Fortnight for Freedom, Day 10

Fortnight for Freedom is all about whether the government can require, under Obamacare, the Catholic Church, its institutional affiliates such as charities and universities, and its individual members who own businesses to provide their employees with health-care coverage that pays for contraception.

Underlying that controversy is the question of whether the Church is right to oppose the use of contraception — other than the "rhythm method" — as immoral.

I believe the Church is wrong to do so.

The Church opposes contraception largely because, in the 13th century, it was found by Thomas Aquinas in his seminal theological discourses that anything that marriage partners might employ to "impede" the ability of sex to lead to procreation is "unnatural."

Aquinas felt that the "natural" function of the generative organs irrefutably tells us that we ought not to artificially block the possibility of pregnancy. His approach to theology has long been called that of "natural law." The Church has, ever since the 13th century, made Aquinas's "natural law" a centerpiece of its theological outlook.

Today, I think we need to revisit the question of what is natural, and thus lawful.

Michel Foucault

One excellent rationale for revisiting natural law, I have recently learned from Margaret Farley's book Just Love: A Framework for Christian Sexual Ethics, comes from French philosopher Michel Foucault. Foucault has written several books on the history of sexuaity in the West. As Farley describes Foucault's insights, they revolve around two ideas.

One is that human "sexuality" is something humans have "constructed." Although there is obviously a natural stimulus toward sex, what sex we engage in and how we regulate our sexuality are matters that vary by historical epoch. Human sexuality in all its rich complexity is not a natural given.

The other of Foucault's main ideas is that human sexuality is constructed by power relationships. There are, historically, human institutions of power that give us permissions — or else withhold them. The Catholic Church was once the most important permission giver/witholder in the Western world. No longer.

Today, I would say, we face a complex picture when it comes to permission giving. Many of our cultural power centers tell us a different story than does the Church. It feels "natural" for many women today to try to artificially "impede" pregnancy under certain circumstances — and if that doesn't work, to have an abortion.

Each of us, female or male, Catholic or otherwise, tries to find our way through today's veritable thicket of conflicting permission givers. As we do this, we necessarily have to employ our free will. And our free will is necessarily guided by what feels "natural" to us — which in turn is conditioned by the cultural "waters" we together find ourselves swimming in.

Obamacare will make oral contraceptives (nearly) universally free of charge — just show your insurance card to the pharmacist along with your prescription, and take the pills home with you. The next generation of women won't know there was a time when oral contraceptives were deemed impermissible.

Under such circumstances, it will quite naturally feel "natural" to have sex while on the pill. In fact, for 98 percent of Catholic women, it already does.

I would accordingly say that the Catholic Church needs to step boldly into the 21st century, and that Fortnight for Freedom is counterproductive in that regard.