I\u2019m going to write about an issue that I have really been grappling with during this pregnancy. I really wanted to write a few lighter, funnier posts on this blog first to ease my readers into a false sense of comfort before I hit you with the big, lightning-rod issues, but after spending a few days trying to think of something funny to tell you I gave up. And honestly, it\u2019s probably better that you figure out what I\u2019m all about before you get attached to this blog and then offended. (Is it arrogant of me to assume that any of you will get attached to this blog?)<\/p>\n
Here\u2019s a little bit of background for those of you who don\u2019t know me: I was raised Protestant (of the non-denominational, Baptisty-ey flavor) and converted to Catholicism after attending the University of Dallas. I like to blame my conversion on intellectual prowess, because UD has a great core curriculum that immerses its\u2019 students in the Western tradition, and I believe that a truly thoughtful person cannot go through that program without being at least influenced by the philosophical truth of Catholic teaching. However, the sad truth is that in college I was less a thinking person and more a typical college student. Much of my conversion was brought about through truly poor life choices and the consequences that followed. I\u2019m not going to go into all that here, maybe another time, but the act of going to Mass became a solace in those dark days, and the light of the Christ and His Church, in conjunction with the love and support of my family, friends, and now-husband, were all that brought me through that time.<\/p>\n
However, the first time I was told that Catholics weren\u2019t supposed to use contraception, I was horrified. That alone nearly derailed my conversion. I thought that was the most idiotic, backward, oppressive-to-women thing I had ever heard. (Did I mention that I have a latent feminist streak? I\u2019m battling it, trust me.)<\/p>\n
After many, many, many conversations with priests, women, friends, in-laws, and others whose wisdom exceeds my own, I managed to grudgingly admit the truth of the intellectual argument, which I see as two-fold. The first part is this: sex within marriage is an act that is meant to be both<\/span> unitive and procreative. To use artificial means to deny one part of that act is to undercut the fullness of grace inherent in the act. This is not to say that every time a Catholic couple has sex they should be trying to have a baby; in fact, NFP (Natural Family Planning) is commonly used by Catholic couples to determine fertility in the woman, and sometimes couples for various reasons choose to abstain from sex during those times. But abstaining from sex is not the same thing as using contraception. Contraception falsely separates the life-creating power of the sexual act from the act itself. Abstaining recognizes the potential for new life and respects the dignity of the sexual act by acknowledging that power. In a way, NFP also allows couples to respect each other more fully as well. It allows them to say, \u201cI respect and love you too much to use you for my own pleasure, or to use this powerful act solely as a tool for our mutual pleasure.\u201d I say that I intellectually agreed with these positions because, to be frank, I was pretty pissed off about the whole thing. The first part of the argument, the \u201cunitive and procreative\u201d thing, I understood but didn\u2019t really care much about. I knew plenty of Protestant couples who had used birth control and had fine, even wonderful, marriages. I didn\u2019t really believe that it would have that big of an impact. The second part was the part that got me; I am and always have been staunchly and vocally pro-life. I think the killing of infants is the most horrific development of our modern age and is wreaking destruction on the souls and minds of us all. Obviously, I couldn\u2019t take the Pill if there was even the slightest chance that I might be culpable for killing my own child.<\/p>\n All this wasn\u2019t that big of a concern for me at first. We had Sienna in 2005, and then Charlotte in 2008. That seemed to me a reasonable spread, and I figured that we\u2019d wait at least four or five years for another one. Then we discovered that I was pregnant when Charlotte was only ten months old.<\/p>\n This was nothing short of calamitous to me. It wasn\u2019t so much that three children seemed like such a nightmare; it was that suddenly I felt that I couldn\u2019t trust NFP, and I saw my future laid out in front of my feet, and it was a future that involved \u2013because I\u2019m only 26!\u2013 at least twelve children. I had never really considered the possibility of children occurring so soon after one another, but once they did, I realized just how many child-bearing years I have left. I was \u2013and am\u2013 terrified.<\/p>\n See, I always swore that I would never have children. I\u2019m not one of those people that rushes up to babies in supermarkets; actually, I always found children strange, annoying and dirty until I had my own. (That opinion hasn\u2019t changed a lot, but I\u2019ve discovered that I love the little dirtballs.) I felt that my vocation lay elsewhere; I wanted to be a writer, and have had it on good authority that I have some potential in that area. Additionally, we\u2019re poor. I mean really, really, living-on-the-stipend-of-a-graduate-assistant poor. For those of you outside academia, this means that going to a movie or eating fast food are luxuries we can afford to indulge in twice a year at most. This also means that we can\u2019t afford private school, and since neither my husband nor I would ever consider putting our children through that atrocity that the government calls education, our only option left is homeschooling. That sent my panic level right through the roof. Not only did I just not want to be responsible for figuring out how to shove age-appropriate knowledge into little brains in age-appropriate ways, but my opinion of homeschoolers had always been similar to this<\/a>. <\/p>\n Slowly, over the course of the first six months of my pregnancy, my panic turned into real anger. I became furious with the Catholic Church for sentencing me to a life of bearing and rearing children while my husband got to pursue his passion \u2014 teaching and literature \u2014 while being a father, simply because he\u2019s a man. And when my latent feminist reared her ugly head, things got really interesting. I started to fume about those men <\/span>in Rome who make these rules without caring about the life of absolute drudgery <\/span>that they are condemning women the world over to\u2026and how dare they. <\/span>All my intellectual agreement with the Church\u2019s arguments went right out the window.<\/p>\n So I began talking with my friends about the whole situation. Consciously, I told myself that I was just trying to \u201cunderstand the position of the Church.\u201d But subconsciously, I had already decided to use birth control after this baby was born, and I was looking for as many Catholics as possible to tell me that it was okay, given my particular circumstances.<\/p>\n
The second part of the intellectual argument is that many contraceptives are abortive in nature; that is, the Pill and IUD\u2019s often do not prevent the sperm from implanting into the egg, but instead prevent the fertilized egg from implanting into the uterus. To some people, even pro-life people, this may seem like splitting philosophical hairs, but I don\u2019t see it that way. Respect for life, in my opinion, is respect for life. In most <\/span>cases a fertilized egg will, in 9 months, result in a living baby; therefore, chemically disposing of the egg is abortive in nature.<\/p>\n