{"id":26868,"date":"2014-07-20T20:39:32","date_gmt":"2014-07-21T01:39:32","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.patheos.com\/blogs\/voxnova\/?p=26868"},"modified":"2014-07-20T20:39:32","modified_gmt":"2014-07-21T01:39:32","slug":"catholic-women-on-not-using-birth-control","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.patheos.com\/blogs\/voxnova\/2014\/07\/20\/catholic-women-on-not-using-birth-control\/","title":{"rendered":"Catholic Women on Not Using Birth Control"},"content":{"rendered":"\n<\/head>

If I have been largely silent on the\u00a0subject of contraception, it has been for two main reasons.<\/p>\n

Firstly, while I am comfortable with Catholic teaching on the matter, I tend to see it as a secondary issue.\u00a0 Or to say it another way, I am personally un<\/em>comfortable with artificial birth control \u2013 much as I am with artificiality in general, or with the drive to control<\/em> every aspect of our lives, including life itself \u2013 and I see its connections to some disturbing social trends (which will be explained more below); and yet it does not disturb me at the same level as, say, abortion, or any other direct violence.<\/p>\n

The\u00a0other reason is that it is simply difficult to find something substantial to say when\u00a0so few\u00a0statements on the subject, whether for or against, manage to get past the level of superficial and excessively confrontational \u201cculture wars\u201d that\u00a0only serve to galvanize the convinced and unconvinced alike in their respective positions.<\/p>\n

Because of this, I\u2019ve sometimes thought of myself as a secret believer in Catholic\u00a0teaching about\u00a0artificial birth control.\u00a0 Call it cowardice if you will, and perhaps you will not be entirely wrong.\u00a0 But a variety of women at Catholic Sistas<\/a> have\u00a0provided reasons\u00a0worth sharing, which\u00a0go well beyond culture-war rhetoric and are not accompanied by a crusader\u2019s battle cry.\u00a0 They explicitly state that they are providing their own reasons for not using birth control rather than trying \u201cto force others to follow what we believe.\u201d\u00a0 And the reasons they give are disarmingly substantial.<\/p>\n

The full list is linked above, but I\u2019d like to highlight a few interrelated themes running through it that I find particularly compelling.<\/p>\n

First, there is the objection to treating pregnancy and\/or fertility as a disease (which, though they don\u2019t mention this, is an attitude that also relates to gender-based disparities in health insurance premiums: since we are capable of becoming pregnant, being female is a \u201cpre-existing condition\u201d).<\/p>\n