Contraception in the Heat Of Summer: An Illustration

Our home was built in the 1950's, a two story, brick split level. I would take a home built fifty years ago over today's stick-and-plywood construction, since in general they were built to last. 

What's advantageous about our home is various thought-out little details that make good use of the natural environment in its orientation and layout that minimize energy costs. For one, the front of the house is oriented due-south with a huge south-facing bay window in the living room and two large south-facing skylights over the master bedroom. There is also a protruded roof overhand in the front of the house. In the winter time, the solar gain from this orientation allows over 10kw of heat into the home during the day when the sun is low in the sky. In the summer, we cover these windows and skylights to keep the heat out, and the roof overhang helps shield some of that sun as well since it is higher in the sky that time of year. Additionally, the lower level of our home is built half below-grade, so it stays a more-or-less constant temperature: cooler in summer and warmer in winter than the rest of the house due to the thermal mass of the surrounding earth. This is just low-tech, common sense stuff that sadly has been left by the wayside in modern cost-cutting construction.

What I have found that with these various details, when paid attention to and taken advantage of, is that we burned only one hundred gallons of oil this winter for heating, and we can avoid running our central AC most of the summer, except on the hottest of days (which is good, because it's almost thirty years old at this point and probably on its last legs). One thing we do to minimize the use of AC is utilizing a modified "whole house fan." The idea is that when the nighttime temps are lower than the inside temperature, you crack the windows on the ground floor (where it is cooler), and run a 4,000cfm fan in the upstairs bedroom that points out the window (usually these fans are in an attic, but because we our attic is a walkup rather than a hatch, this won't work). This creates a vacuum effect that exhausts hot air from the upstairs and draws the cool nighttime air up from the ground floor and throughout the house. Then  in the morning, when you get up, you shut the windows and seal in all that cooler air and keep the hot daytime air out. This works best in the shoulder seasons when it's not super humid and not sweltering at night. But combined with blocking the solar radiation at the windows from entering and heating the home, it can still work well in the summer to reduce, if not eliminate, your need for AC. I do have a window AC unit for our bedroom in those hottest parts of the summer when the whole house fan is less effective. 

Living this way (my wife is a real sport) requires a bit of a shift in how one thinks about and approaches the idea of comfort. Is the goal to live in an hermetically sealed environment at a constant 72 degrees using mechanical means? Can one tolerate a degree of slight discomfort at certain periods of the year? And why am I writing about all this eco-weenie stuff, and what does it have to do with birth control, as alluded to in the title of this post?

Well, it got me thinking about how we approach what we see as "problems" in our lives. In the summer, in the Northeast where I live, that "problem" is how to stay cool inside when it's blazing hot outside. For the vast majority of people, the "solution" is the tap the thermostat and blast their central air. Since I'm not normal, I like the approach we take that isn't so artificial/mechanical and divorced from the seasons, and which also conditions our bodies for cold and heat tolerance so that we are more adaptable and less...well, soft.

It also occurred to me that this approach we take mimicks how we approach the "problem" (although it's not really a problem, of course) of the regulation of births. As Catholics, we live by the teachings of Christ as revealed to us through Scripture, the Magisterium, and the Natural Law. One must understand the Natural Law to make sense of WHY the Church condemns the use of artificial contraception as mortally sinful. This is not rocket science and does not require a degree in Philosophy or Theology, but simply that we are to use our faculties for their intended purpose. The intended purpose of the female reproductive cycle is to give rise to life. But we reverse this in the modern world by seeing pregnancy as the "problem", that something went wrong and haywire. This is in large part due to the acceptance and mainstreaming of artificial contraception which takes a healthy reproductive system and renders it infertile. 

Now, life is a great gift and blessing, but that does not mean the Church expects people to maximize the number of births in their lifetimes. She respects the judicious employment of our faculty of reason and free-will within the confines of the moral law, so that the discernment of the the number of children a couple has rests with them. Now, one can argue that this "planning" is itself contra to the will of God--that to be truly aligned with the divine will one cedes any and all control of how many children they have to God and let the chips fall where they will. Perhaps it is for the sake of human weakness in this way that the Church allows this concession of the moral means of the regulation of births by way of Natural Family Planning (NFP). That is debatable depending on which circles you run in. Nevertheless, a couple can always morally choose when to engage and when to abstain in the act of sexual intimacy so as to achieve the end of either avoiding or achieving pregnancy. What they cannot do is separate the means and the ends--that is, to have sexual intimacy without openness to life--through artificial means or coitus interruptus--in a way that is morally justifiable. 

This approach to the regulation of births by "natural" (basal body temperature monitoring, observing cervical fluid, cervix position, etc) means certainly takes a shift in mindset away from the modern mentality of '100% control-on-demand' in popping a pill or slipping on a condom. Because as any Catholic couple knows, NFP, while largely effective, is not foolproof in terms of preventing pregnancy. You have to think and communicate, adjust your behavior around your cycles, and work in tandem with the natural rhythms of the wife's body. You also have to accept that you are not 100% in control here. Kind of like when you have to crack the windows at night and turn on the upstairs fan, remember to shut it off in the morning and shut the windows, and deal with some slight discomfort when it gets a little warm. When one employs artificial contraception, you don't think about this stuff, you just take your pill every day and get your IUD implanted like setting your thermostat to 72 and not thinking about it. What is also disconcerting is that many grown women on the pill do not even know how their natural cycles work, or have any cogent understanding of their reproductive biology as a result.

The naturalist Wendell Berry, although not a Christian, wrote about how artificial contraception is out of step with the natural environment. From the Public Discourse:

In The Art of the Commonplace, Wendell Berry states that “birth control is a serious matter, both culturally and biologically,” but what is really “horrifying is not that we are relying so exclusively on a technology of birth control that is still experimental, but that we are using it casually, in utter cultural nakedness, unceremoniously, without sufficient understanding, and as a substitute for cultural solutions . . . and to promote these means without cultural insight.” In other words, a serious matter requiring careful deliberation and sound judgment has been handled carelessly and thoughtlessly—we have been forgetful.

Berry continues by noting that such thoughtless neglect is made possible, and subsequently exploited, by specialists; in this case the separation of sexuality from fertility has resulted in two groups of specialists, “the sexual clinicians and the pornographers, both of whom subsist on the increasing possibility of sex between people who neither know nor care about each other.” Both groups separate sexuality from fertility in the name of freedom and “thrive in a profound cultural rift” where sex is free “from thought, responsibility, and the issue of quality.”

As Catholics, we are not Luddites--we utilize and celebrate technological advancements when they are in accordance with the moral law. Air conditioning is one of those that is; artificial contraception is not. It can be argued that AC made residing in desert environments like Las Vegas and Phoenix possible, and made us all more comfortable; it can also be argued that the Pill made commonplace abortion, infidelity, promiscuity, and a greater proportion of women in the workforce. These are arguably not good things, but as moderns we are so far removed from being in tune with both our natural environment and our bodies that we can "afford" to not pay attention to these things and can gloss over them as the inevitable cost of comfort and control--our modern day golden calves. 

The Tired Revolution

 

A few years ago Dr. Jennifer Roback Morse reached out to me to see if I would be willing to write a review of her book The Sexual State: How Elite Ideologies Are Destroying Lives and Why The Church Was Right All Along. I was happy to do so, as my eyes had been unwittingly opened and moistened with the tear drops of grace a few years prior to sitting down to read and review her book. Figures like Janet Smith and Christopher West dragged me kicking and screaming into the light of Truth--Dr. Smith through humor and common sense reasoning, Christopher West by way of the book Good News About Sex and Marriage (which I threw across the room; read here). 

In my review of her book, I highlighted the premise of Dr. Morse's thesis: the Sexual Revolution did not just “happen” as a social phenomenon. Rather, it was engineered by cultural elites, enabled and underwritten by the State, codified into law, and accepted as normative in the culture as a deliberate matter of course. In other words, she doesn't just lay out the what and the why of the sexual "revolution" but the who and the how.

After harvesting the fruits of the sexual "revolution" most of my life, I had never gave it a thought to second-guess the contraceptive mindset, even as a Catholic. To do otherwise would be like a fish questioning the source of the water it swims in. Part of that was because I didn't have an alternative to look to: we were only acquainted with nominal and left-leaning Catholics who played the "primacy of conscience" card, and faithful Protestants who didn't think twice about utilizing contraception. That changed over the years as God began planting faithful Catholic families in our life one by one, to make it visible to us what is possible when you live by faith and the Church's teaching on human sexuality. 

I guess I was hoping for a little bit of new material when I went to hear Mary Eberstadt speak at our local campus Oratory this evening. Her books include How the West Really Lost God: A New Theory of Secularization; Adam and Eve after the Pill: Paradoxes of the Sexual Revolution; and Primal Screams: How the Sexual Revolution Created Identity Politics. From her website: "Her social commentary draws from fields including anthropology, intellectual history, philosophy, popular culture, sociology, and theology.  Central to her diverse interests are questions concerning the philosophy and culture of Western civilization and the fate and aspirations of post-modern man."

I wasn't well acquainted with her body of work, but the particular talk she delivered this evening seemed to be an amalgamation of generalized themes: Humanae Vitae was prophetic, sexually "liberated" individuals today are not happy, porn is rampant, etc etc. Now, perhaps she had meant to deliver it to students and tailored it as such--indeed there were some students present. It wasn't anything new and it had all been said and highlighted before, but to a student that may be hearing it for the first time, it WAS new and potentially eye-opening. So my intention is not to disparage, only to say I was underwhelmed and saw a bit of a lost opportunity. As a friend also present shared with me, "it's not like this hasn't been happening for the past sixty years." The Sexual "Revolution" may be a distant memory for those of Mrs. Eberstadt's generation--but for the younger generation (and my own), it's something for the history books. The damage and fallout is irrefutable--we know we're not happy and we are less free, but we don't know HOW to get out from under this old blanket. 

Which is why I wanted to press Mrs. Eberstadt a little. I posed the question, but in an abridged format. I share it here in writing only because I wrote it down so as to be able to articulate it during the Q&A:  

"Upon first glance, there seem to be at least three areas in society which it is very difficult and (not without major repercussions) to "put the genie back in the bottle" so to speak. These are:

1) full-time women in the workforce

2) a consumer economy

3) contraception and abortion

In other words, we can't imagine a society in which women were suddenly taken out of the full-time workforce; we can't imagine an economic system that isn't founded on people feeding it with material consumption; and we can't imagine a society in which contraception and abortion were not an available option. 

And these three things seem inter-related as well. Women accounted for 52 percent of all workers employed in management, professional, and related occupations and comprised 47 percent total employment. (BLS).  In other words, in an ideal "conservative" world, women would stay home, abortion would be unthinkable, and consumer spending would not account for more than two thirds of economic activity in the U.S. But were any one to take away or reverse these three things, there would be an implosion because these systems are designed, built and predicated upon one another's existence: 

a) the workforce depends on women working

b) women working depends on limiting family size and/or abortion

c) the economy is dependent on consumer activity, which feeds the perceived need for two-income households, which bids up the cost of housing, etc, 

Rinse and repeat. We stop spending, the economy tanks; women stop working, productivity falters; abortion is eradicated, babies are born.

Of course most of the women and families in our particular circle have "opted out" of this narrative--they are staying home, having babies, raising families, etc. And they seem very happy doing so; So my question is, how do you advocate for these positive 'right-sizing' changes based upon conservative/traditional values when such a proposition seems to threaten the very foundation of the economic and social model the U.S. has adopted in a post-Roe world? It is no wonder why they are resisted so vehemently, and why even questioning the good of those assumptions is almost unfathomable today. "

I don't quite remember the extent of her answer, and that is my fault, but it was, like the talk-- underwhelming, with a few Weigelian accents here and there, and seemed to take the 'dourness' (as my same friend also called it) of Church teaching as a scholastic given rather than the dynamism of unscripted fecundity lived out in real time. There is no living "Revolution", there are no hippies--there are only washouts and their fallout from their failed social utopia that people my age and older now have to sift and live through, with no good solutions. Yes, have faith and have all the babies because kids are the best. But that can be a tough pitch unless you are traditionally minded, an orthodox Christian, or a counter-revolutionary breeder. 

As Dr. Morse maintains, the State has become sexual not because it believes in "free love" but because it operates by way of coercion. And how does one coerce? By fear: fear of pregnancy, fear of children, fear of overpopulation, fear of genetic abnormalities, fear of financial "irresponsibility." The State is a major player here, and they are not in the game for the benefit of the public good (at least not as Catholics understand it). Whatever the agenda is, you can place bets that it is most likely at odds with Catholic teaching which liberates the human person rather than subjugates, and gives hope rather than instills fear. When we get stuck in highlighting the "bad fruit" of the so-called sexual "revolution" and not moving beyond that, we miss a huge opportunity to give hope to the next generation that they don't have to make the same mistakes, aren't subject to the same fate--if they take a different route.  As Chesterton said, “The Christian ideal has not been tried and found wanting. It has been found difficult; and left untried.”

Let's be honest: the "revolution" is no longer novel and the effects of its rotten fruit is straightforward. But figuring out how to live a fruitful life in the shadow of that shell can present challenges that demand creativity, courage, and unconventional faith. We can be guided by the teachings of the Church and inspired by holy families, but ultimately we need to live it out ourselves in real time. We don't need more Weigalian scholastic talks or TOB in a vacuum. What we need is witness. Fruitfulness. Living saints. A casting off of the shackles of sin. A revolution of the home. We need to do it because others need to see not so much how it is done, but simply that it is possible. They will find their way, aided by grace, from there, as long as we are all doing our part one by one, home by home, marriage by marriage, baby by baby, family by family.

A Letter From A Reader, On Contraception

A reader writes:

"I just saw you on The Journey Home. It was good stuff and I am sorry for the losses you and your wife had along the way. My wife and I are converts. Since you write about chastity I figured you might be interested in this dilemma and if you avoid using my name you can use it for your blog.  

As Catholic converts my wife and I opened our hearts to have two more children together. Our very first pregnancy after marriage was a loss but together we had four healthy children. But after our 4th child with my wife being close to 40 we decided to use NFP to not get pregnant. We went to NFP professionals when we got pregnant anyway and they said “Holy Spirit baby”. Our hearts were open for this surprise. But we miscarried at 5 weeks. We were heartbroken and we used NFP again to avoid pregnancy with charts being reviewed again by NaPro trained medical professionals. We still got pregnant and lost another one at 10 weeks. My wife nearly passed out when the last part of her pseudo labor happened. DNA test showed there was a chromosomal defect. We then added another NFP related method to avoid a pregnancy with the NFP medical coaching. She got pregnant again.  

I wish I could say we had a miracle baby like you. The pregnancy was going along quite well and our hopes were up. But we lost our son at 18 weeks and his body was delivered at the hospital. Our hearts were broken with that June of last year. Months passed. In my pre-Catholic days I was in an odd form of Christianity that suspended critical thinking. I have faith in Jesus and the Church he founded. I admire the courage of Humanae Vitae. But I also admire things said in Amores Laeticia. So after praying about it my wife and I have decided to use contraception. We take no joy in giving the middle finger to Jesus or the Church. But we are a red blooded couple who simply cannot trust NFP to be accurate anymore. 

Are we in sin headed for hell? We are open to a live baby even though my wife is now almost 41 and I am 48 and I have 3 kids from before. But we are not open to a dead baby or my wife nearly needing a blood transfusion like she did at the hospital. I am a proud Catholic and I would humbly submit that my wife and I are not in danger of the fires of hell from a merciful and just God. 

(Ps: my wife reminded me that I forgot to mention in our final miscarriage/stillbirth that it was confirmed she has a virus that is developed in her body where having another baby is strongly advised against. The Doctor Who strongly advised against conception once the virus was discovered is a practicing, devout Catholic who works under full agreement with Humanae Vitae.")

Thanks for your heartfelt and honest message. I can say a few things, and there will be a lot left unsaid too. I understand your fear all too well. It sounds like you and your wife have gone through a lot. I'm not good at giving advice or guidance, because I really know nothing. But I will share some thoughts.

First, the Church is clear on the issue. We are very blessed to be Catholic because, probably more than any other Christian denomination, we have clear teaching to guide us. I know you probably know or are familiar with this, since you reference HV, but the use of contraception is by nature "intrinsically evil" (CCC 2370) and "legitimate intentions on the part of the spouses do not justify recourse to morally unacceptable means . . . for example, direct sterilization or contraception" (CCC 2399).

But I don't think you are writing because you don't know.

It's a separate issue and may seem out of left field, but on the topic of abortion, the position is sometimes taken to be against abortion "except in cases of rape or incest," kind of like an insertion of an arbitrary clause. This, too, is understandable but not consistent with the Church's teaching of abortion: "Since the first century the Church has affirmed the moral evil of every procured abortion. This teaching has not changed and remains unchangeable. Direct abortion, that is to say, abortion willed either as an end or a means, is gravely contrary to the moral law" (CCC 2271).

I mention this for a few reasons. For one, it's easy to talk about being opposed to abortion. But if you are the one finding yourself a victim of rape and pregnant as a result, that is a situation in which your convictions are tested. Because it's no longer an abstract issue--it's your life. What do you do? Do you invoke the clause (which is popularly accepted in politics and culture, but not consistent with the Church's teaching), or do you carry to term? If you are a practicing Catholic, have faith in Christ and the teaching of the Church, and you know what the right thing to do is, that doesn't make it easy to carry out. But you know.

Your only question from your message is this: Are we in sin headed for hell? I would like to tell you a story:

When I was 19, I was dating a very nice Catholic girl. I was a fresh convert (had only been Catholic about a year) and as I mentioned on the show, was always bothered by the Church's teaching on birth control because it just didn't seem to square with 'real life.' This girl gave me a book of Catholic fiction called "Pierced By A Sword" by an author named Bud MacFarlane Jr. I read the book but don't remember anything from it except one line from a scene in which a man dies and is facing his judgment and the Devil says, "Contraception has made you mine." I threw the book across the room.

I read that book almost twenty years ago. I still remember that line today. It woke me up, was a thorn in my side for twenty years, and it took me almost twenty years to get on board with the Church's teachings, and that was under relatively favorable circumstances. But I never forgot it. The people who shot me straight in those ensuing years I railed against and hated. But I am very grateful for them now.

Your cross is not my cross, and my cross is not yours. Each of our crosses is custom made for us individually. If pregnancy is not advisable, and you do not trust NFP, a moral recourse in the eyes of the Church is complete abstinence. I cannot speak to this, only to periods of abstinence in our marriage. Personally, I don't think contraception makes anything better or ultimately solves anything. I mean, it does on the surface seemingly, but I think when you dig deep to the spiritual undercurrent, I personally would be uneasy taking this route if it would put our family outside of a state of grace, because we rely so heavily on grace just to survive, spiritually speaking.

Do you have a priest or spiritual director you can speak with about this, someone with compassion who will also challenge you to be faithful to what Christ calls us to in discernment and prayer? Keep in mind I am not a priest or any kind of spiritual guy or expert on these matters, just a Catholic guy like you, trying to get to Heaven with my family in tow. That means the cross. It is inescapable. My crosses are on the horizon, of that I'm sure.

In light of my inadequacy to give any kind of comfort in this response, I will be praying a nine-day novena asking for the intercession of Servant of God Chiara Corbella for you and your wife as it relates to this topic. If you haven't read her story, you can here.

God bless you my brother,

Rob