion ... another way of keeping sex from yielding live babies.

Until now, I personally have had a hard time accepting the teaching of Humanae Vitae, since it has seemed to me that 'openness to procreation' is a slippery notion best left to individual couples to be put into practice in the light of their own consciences.


Arguably, though, severing the tether connecting sex to procreation has ushered in a raft of society-wide woes:

1. HIV/AIDS has killed over 25 million people worldwide since 1981, when AIDS was first reported.
2. Though abortion should, in President Clinton's words, be 'safe, legal, and rare', Abort73.com reports that 'In 2008, approximately 1.21 million abortions took place in the U.S., down from an estimated 1.29 million in 2002, 1.31 million in 2000 and 1.36 million in 1996. From 1973 through 2008, nearly 50 million legal abortions have occurred in the U.S.'
3. TopTenReviews.com reports that 'According to compiled numbers from respected news and research organizations, every second $3,075.64 is being spent on pornography. Every second 28,258 internet users are viewing pornography. In that same second 372 internet users are typing adult search terms into search engines. Every 39 minutes a new pornographic video is being created in the U.S.'
4. According to RAINN, the Rape, Abuse & Incest National Network, 'Every 2 minutes, someone in the U.S. is sexually assaulted ... There is an average of 207,754 victims (age 12 or older) of rape and sexual assault each year ... 54% of rapes/sexual assaults are not reported to the police [and] only about 3% of rapists ever serve a day in jail'.
5. In North America, according to Wikipedia, 'approximately 15% to 25% of women and 5% to 15% of men were sexually abused when they were children'.

I look at those woes as cancers in our midst. I can't prove it, but I say that going back to enshrining the procreative norm would radically shrink those cancers!