This Holy Week we
contemplate Mary Eberstadt’s compelling, hard-hitting analysis of the
sterility and loneliness of Western societies in light of Humanae Vitae, the most
controversial and disputed document of modern times. Her article includes, sadly, a devastating analysis of the decline and fall of the Anglican Communion.
Mary Eberstadt is a senior
research fellow at the Faith and Reason Institute and author of : How the West Really Lost God and Adam and Eve After the Pill.
Previously on this blog we gave an excerpted version of her
2008 article on the 40th anniversary of the encyclical. Following is an excerpted version of her 2018
article (5oth anniversary) in FIRST
THINGS:
(The bolding is ours.)
One recurring theme in Pope Francis’s teaching is that human
realities trump scholarly abstractions: “La
realidad es superior a la idea.” His signature phrase about pastors who
have the “smell of the sheep” is the folk version of this maxim. Cautions about
“rigidity,” “empty rhetoric,” and getting “stuck in pure ideas” appear often in
his work, and in that of his inner circle, too. What matters most are “the
realities people face in their daily lives,” as Blase Cardinal Cupich put it in
a speech at Cambridge recently.
Attention to “reality” is especially fitting as we mark this
fiftieth anniversary year of one of the most famous, and infamous, encyclicals
in church history. Ten years ago, on its fortieth anniversary, FIRST THINGS
published an essay of mine called “The
Vindication of Humanae Vitae.” Citing contemporary evidence from many
sources, including sociology, psychology, history, and contemporary women’s
literature, I argued:
Four decades later, not only have the document’s signature predictions
been ratified in empirical force, but they have been ratified as few
predictions ever are: in ways its authors could not possibly have foreseen,
including by information that did not exist when the document was written, by
scholars and others with no interest whatever in its teaching, and indeed even
inadvertently, and in more ways than one, by many proud public adversaries of
the Church.
Of course, to say that proof abounds is not to say that a
valid argument falls always and everywhere on happy ears—not fifty years ago,
not ten years ago, and not today. The promise of sex on demand, unencumbered by
constraint, may be the strongest collective temptation humanity has ever
encountered. That’s why, since the invention of the birth control pill,
resistance to the traditional Christian code has been unremittingly ferocious,
and why so many in the laity and clergy wish that this rule—among others—were
less taxing. As the disciples of Jesus Christ complained upon hearing his
teaching about marriage, these lessons are “hard.”
But to confuse “hard” with “wrong” is a fundamental error.
If we are truly to lean into realidades,
there is only one conclusion to be drawn from the mass of empirical evidence
now out there. It’s the same conclusion that was visible ten years ago, and
that will remain visible ten, or one hundred, or two hundred years from now.
It’s simply this: The most globally
reviled and widely misunderstood document of the last half century is also the
most prophetic and explanatory of our time.
Let us set aside theology, philosophy, ideology, and other
abstractions and count up the new realities vindicating Humanae Vitae, one by one.
1) The first
empirical reality is this: If we leave out individual intentions and assess
nothing but uncontroversial facts, it is
transparently clear that the increased use of contraception has also increased
abortion. Fifty years ago, when contraception became commonplace, many
people of good will defended it precisely for the reason that they thought it
would render abortion obsolete. Reliable birth control, they reasoned, would
prevent abortion. But the statistical
record since the 1960s shows this commonly held logic to be wrong. Many
studies have emanated from the social sciences during the past decades trying
to explain what secular wisdom regards as a puzzling fact. Far from preventing
abortion and unplanned pregnancies, contraception’s effects after the invention
of the pill ran quite the other way: Rates of contraception usage, abortion,
and out-of-wedlock births all exploded simultaneously.
Writing in the Quarterly
Journal of Economics twenty-two years ago, economists George A. Akerlof,
Janet L. Yellen, and Michael L. Katz summarized these unexpected connections:
Before the sexual revolution, women had less freedom, but men were
expected to assume responsibility for their welfare. Today women are more free
to choose, but men have afforded themselves the comparable option. “If she is
not willing to have an abortion or use contraception,” the man can reason, “why
should I sacrifice myself to get married?” By making the birth of the child the
physical choice of the mother, the sexual revolution has made marriage and
child support a social choice of the father.
In other words, contraception has led to more pregnancy and
more abortion because it eroded the idea
that men had equal responsibility in case of an unplanned pregnancy. Contraception, as these economists explain,
sharply reduced the incentive for men to marry—including to marry their
pregnant girlfriends. In the new, post-pill order, pregnancy became the woman’s
responsibility—and if birth control “failed,” that was not the man’s problem.
2) Then there is the fact that contraception and
abortion are bound together juridically.
As Michael Pakaluk, among other scholars, has recently
pointed out:
As regards jurisprudence, the
fruit of contraception is abortion.
Until the 1960s, Comstock Act laws were on the books in many states, making the
sale of contraceptives illegal even to married couples. These laws were
overturned in 1965 by the Supreme Court’s muddled Griswold decision. But by
1973—only eight years later—the Supreme Court in Roe v. Wade had inferred from
the right to contraception a right to abortion.
Putting that point differently: Legal reasoning justifying
freedom to contracept has been used to justify freedom to abort—a linkage that
undermines the claim that a hard-and-fast line can be drawn between the two.
Or, we might say, freedom to contracept was not enough. People needed the added
freedom to terminate a product of failed contraception. History connects the
same causal dots. The push to liberalize
abortion laws in countries around the world did not begin until the first third
of the twentieth century, as birth control devices came into wider circulation,
and American states did not start liberalizing abortion laws until after the
federal approval of the birth control pill in 1960. Roe v. Wade comes after the
pill, not before. As a matter of historical fact, the mass use of contraception
called forth the demand for more abortion.
Writing in the National Catholic Bioethics Quarterly in
2015, researcher Scott Lloyd likewise concluded that contraception leads to
abortion—not inevitably in individual cases, of course, but repeatedly and
reliably as twinned social phenomena: “Because the lower risk perceived with
contraceptives enables sexual encounters and relationships that would not occur
otherwise, it invites pregnancies that occur in situations where women do not
feel ready to become pregnant.”
As we review the record, mercy and forgiveness are patently
in order—toward the postwar generation that championed contraception, that is.
Who, back then, could have anticipated that contraception would lead to
abortion on a scale never before seen? Would the uproar over Humanae Vitae have been much diminished
had all critics known then what the ledger shows now? Might not some of those
dissenting Catholics—and others—who publicly rebuked the Church have acted
differently if they’d realized that embracing contraception would open the way
to vastly more abortion? It is plain in hindsight that the “lowering of moral
standards” foreseen by Humanae Vitae
would come to include disrespect not only for women, but for the human fetus,
too.
Reality since 1968 has made it impossible to pretend that
contraception has not played a decisive role in the scourge of abortion. Pope
Francis himself has called abortion “a very grave sin” and a “horrendous
crime.” The old defense of birth control as the alternative to abortion has
been overruled by facts. The reality that it is an accelerant to abortion has
been confirmed by time.
In part because fifty years of experience have established
reality number one, a second reality has become evident. People outside the Catholic Church—most notably, though not only, some
leading Protestants—have come to see Humanae
Vitae in a new and more favorable light.
One of the least reported religious stories of our time,
this potent trend may reconfigure Christianity, replacing disunity over birth
control with a new unity. Observing what the sexual revolution has wrought,
more and more Protestant voices now question yesterday’s nonchalance about
contraception. This reconsideration is far from a majority view—yet, anyway.
But it manifests what any minority view must have in order to win over others:
evidence and moral energy. Consider the following examples from the last ten
years.
Protestants have done themselves a disservice by ignoring Humanae Vitae’s substantial statement on
human anthropology and sexuality. . . . Protestants would be well-served to
study Paul VI’s encyclical and take heed of its warnings.
–Evan Lenow, professor at Southwestern Baptist Theological
Seminary
Many evangelicals are joining the discussion about birth
control and its meaning. Evangelicals arrived late to the issue of abortion,
and we have arrived late to the issue of birth control, but we are here now.
–Jenell Paris,
anthropologist, Messiah College
Whenever current events touch on life issues, evangelicals
like me become increasingly uncomfortable with the contraception culture. We
realize we have much more in common with Catholics, who revere life, than the
radical feminists who revere the rights of women above all else.
–Julie Roys,
evangelical author and blogger
“More Protestants Oppose Birth Control,” New York Times
headline, 2012
These second thoughts among Protestants and other
non-Catholics are less a radical break from Christian tradition than a return
to it. Church teaching on contraception, including Protestant teaching, has
followed an unbroken line through the centuries. Not until the Anglican Communion made the first exception to the
prohibition at the Lambeth Conference of 1930 did Catholics and Protestants
divide on this moral teaching. The famous Resolution 15 was intended for
married couples only, and in carefully delineated circumstances; but it ushered
in contraception for convenience. Its language matches the terminology deployed
by would-be Catholic “reformers” today:
In those cases where there is such a clearly felt moral
obligation to limit or avoid parenthood, and where there is a morally sound
reason for avoiding complete abstinence, the Conference agrees that other
methods may be used, provided that this is done in the light of the same
Christian principles.
Then as now, Protestants who were not at ease with
abandoning traditional teaching turned to Rome for authority. Charles Gore, the bishop of Oxford,
objected to Resolution 15. He had “manifold reason to believe that in the
case of Birth Prevention the ‘very strong tradition in the Catholic Church’ has
been in the right, and has divine sanction.” The move by some Protestants
toward Humanae Vitae today is in part
a tacit declaration that, in retrospect, the bishop of Oxford’s side might have
been the right one.
In Africa, both Protestants and Catholics lean toward
traditionalism in Christian moral teaching. Here as elsewhere in history, the
maxim delivered by sociologist Laurence R. Iannaccone holds: “Strict churches are strong”—and
concomitantly, lax churches are weak. It is in tradition-minded Africa that
Christianity has grown explosively in the years since Humanae Vitae—as opposed
to those nations whose Christian leaders have struggled, and struggle still, to
change the rulebook.
Nigerian-born Obianuju Ekeocha, author of the new book
Target Africa: Ideological Neo-Colonialism of the Twenty-first Century, wrote
an open letter to Melinda Gates, whose foundation dedicates impressive
resources to spreading birth control among Africans: “I see this $4.6 billion buying us misery. I see it buying us
unfaithful husbands. I see it buying us streets devoid of the innocent chatter
of children. . . . I see it buying us a retirement without the tender loving
care of our children.”
. . . . There is also sound reason for the enduring fear
that “public authorities” might “impose” these technologies on the citizenry—as
Humanae Vitae also warned. This has
happened, of course, in China, via its long-standing, barbaric “one child”
policy, replete with forced abortions and involuntary sterilizations. A softer
kind of coercion has appeared in the United States and other Western nations
where efforts have been made to link desired outcomes with mandatory birth
control. In the 1990s and beyond, for example, some U.S. judges backed
state-imposed implantation of long-term contraceptives on women convicted of
crimes. Such implied force has provoked criticism by (among others) the
American Civil Liberties Union. “The recent attempts to coerce women to use
Norplant represent a reversion to an era of overt racism and eugenics,” the
ACLU explained.
3) Reality number three concerns the state
of modern women. Contraception, it was and is perennially asserted, will make
them happier and freer than ever before. Has it? Evidence points to the
contrary—from social science suggesting that female happiness across the United
States and Europe has been declining over time, to the dolorous notes so often
struck in academic and popular feminism, to the growing worry among secular
women that marriage has become impossible and it is time to go it alone. A
decade after I documented those trends, there is much more that could be added
to the ledger suggesting that Humanae Vitae was right to spy an impending
increase in divisiveness between the sexes. Consider in passing just two
evocative snapshots.
In 2012, Amazon U.K. announced that E. L. James’s Fifty
Shades of Grey had replaced J. K. Rowling’s Harry Potter books as the
bestselling volume in its history. This signals an extraordinary commercial
demand by women for the tale of a rich and powerful man who humiliates,
bullies, and commits violence against a woman, over and over.
Sadomasochism is a
prominent theme elsewhere in popular culture—including, again, popular women’s
culture. Concerning the fashion industry, John Leo observed, “I first
noticed the porn-fashion connection in 1975, when Vogue magazine ran a
seven-photo fashion spread featuring a man in a bathrobe battering a screaming
model in a lovely pink jumpsuit ($140 from Saks, picture by Avedon).” Harper’s
Bazaar has seconded the point: “Long before Fifty Shades fever hit, designers
have been mining BDSM for sartorial inspiration. From literal crops to all
forms of waist, wrist, and ankle ties—not to mention the sheer volume of
leather—it’s clear Christian Grey would be proud.”
Implied and even
overt violence against women saturates video games and, of course, pornography.
The sadomasochistic look has become widespread in popular music, too; the
number of globally recognized female singers who have not paid homage to
pornography and sadomasochism is vanishingly small. Why are so many women subsidizing a self-image of subjugation and
dejection at a time when their freedom is greater than ever before? Does the
success of Fifty Shades tell us that men have become so hard to get that any
means of finding one will do, no matter how degrading?
Joy does not abound in another post-pill reality: the
continuing secular sex scandals of 2017 and 2018, and the #MeToo movement. It
appears that the sexual revolution licensed predation. That is not a
theological judgment, but an empirical one—foreseen in part by social scientist
Francis Fukuyama. His 1999 book The Great Disruption made a point
that echoes in Humanae Vitae, though
based on a thoroughly secular analysis:
One of the greatest
frauds perpetrated during the Great Disruption was the notion that the sexual
revolution was gender-neutral, benefiting women and men equally. . . . In
fact the sexual revolution served the interests of men, and in the end put
sharp limits on the gains that women might otherwise have expected from their
liberation from traditional roles.
Almost twenty years later, that point is irrefutable. The
abuse scandals show that the revolution democratized sexual harassment. No
longer does a man have to be a king or a master of the universe to abuse or
prey upon women in unrelenting, serial fashion, and for a long time, with no
punishment. One needs only a world in which women are assumed to use
contraception—the world we’ve had since the 1960s, the world that Humanae Vitae foresaw.
This brings us to still another reality: Fifty years into the sexual revolution, one
of the most pressing, and growing, issues for researchers is not
overpopulation, but its opposite: under-population. Ten years ago, I
reviewed evidence for the claim that the overpopulation scares of the late
1960s were just that: scares. They happened not so coincidentally to be
ideologically useful to partisans who wanted the Church to change its moral
teaching. As I noted in 2008:
So discredited has
the overpopulation science become that this year Columbia University historian
Matthew Connelly could publish Fatal
Misconception: The Struggle to Control World Population and garner a
starred review in Publishers Weekly—all in service of what is probably the
single best demolition of the population arguments that some hoped would
undermine church teaching. This is all the more satisfying a ratification
because Connelly is so conscientious in establishing his own personal
antagonism toward the Catholic Church. . . . Fatal Misconception is decisive
[secular] proof that the spectacle of overpopulation, which was used to
browbeat the Vatican in the name of science, was a grotesque error all along.
. . . . Toward the end of last year, the New York Times
published a harrowing story about the birth dearth.
4,000 lonely deaths a week. . . . Each year, some of [Japan’s
elderly] died without anyone knowing, only to be discovered after their
neighbors caught the smell.
The first time it happened, or at least the first time it
drew national attention, the corpse of a 69-year-old man living near Mrs. Ito
had been lying on the floor for three years, without anyone noticing his
absence. His monthly rent and utilities had been withdrawn automatically from
his bank account. Finally, after his savings were depleted in 2000, the
authorities came to the apartment and found his skeleton near the kitchen, its
flesh picked clean by maggots and beetles, just a few feet away from his
next-door neighbors . . . .
Japan is just one country facing post-pill demographic
change. “Loneliness is becoming a common phenomenon in France,” Le Figaro
reported several years ago. Citing a study on the “new solitudes” by the
Fondation de France, the article names the prime driver of this loneliness:
“family rupture,” especially divorce . . . .
The secular culture is taking note. In Sweden, a 2015
documentary on The Swedish Theory of Love questioned the dominance of
“independence” in that country as an ideal. It seems more a curse than a
blessing when one-half of Swedes now live in households of one. As a report put
it,
A man is alone in his flat. He has been lying there dead for three
weeks—people only noticing his demise when an awful smell appeared in the
communal hallways. As the Swedish authorities scrutinise the case, they
discover that the man has no close relatives or friends. It is highly likely
that he lived lonely and alone for years, sitting solitary in front of his TV
or computer. After a while, they discover that he has a daughter, but she
proves impossible to locate. . . . It becomes apparent that he actually had
quite a lot of money tucked away in the bank. But what does that help when he
had no one to share with.
And then there’s Germany. In an article in Der Spiegel
titled “Alone by the Millions: Isolation Crisis Threatens German Seniors,”
the German Centre of Gerontology reports:
Over 20 percent of Germans over the age of 70 are in regular
contact with only one person—or nobody. One in four receives a visit less than
once a month from friends and acquaintances, and nearly one in 10 is not visited
by anyone anymore. Many old people have no one who still addresses them by
their first name or asks them how they are doing.
Such human poverty abounds in societies awash in material
wealth. This, too, was not foreseen by those who argued for and against Humanae Vitae in 1968. Yet without
doubt, what unites these tragic portraits is the sexual revolution, which by
the 1970s was operating at full throttle in Western nations, driving up divorce
rates, driving down marriage rates, and emptying cradles. It does not take a
demographer to connect the dots; the evidence of our senses will do. As one
victim poignantly summarized in Der Spiegel:
Aside from the birds, hardly anyone visits the elderly woman anymore.
Erna J. has white hair and black leg braces and, like many people her
age,
is suffering from extreme
loneliness. She was born shortly after World War I
and moved into this apartment 50 years ago. Ten years later, her
husband died. She has outlived all of her siblings and girlfriends. Her husband
didn’t
want any children. “I should have insisted on it,” says the former
cook,
“and then I perhaps wouldn’t be so lonely today”.
A further reality to ponder is historical, and worth
reiterating at a time when hope burns eternal in some precincts that the Catholic
Church will cease its intransigent insistence on supposedly retrograde points
of doctrine. The churches that have
accommodated themselves to the sexual revolution have imploded from within.
As a headline in The Guardian put it simply in 2016, on the eve of a
contentious conference at Lambeth where African representatives of the Anglican
Communion dissented once more from changing moral teaching, “The Anglican
schism over sexuality marks the end of a global church.”
In 1930, people would have been shocked if told that the
doctrinal war over sex would shatter the Anglican Communion; that parts of the
Communion would go to legal war over churches and jurisdictions as well as
doctrine; that the separation of North and South, Episcopal and Anglican,
Africa and Europe, would yield divisions and subdivisions, sorrow and acrimony,
on a global scale.
In 1998, Bishop John Shelby Spong of Newark, New Jersey, a
leader of the Episcopalian Church who urged an embrace of the sexual
revolution, published a book called Why Christianity Must Change or Die,
agitating for still more dismantling of the tradition. The Christianity of
which he spoke did change, exactly as he and others hoped. And now the retooled
version they fought for is dying. According to David Goodhew, editor of the
2016 volume Growth and Decline in the Anglican Communion: 1980 to the Present,
research by Jeremy Bonner on the Episcopal Church shows that:
Around 2000 serious decline set in. . . . Average Sunday
attendance dropped by nearly one third between 2000 and 2015. . . . The rate of
baptism has been cut almost in half over a thirty-year period. . . . The most
dramatic data is for marriages. . . . In 2015 the Episcopal Church married less
than a quarter of the number it married in 1980.
The sad facts of religious history in favor of Paul VI’s
prophetic stance make their own case. Disaster
descended on the Anglican Communion for doing exactly what dissenters from
Humanae Vitae want the Catholic Church to do: make exceptions to rules that
people find difficult.
Surely anyone urging Rome to follow Lambeth’s lead today
must first explain how Catholicism’s fate will be different. As David Goodhew
also noted in his online piece “Facing Episcopal Church Decline”: “If we believe
Christian faith is good news, we should be seeking its proliferation, and be
worried when it shrinks.”
. . . . In this moment of watchfulness inside and outside
the Church, a global fellowship knows the truths of Humanae Vitae and related teachings as truths, however unwanted or
hard. They are among the latest pilgrims in a line stretching two thousand
years back. They have sacrificed to stand where they do, and they sacrifice
still—including by relinquishing the good opinion of a mocking world.
These cradle Catholics and converts and reverts,
fellow-traveling non-Catholics, clergy and laity alike have the consolation of
one final realidad, which may be the
most important reality of all. Whatever the anxieties of the moment, however
prominent or widespread the disgruntlement, the ever-growing empirical record
continues to vindicate Paul VI’s encyclical: Humanae Vitae . . . .
