David QuinnThe Church is not involved in a numbers game, writes David Quinn
Former President Mary McAleese has co-signed a statement calling on the Church to rescind its teaching against artificial contraception reiterated in the 1968 encyclical, Humanae Vitae. The statement has come out under the banner of the Wijngaards Institute, founded in the Netherlands by Fr John Wijngaards, a long-time campaigner for women priests, among other things. It was jointly launched on Tuesday with the UN Population Fund (UNFPA).
Explaining her reasons for signing the statement, Mary McAleese recounted something that happened to her own mother years ago.
She said: “This is personal. I am the oldest of nine children and one of the 60 live children my mother and her siblings produced. Ours is precisely the kind of large Catholic clan system so beloved of flattering papal documents on the family. Yet while our parents handed on to my generation the baton of a strong but docile Catholic faith they never encouraged us to have the big families they had. They had their reasons and they were too obvious to need to be stated.
“The baton, like the proverbial penny, was already dropping. My generation largely rejected Humanae Vitae‘s ban on artificial contraception and along with it magisterial control over family size. Our small families testify to that.”
Ill and weak
She continued: “I still remember the evening our parish priest, in front of us children, lambasted my 40- year-old mother for having had a hysterectomy without his permission and while still of child-bearing age. She had by then had 11 pregnancies and a history of haemorrhages which had left her dangerously ill and chronically weak. He left her in a spiritual agony which lingers even today.”
That priest’s treatment of Mary McAleese’s mother was appalling but it was based on a terrible misinterpretation, a caricature indeed, of the Church’s teaching in regard to family planning because nothing in Church teaching prevents a woman having a hysterectomy if such is needed for pressing health reasons.
It is true that the Catholic Church wants every marriage to be open to children, but it also accepts that couples should not have more children than they can manage. This is because, contrary to the popular impression, the Church is not against family planning per se. Instead, it is against family planning that involves the use of artificial contraception such as the pill. It accepts natural means of family planning that have been shown to be about as effective when used properly as condoms when used properly.
If the Catholic Church simply expected couples to have as many children as physically possible, with the burden of this obviously impacting the woman disproportionately, then Church teaching would rightly stand condemned. But this is not what it teaches, and where individual priests or bishops did tell women to have as many children as possible, then that is indefensible.
But if we are going to reject the Church’s teaching about family planning, then we ought to understand what that teaching is and not reject it based on a distortion or a caricature.
The true teaching is that married couples should strive to have children but the number they have should be decided by them based upon a prudential judgement about what they best manage. That might result in a small family or a large one. When planning their families, the Church says couples must use natural, not artificial means of birth control.
Generations
Thinking about my own family down the generations, there were very few examples of truly large families. I had three siblings. My mother had four siblings. My father had one. My maternal grandmother had two siblings. My paternal grandmother also had just two siblings. My parents and grandparents grew up alongside a very strong Church and yet did not have large families and I never heard about them coming under pressure to have more children than they did.
Obviously, large families existed, but to what extent this was the result of pressure from priests is open to question when large families also existed (and exist) in parts of the world where the Church had (and has) no influence whatever.
The fact of the matter is that family size is driven by economic factors more than by religious factors. It is true that religious people tend to have somewhat bigger families than the non-religious, but it is also true that family size declines sharply as a society becomes more urban and less rural and as it becomes more economically developed. This is one the main reasons why in sub-Saharan Africa the average couple has about five or six children while in Europe the number is one or two.
This brings up a highly apposite topic because the very low birth rates found across Europe is now a very big problem.
We in the West are not reproducing ourselves. Our birth rates have fallen below replacement rates, often far below. Our populations are ageing and over time, without mass immigration, are going to start shrinking very rapidly.
The fact that the statement Mrs McAleese has signed is being jointly launched with the UNFPA should cause concern. The UNFPA worries far more about high birth rates than about very low birth rates. It is more concerned to reduce sub-Saharan Africa’s high birth rate than to increase Europe’s shrivelled one. Why is that?
It is also concerned to increase access to ‘safe abortion’ (when is abortion safe for the unborn child?) Why would a self-styled Catholic organisation like the Wijngaards Institute want to associate itself with a body like the UNFPA that supports abortion?
In fact, wouldn’t the Wijngaards Institute be much better employed campaigning against the UNFPA’s support for abortion rather than caricaturing the Church’s position on birth control and family size as it has done?
